By Dr. Katie Blake, PhD | Social & Cultural Psychologist, Travel Psychology Expert
When I was in university, coming home for the holidays felt a little like stepping into a time machine.
Almost immediately, my life looked the way it had when I was a teenager. I was back in my old bedroom, under the same ceiling I'd stared at all through high school. I slept late. I left clothes on the floor and dishes by the sink. I called up the friends who were home on break too, and we ended up in the same old spots, as if none of us had ever left.
At school, I was learning to run my own life. I picked my classes, managed my own time, and was slowly figuring out who I wanted to be. Then I'd walk through my parents' front door, and all of that seemed to fold itself up and wait in the car.
There was something bittersweet about those trips. A hometown at the holidays can feel like a place where time stops for a few weeks. Everyone is back, the streets are lit up, and for a little while you get to be who you used to be. But part of you knows you're only passing through. You're home, and you're already on your way back out.
Most of us know some form of that feeling, whether we went home from college, from a new city, or from a life our family has only seen in photos.
If you've ever wondered why a trip home for the holidays can feel harder than a week in a country where you don't speak the language, you're not imagining it. Going home is one of the most common trips we take, and one of the most psychologically complicated. Here's what the research says about why, and how to travel home with a little more intention this year.
Going Home Is a Trip, Even If It Doesn't Feel Like One
We don't usually think of going home as travel. There's no itinerary to plan, no guidebook, no new stamp in the passport. But tourism researchers have a name for it: VFR travel, short for visiting friends and relatives.
Elisa Backer, a tourism researcher in Australia who has spent much of her career on this segment, defines VFR travel as any trip where the purpose, the place you stay, or both involve visiting friends or relatives. That covers the drive to your parents' house for Thanksgiving, the flight to your sister's for Christmas, and the hotel room you book near your hometown so everyone has a little breathing space.
It's also enormous. In a 2012 study, Backer estimated that VFR travel made up close to half of Australia's overnight tourism market, and she argued that official data tends to undercount it. Researchers have also called it possibly the oldest form of travel there is. People were crossing distances to see family long before anyone thought of a vacation.
And yet academic research on VFR travel only got going around 1990, and for years it was treated as the least interesting form of travel. Much of that research focused on how many people travel this way and what they spend, rather than what goes on inside the traveler.
That gap is where travel psychology comes in. A trip home moves your body to a place, like any trip does. It also moves you back through time, into old rooms, old roles, and old relationships. That's a lot to carry in a carry-on.
Why You Feel Fifteen Again at Your Parents' Table
The most useful idea I know for understanding the holiday trip home comes from social psychologists Susan Andersen and Serena Chen. In a 2002 paper in Psychological Review, they laid out a theory of what they call the relational self.
Their argument goes like this. Each of us carries mental representations of the important people in our lives, like a parent, a sibling, or a first love. Tied to each of those representations is a sense of who we are with that person. In their model, your sense of self includes a whole collection of relational selves, each linked to someone who matters to you.
Those selves work on an if-then basis. If you're with your dad, then the self you've built in relation to your dad comes online, along with its feelings, motivations, and habits. Andersen and Chen describe this as a normal social-cognitive process, an everyday cousin of what Freud called transference.
Their research found that this can happen even with strangers. When a new person merely resembles someone important to you, the old relational self can activate. In a 1996 study, Hinkley and Andersen found that people's working self-concept actually shifted toward the self they are with that significant other.
Now think about what happens over the holidays. You aren't meeting someone who reminds you of your mom. You're sitting across from your actual mom, in her kitchen, often for days at a time. If a passing resemblance can stir up an old relational self in a lab, a week at home can bring it fully to the surface.
To be fair, this isn't a flaw in you or in your family. Andersen and Chen point out that relational selves often make social life easier. They're how you know, without thinking, how to be with the people you love. The trouble comes when the self your family knows best is one you've outgrown.
The House Remembers, Too
People aren't the only cues at home. The place itself is full of them.
One of the best-known studies in memory research took place underwater. In 1975, Duncan Godden and Alan Baddeley had scuba divers learn lists of words either on land or beneath the surface, then tested their recall in one setting or the other. Divers remembered more when they were tested in the same place they'd learned. Psychology researchers call this context-dependent memory: the setting where something happened can help bring it back.
Think about how many cues a childhood home holds. The creak of a certain stair. The smell of the hallway closet. The light through the kitchen window at four o'clock in December. The bedroom that hasn't changed since you left, or the one that has, which can be its own small shock. None of those were ever neutral. They were the backdrop to years of your life, and many of them were laid down when you were a younger person with younger habits.
