Published on 12, July, 2020
Hi
My child has always really struggled if we stay in a hotel. He is 14 years old now and we stayed in a family room recently for the first time in 10 years. I had forgotten!! The moment we stepped into the hotel room, he became highly anxious.
He is not normally anxious. He is thriving in most areas of life, so it is remarkable to me he experienced this instant high stress at walking into a hotel room.
I wonder what it is that immediately sets him off?
I'm thinking it might be the fact that there is nowhere to hide from the family when we are all sharing a room (mum dad and brother).
Do others have similar experience or are there any other ideas of what it could be that sparks such immediate and unusually intense anxiety in him?
The reason we haven't stayed in hotel rooms for 10 years is because he used to literally not sleep at all and I'd be driving all night or walking him around in a pushchair. It had been so long, I'd forgotten!
I also really hate staying at hotels but I’ve got better at it over the last few years because I’ve done it more often. I always look at what the hotel and room looks like on the website online before we go, I create a routine so I know how much time I’ll actually be in the hotel and what I’ll be doing while I’m there, I bring a lot of my own things from home so I still feel familiar and can go through a similar bedtime routine to at home. I agree that not having any privacy could also be a factor for anxiety, so I try to talk to my family to know what they’re doing and we actually normally don’t end up spending a lot of time in the hotel room so I only have to worry about it at nighttime when I often just use the bathroom to get changed and everything for privacy. I never used to sleep either so would sit on a chair and just read or listen to a podcast, which always woke my parents up because the chair was usually at the end of their bed lol! So now I’m older we often get two separate hotel rooms - one for my parents and one for me and my sister, which is a lot easier to cope with and I still feel connected to my parents because they can come into our room or we can text them. And I sleep a lot better now in unfamiliar beds because I’ve done it more.