I say “our” and “a given traveler” because I am, unfortunately, not alone in this shocking behavior. You and your partner are elbowing me in line to get the last (crust-coated) table at a pan-South American grill that inexplicably also serves sushi; I know this because according to data released by analytics company STR’s Tourism Consumer Insights team, 89% of travelers said that they made purchases in the airport before air travel. (Only 30% said they made a purchase on the flight itself.)
I also asked around.
Some people, like my friend Eric, told me they had a plan in place for airport food. (His is, roughly, to buy Gardetto’s whenever he sees them.) Others, like my friend Maddie—who frequently commutes to other cities from New York City for work—seem to reach their break point as easily as I do. “It’s like I don’t believe the flight will ever take off, which is a valid fear, and so while I’m earthbound I must eat and hoard calories,” Maddie said. “Once I ate an edible to help me sleep on a redeye—it didn’t work, and I ended up slurping down three bowls of ramen in the lounge because I was having a panic attack.”
“Did the ramen help?” I asked.
“Like, no,” she said.
Dr. Ellen Langer, who is often called “the mother of mindfulness” and has taught this topic for more than four decades at Harvard University, believes that the negative emotions I associate with the airport are avoidable. Perhaps most integral, she says, is to preempt the mental error of thinking that situations (i.e. that one especially dismal terminal at LAX where the Dunkin’ sandwiches all for some reason taste like cleaning solution) and events (a delayed flight, a middle seat assignment) are what causes stress.
“For stress to occur,” she explained, “you have to believe that something is going to happen, and you believe that it is going to be awful.” Not only are we fairly bad predictors of actual future events, she argues, but most experiences do not turn out to be awful. Sometimes they are inconvenient, Dr. Langer says, but dreading potential inconveniences is a waste of energy and depletes our ability to be responsive and mindful in the face of strife later, a disposition she calls “defensive pessimism.”
Dr. Langer also challenged me to “accept the fact that virtually anything can be fun” through “choices that make it like a game.” If I made the choice to buy a sad cheeseburger for $24 for example, she suggested I could pretend to be at Noma while eating it, and practice “active noticing”: try to pinpoint what qualities make it good or bad. Or I could eat that $37 undressed Caesar salad leaf by leaf, and attempt to identify its terroir.
As if I needed an excuse to look even wilder at the airport.