I've written before about the psychology of place and how the places we've lived stay with us. Going home is where that research becomes personal. Going home means walking back into the setting where your earliest patterns were learned, surrounded by the cues most likely to call them back up.
Families Have Seats Assigned Long Before You Arrive
It isn't only you slipping back into old patterns. Everyone at the table is doing it, and they're doing it together.
The psychiatrist Murray Bowen, who developed family systems theory in the mid-twentieth century, thought of a family as one emotional unit rather than a collection of separate people. In his view, each member holds a position in that system, and the system tends to resist change. When one person behaves differently, the others often push, sometimes without noticing, to bring things back to the way they were.
Bowen's ideas come from clinical work rather than lab experiments, so I'd hold them a little more loosely than the research above. But anyone who has gone home after a big change will probably recognize the pattern. You come back from a year abroad, a new job, or a hard-won bit of personal growth, and within a day someone says, "There she is," about the exact behavior you thought you'd left behind.
I'd like to note that I'm not a family therapist, and this isn't a piece about fixing your family. From a travel psychology point of view, the useful insight is simpler. When you travel home, you're arriving at a place where your role was assigned long ago, by people who have every reason to keep things familiar.
The Further You've Traveled, the Bigger the Gap Can Feel
In Travel and Identity: Who Are You When You're Away?, I wrote about how travel loosens the roles we play at home and gives us room to try on new ways of being. Going home for the holidays runs that process in reverse. Instead of stepping out of your usual roles, you step back into the oldest ones you have.
The more you've changed since you left, the wider that gap can feel. If you moved across the country, built a life your family has only seen in photos, or came to see the world differently through years of travel, the person you've become and the person your family remembers may not line up neatly.
The psychologist Dan McAdams describes identity as a life story we keep writing, a narrative that links who we were to who we are and who we hope to be. Going home puts you face to face with the earliest chapters of that story, often told by people who were there for it and remember it their own way. That can be lovely. It can also feel like someone keeps reading the first chapter aloud while you're trying to write chapter twelve.
As a cultural psychologist, I'd add one more layer. Hazel Markus and Shinobu Kitayama's research on self-construal shows that cultures differ in whether they treat the self as independent and separate or as interdependent and defined through relationships. Many people who leave home move between those two ways of being without naming it. Out in the world, you may live as a fairly independent self. At home, the family is the unit, and you're expected to fit into it. As I've come to understand it, part of what makes the holiday trip so tiring is the effort of switching between those two modes in the space of one doorway.
Why We Keep Going Back Anyway
If going home is this complicated, why do so many of us do it every year, often at great expense, on the most crowded travel days on the calendar?
Part of the answer is place attachment. Leila Scannell and Robert Gifford's framework describes our bonds to places as having three parts: the person, the psychological process, and the place itself. A childhood home tends to score high on all three. It's tied to the people who raised us, to memories and feelings built up over years, and to the physical details of a place we know by heart. I explored that bond in Why Leaving a Place Can Break Your Heart, and the holidays are often when we feel its pull most strongly. If you've ever wondered what makes a place feel like home in the first place, I wrote about that in What Is Home?
The other part of the answer is nostalgia, which has a better reputation in the research than it does in everyday conversation. Constantine Sedikides, Tim Wildschut, and their colleagues at the University of Southampton have spent years showing that nostalgia, far from being an unhealthy longing for the past, tends to do us good. Across many studies, nostalgia has been linked to a stronger sense of social connectedness, and through that, to a greater sense of meaning in life and of continuity between who we were and who we are now.
That last finding feels especially relevant to the trip home. Even when a visit is hard, it can reconnect you with the thread that runs through your life. The same house that pulls you back into old habits can also remind you where your story started, and that the person you've become grew out of it.
So the holiday trip home often brings two things at once: the friction of old roles and the comfort of belonging. Both are real. And they don't exactly cancel each other out.
How to Travel Home With More Intention
You can't redesign your family before Thanksgiving, and I wouldn't suggest trying. But you can treat the trip home the way you'd treat any other meaningful trip: with a little planning, some awareness, and a few rituals that help you arrive as yourself. Here are some ideas, drawn from the research above.
Use the journey as a transition. The drive or flight home is a natural in-between space. Instead of filling it with work email, use part of it to notice what you're carrying: what you're looking forward to, what you're bracing for, and who you want to be when you walk in.
Name your relational selves before you arrive. If you know you turn into the peacekeeper around your siblings or the teenager around your dad, say it to yourself ahead of time. Andersen and Chen's work suggests these selves switch on automatically. Noticing the switch is often the first step toward choosing how you respond.
