By Dr. Katie Blake, PhD | Social & Cultural Psychologist, Travel Psychology Expert
The curtains are open about a foot, just enough to let a strip of morning light fall across the bed. You're still in the hotel robe. There's a pot of tea on the little table by the window and a room service tray beside it: eggs, toast, a tiny dish of jam you'll finish even though you told yourself you wouldn't.
Somewhere across town, the people you came here to see are also already up. Someone has probably texted the group chat about the details around lunch. You'll answer in a bit. For now, the only voice in the room is the one in your own head, and it's finally slowing down.
By ten, you're dressed, fed and genuinely excited about the day. You walk into the lobby, or up the front steps of a house you know by heart, and you're glad to see everyone. You have energy for the long lunch, the drive out to the lake, the stories you've all heard before. You're good company to have around, and you know it.
If that slow morning feels like a guilty pleasure, I'd gently push back. I think it's the reason the rest of the day goes so well.
I'm one of these travelers. I love traveling, and I love sharing travel moments with the people I care about. Some of my favorite memories exist only because someone else was standing next to me when they happened. But I'm an introvert, and I am not an all-day talker. When I'm visiting family, I need at least a slow morning with some time on my own, or an afternoon break to rest, so I can be the person I want to be for everyone else. For years, I treated that need as something slightly awkward to explain, something I felt guilt about and even resisted. The psychology research suggests it's closer to a basic need.
Being social lifts your mood now and tires you out later, for everyone
Let's start with something that surprised me. Most of us assume the post-dinner slump after a big day with friends or family is an introvert problem. The research doesn't quite support that.
Sointu Leikas and Ville-Juhani Ilmarinen, psychologists at the University of Helsinki, wanted to know what being sociable does to us over the course of a day. They used a method called experience sampling: participants answered short questionnaires on their phones five times a day for 12 days, rating their mood, their energy and how they'd been behaving in the previous hour.
In the moment, being sociable and talkative went with a better mood and less fatigue. You probably know that feeling from travel: the table is loud, the stories are flowing, and you feel great. But about three hours later, those same sociable stretches predicted more fatigue. The tiredness seemed to track how many people someone had been around. Reassuringly, the pattern held, whatever a person's personality. Extraverts got tired too.
To be fair, this was a small study of 48 people, mostly women, and Leikas has said herself that it needed replicating. A later experience-sampling study from Leikas with 74 participants found the same link between sociable behavior and feeling tired two to three hours later. She has also been careful to say the effect is modest and short-lived, and that it's no reason to socialize less.
I agree with her. The takeaway for travelers is gentler than "people are exhausting." Connection costs energy, for everyone, and the cost of it all tends to arrive a few hours after the fun. If you hit a wall at 4 p.m. after a lovely, chatty lunch, nothing is wrong with you. You're right on schedule.
A whole week of being "on" costs introverts more
If socializing tires everyone out, where do introverts come in? A randomized controlled trial from the University of Melbourne gives one of the clearest answers I've seen.
Rowan Jacques-Hamilton, Jessie Sun and Luke Smillie randomly assigned 147 adults to spend a week either acting more extraverted in daily life (bold, talkative, assertive) or following a control set of instructions to act calm and modest. Participants checked in on their phones throughout the week, then looked back on it at the end.
On average, acting extraverted worked. People reported more positive emotion and even felt more authentic, more like themselves. But the averages hid a split. The more introverted participants got smaller boosts in positive emotion, and by the end of the week they reported more negative emotion, more tiredness and feeling less like themselves. They did enjoy some lifts in the moment. Looking back on the week as a whole, though, the cost outweighed them.
That finding helps make sense of older work. In a well-known 2002 study, William Fleeson and colleagues found that introverts who acted extraverted felt just as happy in the moment as extraverts did. Both things can be true at once. A short burst of sociability feels good for most of us. A sustained stretch of it, with no way back to your natural pace, is a different experience for an introvert.
I think this study belongs in every conversation about group travel. A five-day family trip with no break is, more or less, this experiment run on yourself. You're asked to be sociable from breakfast to bedtime, day after day, often in someone else's space and on someone else's schedule. The researchers themselves suggested that a gentler approach, one that leaves room to return to a more introverted mode, would likely cost less. On a trip, that room is your slow morning I described above.
Shared moments feel bigger, which is both the joy and the cost
None of this means introverts would be happier traveling alone. For many of us, the sharing is the point.
Peter Caprariello and Harry Reis found, across four studies, that people valued money spent on experiences shared with others more than money spent on things. Experiences enjoyed alone, by contrast, were valued no more than material purchases. The "experiences over things" advice we hear so often seems to depend heavily on other people being part of the experience.
