You’re not bad at travel. You’re just expecting the wrong thing.

I thought I was good at travel.

Organised. Efficient. The kind of person who finds the right train platform on the first try.

Japan corrected that assumption within about 12 hours.

It also made me realise how unrealistic my expectations of travel had become and how bad I am at being present, even when I’ve flown across the world to try.

Here are 7 things I learned.

Social media has been lying to you about travel

Everyone’s holiday feed looks the same: golden light, zero queues, tantrum-free children, effortless joy.

Nobody posts the 45-minute search for the right train platform. Nobody posts themselves stress-eating a convenience store onigiri on the floor of a station concourse. (Hypothetically).

The result? We arrive expecting friction-free magic… and feel personally betrayed when something is hard.

Reset before you go. Travel involves friction.

(And Instagram is not a documentary).

Friction is actually the experience

Getting lost inside a Tokyo train station for 45 minutes is, in retrospect, a fantastic memory (at the time: not so fun).

Research shows that effort and novelty make experiences stick. Smooth, frictionless moments slide straight past our brains. The inconvenient bits are what we remember and what we tell stories about later.

Reframe the hard parts as part of what you came for.

(Also: the occasional taxi is a completely valid choice.)

Delete your work apps. Actually delete them.

Before we left, I reinstalled Outlook to grab some travel confirmations.

Reasonable. Logical. A massive error in judgement.

Within 48 hours, I was checking email at dinner.

Work emails are engineered to feel urgent because someone, somewhere, has decided your attention is their resource. It’s rarely actually urgent. But your brain doesn’t know that and your brain is very easy to trick.

If you need a work app, use it, then delete it immediately.

Your inbox will survive without you. I promise.

Keep a diary. Your memory is worse than you think.

By day five, I was already mixing up which city things happened in.

By day ten, entire experiences had blurred into a vague haze of amazing food and sore feet.

Without rehearsal, episodic memories fade extremely fast. Writing things down (or in my case, recording voice memos using an app called Letterly, which converts them into a written diary) creates a second encoding that actually makes memories stick.

Five minutes at the end of the day. That’s it.

Future you will be genuinely grateful.

Current you will be slightly annoyed.

One non-negotiable per day. Everything else is improv.

For the first few days, we treated sightseeing like a competitive sport.

20,000 steps. No breaks. Maximum efficiency.

We were also completely wrecked by 7pm, which is not ideal when you’re three days into a 12-day trip.

What worked instead: one non-negotiable per day. One thing we genuinely didn’t want to miss.

Everything else? Improvised based on energy, mood, and whether anyone’s feet had filed a formal complaint.

People walk at different speeds. This is allowed.

I am a fast walker.

I experience slow walkers the way some people experience a buffering screen: with a disproportionate level of outrage.

Japan, with its dense footpaths and meandering tourists, was an excellent stress test for this particular character flaw.

The reframe that helped: I’m not actually late for anything.

So maybe… calm down.

Let the slow walkers be slow. They might be onto something.

Debrief over dinner

Every night, we asked the same question: what was your favourite moment today?

The impact was disproportionate to the effort.

It forced us to recall the day instead of letting it blur into the next one. It surfaced small moments we’d already half-forgotten. And it made us feel present in a way that was intentional.

Retrieving memories strengthens them. Naming what you enjoyed trains your attention.

It also makes for significantly better dinner conversation than whinging about sore feet.

Tell me in the comments: What’s your best travel lesson?