Bring a piece of your current life with you. A book you're reading, your morning walk, the playlist you've been loving, the tea you make every afternoon. Small habits from your present life can act as cues, too, helping you remember who you are now in a house full of reminders of who you were.
Build in some breathing room. Plenty of VFR travelers stay in a hotel or rental rather than the family home. That isn't rude. A little physical space can make it easier to step out of the old roles at the end of each day.
Visit the places that mean something to you. Drive past your old school, walk the neighborhood, stop by the diner where you spent your teenage Friday nights. Letting yourself feel nostalgic on purpose can turn the trip into something closer to a pilgrimage, and the research suggests it may leave you feeling more connected.
Plan a small re-entry ritual for afterward. In The Psychology of Re-Entry Rituals, I wrote about the practices that help us come back from a trip. They help after a trip home, too. Give yourself an unscheduled hour, a long walk, or a phone call with a friend who knows the person you are now.
Schedule a buffer day. Never feel bad about leaving one slow day between the trip and Monday morning. A day of airports or holiday traffic takes real effort, even if you spend most of it sitting down. Psychology researchers who study recovery describe how that strain usually fades with rest, but when we go straight from one demanding day into the next, we can start already tired and have to push harder just to keep up. That might mean heading home from the family visit a day earlier than usual, and research suggests that may be a perfectly healthy choice.
Going Home, and Coming Back as Yourself
Looking back on those university breaks, I can see both journeys at work. The bedroom, the late mornings, the nights out with old friends: that was the house and the people calling up the teenager I'd been. And the small ache when it was time to pack up and drive back to school was the other self, the one I was still building, waiting for me to return.
At the time, it just felt like being home. Now I think those trips were part of how I learned to hold both selves at once.
When I think about why the trip home can be so hard, I keep coming back to the idea that we're making two journeys at once, one across miles and another across years.
The first journey is the one we plan for, with the flights, the packing, and the Thanksgiving traffic. The second one sneaks up on us in the doorway, when the smell of the house and the sound of a parent's voice call up a self we haven't been in a long time.
Knowing that doesn't make the trip easy, but it can make it gentler. You can love your family and still feel tired after three days with them. You can slip into old habits and still come home as the person you've become. And if you treat the trip home with the same care you'd bring to any other meaningful journey, it might even teach you something about where you started, and how far you've come since.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is going home for the holidays so stressful? Going home combines travel stress with something most trips don't involve: a return to old relationships, old roles, and the place where many of your earliest habits were learned. Research on the relational self suggests that being around family can automatically bring back the self you are with them, even if you've changed a lot since you left.
Why do I act like a teenager when I visit my parents? Social psychologists Susan Andersen and Serena Chen describe a relational self that switches on in the presence of important people in our lives. When you're with your parents, the self you built in relation to them can come back online, along with its old feelings and habits. Familiar surroundings may add to the effect.
Is visiting family considered travel? Yes. Tourism researchers call it VFR travel, short for visiting friends and relatives, and it's one of the largest segments of travel worldwide. Some researchers consider it the oldest form of travel there is.
How can I make going home for the holidays easier? Treat it like any other meaningful trip. Use the journey as a transition, notice the old roles you tend to slip into, bring small habits from your current life with you, give yourself some physical space if you need it, and plan a simple ritual for when you get back.
Why do I feel exhausted after visiting family? Moving between the self you are in your everyday life and the self your family knows takes effort, especially if the two are very different. Add travel, crowds, disrupted routines, and a lot of time together, and tiredness makes sense. It doesn't mean the visit went badly.
Is it normal to feel nostalgic and frustrated at the same time when going home? Very normal. Place attachment and nostalgia can pull you toward home while old family roles create friction once you arrive. Research on nostalgia suggests the warm side of that mix can strengthen your sense of connection and meaning, even when the visit is complicated.
Should I take a day off after traveling for the holidays? If you can, it often helps. Recovery research suggests that the strain of a demanding day usually fades with rest, so a slow day between holiday travel and your first day back at work can make the return feel less abrupt.
If this resonated, I write about the psychology of travel — where we go and how those places change us — every week on Psychologie. Subscribe here to get it straight in your inbox.
Katie Blake, PhD is a social and cultural psychologist, travel psychologist, and writer based in the USA. She is the publisher of The Journal of Travel Psychology and the founder of The Postcard Société. She works with individual travelers and leading travel and hospitality brands on psychology-informed experiences and campaigns. Available for media inquiries, expert commentary, podcast appearances, and brand collaborations — visit drkatieblake.com/press.