Why would company make such a difference? Erica Boothby, Margaret Clark and John Bargh at Yale offer one answer. In their 2014 study, participants tasted chocolate at the same moment as another person, or while that person was looking at something else. They never spoke. Even so, the shared chocolate was rated as more likeable and more flavorful. Then the researchers swapped in unpleasantly bitter chocolate, and sharing made it taste worse. Their conclusion was that sharing an experience amplifies it, in both directions. People in the shared condition also felt more absorbed in the moment and more in tune with their partner. A follow-up study found the effect held only when the people sharing felt psychologically close.
Add to that what Elaine Hatfield, John Cacioppo and Richard Rapson called emotional contagion: our tendency to automatically mimic the facial expressions, voices and postures of the people around us, and to take on their feelings as a result. On a trip, that means you're rarely having just your own day. You're catching your companion's excitement at the overlook, and also their irritation when the restaurant is closed.
As I've come to understand it, this is why a day of shared travel can feel so full. You're living your own experience while also tracking everyone else's: who's hungry, who's flagging, whether your aunt liked the museum or was just being polite. That tracking is a big part of what makes shared travel meaningful. It's also work. For introverts, I think downtime is how we keep enough energy to keep showing up for the connection we came for.
Introverts can stretch for the people they love, as long as there's somewhere to recover
The personality psychologist Brian Little, who has taught at Harvard, Carleton and Cambridge, has a framework for this that I return to again and again.
Little calls it free trait theory. We all have a natural disposition, our "first nature," and some of it is biological. But we regularly act out of character in service of what he calls core personal projects: the goals tied to the people and work we care most about. An introverted professor lectures with real passion because teaching matters to him. An introverted parent chats with every family at the birthday party because it matters to their child. Little, a self-described introvert, says he does exactly this every time he steps in front of a lecture hall.
He's clear that this is a good thing. Acting out of character for love or for meaningful work is part of a full life. But he's equally clear that doing it for long stretches has a price. Without what he calls a restorative niche, a place or time where you can return to your first nature, he believes it can wear you down and even lead to burnout. His own niche, after a couple of hours of lecturing, is as simple as a few minutes alone or a breath of fresh air outside.
Little also proposes something he calls a free trait agreement, a kind-hearted bargain between people who love each other: I'll act out of character for our shared project if you'll grant me a restorative niche. He points out that the niche looks very different for different people. For an extravert, it might be a loud party. For an introvert, it might be an hour with a book and the door shut.
A family trip is, in Little's terms, a core project. Most of us want it to go well, and we'll stretch to make that happen. The slow morning with tea by the window is a restorative niche. And as I see it, telling your travel companion "I'll be all in from ten o'clock on, I just need the morning" is a free trait agreement in plain language.
Fifteen minutes alone can turn the volume down, especially when you choose it
So what does that restorative time actually do? Thuy-vy Nguyen, Richard Ryan and Edward Deci at the University of Rochester ran a series of experiments on exactly that question. (Ryan and Deci are the psychologists behind self-determination theory, one of the most influential theories of human motivation.)
In their studies, participants sat alone for 15 minutes, with no phone and no conversation. Afterward, their high-intensity emotions dropped: anger and anxiety went down, and so did excitement. The researchers called it a deactivation effect. It didn't happen when people spent the same 15 minutes talking with someone. It did happen when people read on their own, so the calming effect doesn't require staring at a wall.
The most useful finding for travelers came from their last study. When people chose to be alone, solitude led to relaxation and lower stress. When alone time wasn't freely chosen, it was more likely to bring boredom or loneliness along with the calm. Two later replications found the same basic deactivation effect.
A fair caveat: these were mostly short, controlled studies, many with university students, so I'd treat them as good evidence of a real mechanism that still needs more testing out in the world. Still, the pattern lines up closely with what so many introverted travelers describe. Time alone seems to work best when you plan it, before you're already overwhelmed. Tea and a room service breakfast by the window counts. So does a walk around the block before anyone else is awake.
Visiting family often leaves the least room to be alone
If there's one form of travel where introverts tend to run out of steam fastest, I'd put my money on visiting friends and relatives, which tourism researchers shorten to VFR travel.
Elisa Backer, a tourism researcher who has spent much of her career on this segment, has argued for years that VFR travel is badly underestimated. Official statistics often count trips by their stated purpose or by where people sleep, so a visit to your sister that includes a day at the aquarium can disappear from the numbers. In her work with colleagues on hosts, Backer makes the point that the host relationship is what defines VFR travel in the first place. You're there for the people, which is lovely. It also means the people are the itinerary.
Think about what that removes. There's often no hotel room to retreat to, no lobby, no lock on a door that's fully yours. Your hosts may have planned every hour out of love. Meals are shared, cars are shared, sometimes bathrooms and bedrooms are shared. Every one of Little's restorative niches has to be negotiated.
Then there's the emotional side. In Why Going Home for the Holidays Can Be So Hard, I wrote about how returning to a childhood home can pull us back into old roles almost the moment we walk in. On those trips, you're doing two kinds of stretching at once: being more sociable than usual, and holding onto the adult you've become in a place that remembers an earlier you.
