I spoke with a friend this week about his approach to travel. Anxiety makes visiting new places an immense personal challenge; the sudden rush of unfamiliar sights and sensations can swiftly ignite his body’s fight-or-flight response. Yet, beyond this muted wall of unease, he remains a world traveller at heart, drawn to the same breadth of experience as those unburdened by such reactions.
To make matters more complex, he is not a beachside holidaymaker but a devotee of cities. Lately, his fascination is with Hanoi. Picture it: mopeds swirling in every direction, streets ungoverned by traffic lights, vendors jostling for attention, and a symphony of French colonial and Chinese-inflected architecture framing the scene. It is marvellous to behold, yet for my friend, each unfamiliar detail becomes a potential trigger—language, food, navigation, street safety, public transport—all priming his nervous system for a state of constant vigilance.
Unwilling to let such ruminations confine him to home, he has, over years of cautious travel, devised his own method. We spoke about how a first visit to almost any city can be regarded as an upfront cost—a period of unavoidable exposure in which the discomfort of uncertainty must simply be borne for the brain to begin recalibrating its threat response.
He explained that his anxious thought patterns ease when he absorbs as much information as possible beforehand—immersing himself in YouTube walking tours, advice columns, reviews, travelogues, and long sessions on Google Street View. This preloading of familiarity reduces the shock of novelty. But ultimately, upon arrival, you must be ready with your coping methods and ride out the brain’s alarm signals, the sympathetic nerve response, and the hormone surges that come with movement and change.
By the end of that first trip, the fight-or-flight machinery has usually wound down through repeated, non-threatening exposure. He seeks out a neighbourhood that feels balanced—not overwhelming, yet not lifeless—and a handful of activities that nudge him just beyond his comfort zone without triggering retreat. Once that early anxiety has been manoeuvred through and the down payment made, the city is, in effect, unlocked. Later visits bring reduced symptoms, and in time, he comes to think of them less as holidays and more as home-from-home stays.
I once came across the idea of psychological reinforcement loops in the context of eating habits. They operate through both positive and negative reinforcement: positively, you enjoy the food, choose it again, and the pleasure deepens the habit; negatively, eating it lifts the anxiety of choice or change, and the relief cements the habit. It occurred to me that my friend’s method works much the same way—a set of mini-routines established for the length of the trip, forming what you might call a travel loop, repeatable ad infinitum.
I recalled a thread in which the poster asked if it would be acceptable to remain in Tokyo for her entire trip, explaining that her autism made frequent relocation thorny. The subtext seemed clear: simply reaching Tokyo and settling in would be a significant undertaking, and the rest of the journey would need to stay within those sensory and cognitive limits. The replies were mixed; many, unable to relate, breezily assured her that the Shinkansen to Kyoto is effortless, overlooking how ease is relative to one’s neurological wiring.
It took me back to my first trip to Japan—ten days spent wholly in Tokyo. At 25, feeling intrepid, my choice was driven less by an inclination to stay put than by the realities of travelling on the thinnest of shoestrings. Yet even then, I began to form a travel loop: getting to know my neighbourhood in depth, and treating my outings further afield as excursions from that established base. It was my first solo journey, and I found contentment in it—making a few friends, shopping at the local supermarket, becoming a temporary regular at a coffee shop.
The oft-touted idea of “travelling like a local” is imperfect. Still, the manageable scale, repetition, and accumulated familiarity gave me a closer brush with Japan than a checklist of sights could have. I carried that feeling to its furthest conclusion—quitting my job upon returning home and moving to Tokyo later that year, where I would spend five years.
Looking back, that time sealed the most ingrained travel loop of all. Whenever I return to Japan, I make a point of travelling regionally. I’ve also been fortunate to travel widely enough to have several cities around the world that feel like a kind of home—places that greet me with a sense of solace on arrival. But still, there’s no place like Tokyo.
As the years pass, and contrary to what my 25-year-old self might have imagined, life offers more reasons to feel anxious than ever, making travel feel like a bigger undertaking. Tokyo, though, remains the ultimate grounding ritual—a trip I’ll book without hesitation, an excursion that reinvigorates my thinking and restores my sense of capability when it feels lost. The racing heart, the quickened breath, the tense muscles are, in this case, the body leaning forward into motion, not bracing against fear.
Until we meet in Tokyo,
AJ
Among the reasons readers share for choosing Tokyothèque, I’m especially moved by those who, like my Hanoi-bound friend, say it helps them build confidence toward travel—by absorbing the finer details slowly, without the sensationalism or fear of missing out that so often accompanies travel content.
I’m here for that journey, and I want Tokyothèque to remain a place where exploration is approached with clarity, calm, and depth. If you’d like to support this work, I invite you to become a member and help build a publication that holds fast to these values.