By the time we pulled into the Joshua Tree parking lot, I was wearing every piece of warm clothing I’d brought on our trip.
We had flown from Vermont to Palm Springs in February. The logic was airtight. Escape the cold, get some sun, do the desert thing. As our day trip to Joshua Tree approached, I had been watching the forecast with increasing dread. Highs barely cracking 55, growing colder as the day went on. I had expressed my feelings about this in a totally reasonable way, specifically by crying to my husband in our hotel room and announcing, with full conviction, “WE’RE IN CALIFORNIA FOR FIVE DAYS AND IT’S SUPPOSED TO BE HOT.”
We stopped at Target on the way because nobody had packed pants. My kids were bewildered. My husband was patient in the way that suggested he was also a little scared. And when we got to Skull Rock, it was snowing. Actual snow. In the Mojave.
My family was gracious enough to honor my grumpiness in the moment. (Sort of.) But by the time we landed back home, my weather meltdown had become the family joke to end all jokes. Now, every time we leave for a trip, someone checks the forecast and performs my breakdown back to me. It has become, against my will, a core memory.
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I am a person who knows better. I write about parenting and wellness for a living. I understand, intellectually, that the point of a family vacation is connection, not perfect weather. And I still stood in a Palm Springs hotel room crying about a temperature forecast like the whole trip was ruined.
This is what therapists might call the vacation doom loop. And it’s more common than you think.
Why vacation stress hits the way it does
Dr. Cassidy Freitas is a therapist who works primarily with mothers, and the author of Mom Needs a Moment. She describes the doom loop as happening in three distinct chapters. “It starts with the planning,” she says. “This can often fall on one person as the card holder of the vacation mental load. Often this wasn’t discussed or determined as a team but just falls on one person’s shoulders. It’s a hefty load to carry.” Then the trip itself, where “days feel like your brain is navigating a lot more tabs open than usual” and “a lot of parents will report feeling like they can only appreciate it all in hindsight. But in the moment, it just feels like survival.” And finally the crash landing back home. “You’re looking back at photos wondering, was I even enjoying it while we were there?” she says. “All three chapters of vacation stress are very real. And with kids, let’s be so real. It’s not a vacation. It’s a trip. It’s parenting in the wild.”
The cycle tends to go like this. High expectations meet real-life chaos, stress kicks in, and then you become stressed about being stressed, because you’re on vacation and you’re supposed to be happy and the money is already spent and you can feel the whole thing slipping through your fingers. Dr. Freitas has a clinical name for it: a hypervigilance stress cycle. “When there’s a mismatch between what we expected and what’s actually happening, your nervous system reads that gap as a threat,” she explains. Stress hormones flood in. And then the awareness that you are stressed on vacation, that you are failing vacation, registers as an additional threat, which creates more arousal, which makes it harder to regulate, and around it goes.
High-investment trips accelerate this because the stakes feel higher. “The higher the stakes feel, the lower our window of tolerance can set itself,” Dr. Freitas says. “So these situations might be a bit more manageable at home, but feel completely unbearable on a trip you saved all year for.”
When money enters the picture
Financial pressure is its own special accelerant. “There’s an experience that many feel with pre-paid, pre-planned vacations where past investments start to dictate present emotional experiences,” Dr. Freitas says. It’s the feeling of turning “we spent $5,000 on this trip” into “I owe my family $5,000 worth of good times.” Every moment of tension or boredom or logistical friction starts to feel like debt accumulating.
“Money becomes moralized,” she says. “Financial sacrifice has a way of really activating guilt. This can show up whether a mother is working outside of the home or not.” And guilt makes presence nearly impossible. You can’t be in a moment you’re busy auditing.
The thing worth naming is that cost and enjoyment don’t actually operate on the same ledger. “Spending more doesn’t create joy,” Dr. Freitas points out. “Yes, resources can provide ease. But ultimately, presence is what connects us to joy and wonder and awe. Getting fixated on the ROI is the thing that gets in the way of our capacity to be present.”
The performance trap
Part of what makes the loop so hard to break is that we’re not just measuring ourselves against our own expectations. We’re measuring ourselves against everyone else’s highlight reels. Dr. Freitas is candid about her own experience here. “I have absolutely planned trips around what will be the most exciting thing to share with others, instead of what will actually feel good for our specific family in this particular moment,” she says. “I’ve spent way too much money on outfits, chosen destinations that were trendy but too far, pushed my family to do an activity when everything in the moment is signaling enough.” Nice to know we’re in good company.
When the reality doesn’t match the plan, she describes something she calls a double grief. “The trip didn’t feel like the way we hoped, and it also doesn’t look the way we imagined,” she says. “When I look back on all the trips we’ve taken, some of the most memorable ones were actually close to home and didn’t have a pretty aesthetic backdrop. And I don’t think that’s a coincidence.”