Research on family holidays echoes this. In interviews and surveys with Danish families, Malene Gram, Anette Therkelsen and Jacob Larsen found that even happy family trips came with mixed emotions, including children's frustration with what the researchers called relational overload. The researchers suggested that travel companies show families more realistic images, including opportunities for some "alone time" when togetherness gets to be too much.
This is exactly where my own rule comes from. When I'm visiting family, I protect a slow morning or an afternoon rest, and if staying in a hotel nearby makes that possible, I'll book it. I used to worry that this looked like I didn't want to be there. These days, I think of it as the reason I can be fully present when I am there.
Alone time makes shared time better, so plan it in
Tourism researchers Elisa Backer and Heike Schänzel have written about how family holidays can feel as much like an obligation as a vacation. One idea from their work stays with me: time on your own during a trip can support the shared time rather than compete with it, giving everyone a break from the intensity of constant togetherness. Every family, they suggest, has to find its own balance.
Here's how I'd put the research to work on your next shared trip:
Decide on your downtime before you go. Nguyen's work suggests chosen solitude restores better than solitude you grab in desperation. Put it in the plan the same way you'd put in a dinner reservation.
Say it out loud, early. Make your own free trait agreement. Something like: "I'm so excited for this. I'll be at my best if I get mornings to myself, and then I'm all yours." Most companions hear that as generous, because it is.
Give yourself a door. On VFR trips, a hotel nearby or a suite with a room of your own can make the difference. If that isn't possible, a solo walk, an early coffee run or a bath with a book can do the job.
Time your breaks for the three-hour lag. If Leikas's findings hold, the tiredness from a big social stretch shows up later. An afternoon rest after a long, chatty lunch is better timing than pushing through to dinner.
Leave the phone out of it. The calming effect in Nguyen's studies came from being alone without devices. Scrolling the group chat in your room doesn't quite count.
Say yes to the big shared moments. Boothby's research suggests moments like a sunset or the first bite of something wonderful really are better together. Save your energy for those, and let the smaller stuff go.
Offer the same to your companions. Their restorative niche may look nothing like yours. The extravert in your group might need a night out while you need a night in, and both are fair requests.
Plan a soft landing at home. A buffer day after a big family trip gives you somewhere to recover at home before normal life restarts. I've written more about this in The Psychology of Re-Entry Rituals.
Back to the hotel window
Go back to that hotel room for a moment. The tea is finished, the tray is pushed aside, and you're lacing up your shoes. Nothing remarkable happened in the last two hours. Nobody would put it on Instagram.
But if the research is right, a lot was happening underneath. The leftover buzz from yesterday's long dinner was settling. Nobody needed anything from you, so you had nothing to track. You chose this time, so it felt restful rather than lonely. And you're walking into today with something to give.
I think that's the real gift of alone time on a shared trip. It lets you love the company and enjoy it, which aren't always the same thing when you're running on empty. If you've ever felt guilty for needing a slow morning, I hope you'll let that go. You're taking care of the trip, and of the people you're sharing it with.
Curious where you fall on the introvert–extravert spectrum, and what that means for the way you travel? My Travel Personality Quiz is built on the Big Five personality traits, extraversion included, and takes just a few minutes.
Frequently asked questions
Is it normal to need alone time on vacation?
Very. Experience-sampling research from Sointu Leikas and Ville-Juhani Ilmarinen suggests sociable stretches are followed by more fatigue a few hours later, whatever your personality. Introverts may feel it more over several days, but needing time to recharge on a trip is common and healthy.
Why am I exhausted after a fun day with friends or family?
In the research, being sociable tends to lift your mood in the moment and leave you more tired roughly two to three hours later. Shared experiences also feel more intense, and we automatically pick up on other people's emotions, so a full day together takes real energy even when it's a good day.
How do I tell my family I need alone time when I'm visiting?
Frame it as a way to be fully present, and say it early. Something like "I'll be at my best if I can have mornings to myself, and then I'm all in" usually lands well. The psychologist Brian Little calls this a free trait agreement: you stretch for the people you love, and they give you room to recover.
Do extraverts need alone time on vacation too?
Many do. The delayed fatigue Leikas and Ilmarinen found wasn't limited to introverts. What restores people differs, though. An extravert may recharge with a lively night out, while an introvert may need a closed door and a book.
How much alone time do introverts need while traveling?
There's no fixed number, and it varies from person to person. Lab studies by Thuy-vy Nguyen and colleagues found that even 15 minutes alone, without a phone, lowered intense emotions, and that chosen solitude was especially relaxing. Many introverts find a slow morning or an afternoon break each day makes a big difference.
Can introverts enjoy group travel?
Absolutely. Research by Peter Caprariello and Harry Reis suggests shared experiences bring more happiness than solo ones, and introverts benefit from that too. The key is pacing: say yes to the moments that matter most, and build in time to recover between them.
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.