She calls the broader pattern the performance trap. “Vacation time carries this cultural weight of being proof that your family is OK, that you’re a good mom, that you ‘did summer right,’” she says. It’s bound up with the era of intensive parenting, which Dr. Freitas describes as having “migrated across communities without the same supports, turning an optional enrichment style into a moral barometer for ‘good parenting.’”
When you’re past the point of “just breathe”
There’s a threshold in the doom loop where the usual advice stops working. Dr. Freitas calls it being outside your window of tolerance, the point where your nervous system is so activated that higher-order thinking (perspective, empathy, problem-solving) becomes genuinely harder to access. “This is that moment where you feel like you’re seeing red,” she says. “You lose access to flexibility, your tone gets sharp and reactive, everything feels overwhelming and catastrophic.”
The warning signs that you’re approaching that threshold tend to get dismissed as normal travel stress. Dr. Freitas says to watch for tunnel vision on logistics, compulsively checking the itinerary or weather (hi, it me), irritability that feels larger than the situation warrants, or a kind of numbness, going through the motions without really being there. “These are all signs that a nervous system stress response is triggered,” she says. “They’re signals, your body’s way of communicating ‘I’m not okay and I don’t have what I need.’ A lot of moms will override these signals. I’m always amazed at how much women can push through.”
What to do in the actual moment
Dr. Freitas has a five-step framework she walks clients through: pause, breathe, notice, soften, shift. She’s explicit that perfection is not the point.
“The practice is about interrupting the automatic reactivity, not achieving perfect zen,” she says. “You do NOT need to do this perfectly while your child is losing it in line for a $12 churro or a $40 bubble wand that you already have at home. When we talk about the pause, we’re talking about just taking a beat. One breath before you react, to notice and name what’s happening in your body and the context of what’s happening around you. Naming context makes compassion so much easier.” That self-talk might sound something like: this is a lot. It makes sense that I’m feeling like it’s a lot. What do I need to get back into presence here?
From there, the shift can be pretty concrete. “Maybe we leave the line,” she says. “Find some space. Sit on a bench. Get some water. Get down to our child’s level and offer a hug. Ask our partner for a hug. Recalibrate together. We’re not trying to force joy here. We’re trying to reduce the ‘threat’ our body is responding to so our window of tolerance can widen again.”
What actually helps (before you even leave)
Dr. Freitas’s most counterintuitive advice for actually enjoying the trip you’ve already planned and paid for is to lower the bar. Not as a form of resignation, but as a nervous system intervention. “The vacation doom loop festers on the gap between what you imagined and what’s actually happening,” she says. “The most effective way to close that gap isn’t to control reality harder. It’s to release the grip on the ‘perfect’ vision.”
Part of that is leaving room for the moments you couldn’t have planned. “Kids are remarkably bad at abiding by the perfect visions of the vacation we planned, but remarkably good at finding joy in the margins,” she says. “The hotel ice machine that they get to operate on their own, the weird stray cat that followed them around, the piece of concrete they found and decided was treasure that we must pack to bring home. You can’t schedule magic moments or connection. But you can leave space for them.”
At the planning stage, she recommends building those margins in intentionally, protecting empty time as seriously as any ticketed activity. Leave an afternoon unscheduled. Don’t book dinner every night. Put activities on the list that are genuinely okay to skip. “Most vacation doom loops are, at their core, a margin problem,” she says. “Every hour is scheduled, every day is attempted to be optimized, every experience is pre-purchased. Turns out, moms need a moment. And so does the whole family.”
For the financial piece, she suggests trying what she calls a future-memory orientation. Fast-forward five years and ask yourself what you actually hope your kids remember about this trip. “Usually the answer has nothing to do with the price point,” she says. “It’s ‘I want them to remember I was there, I was silly, we laughed, we bonded.’ The money reframe isn’t about convincing yourself it was worth it. It’s about releasing cost from the equation of present-moment pressure.”
It was never really about the vacation
The doom loop, Dr. Freitas is quick to point out, is a symptom of something bigger than travel logistics. “The vacation doom loop, let’s be so real. It’s not really about vacations,” she says. “It’s about the way motherhood has been culturally constructed around how moms are expected to sacrifice, be selfless, be the magic makers, optimize all of their kids’ experiences, curate family moments, to the point where rest and pleasure feel like things that have to be justified.”
“The real work is relearning that you are allowed to rest, to enjoy, to make mistakes, to be present as a human being,” she says. “What a cool thing to model for our kids. What a liberating legacy to leave for the next generation.”
That’s a longer project than any single trip. But it might start with one simple, surprisingly hard thing: letting go of the version of the vacation that existed in your head, and showing up to the one that’s actually happening.
Even if it’s snowing in Joshua Tree.
