 A lot of full-time RVers and van lifers experience a strange phenomenon after they've been out in nature for a while. It happened to me, and today I'm going to tell you about it. Happy Sunday Birdwatchers. I hope you're all doing well out there. Today I'm going to talk to you about something that may be affecting a lot of you right now. If you're new on the road or you're just isolating at home by yourself for the first time because of the quarantine, you may be experiencing some strange feelings that I found happen to me when I first got on the road, and I found it happens to a lot of other nomads. Today I have an entire blog post on this with a lot of research at CreativityRV.com. Go over and check it out if you want to see everything. But here's the deal. Before I hit the road, I used to just fantasize about relaxing. I mean, the pace of my life had gotten really crazy, and I needed to reboot. And so I thought about this freedom that RVers have, you know? You can sit around in your pajamas all day, you can binge watch shows, nobody's watching, you can wear what you want, you can do what you want, sleep when you want, and that is all true. And it's really great. And when I first got out on the road, I expected that those things were going to help me relax. And they did. You know, as soon as I pulled out, I felt all this tension that I had for my old life unfurl. But after I'd been on the road for a couple of months, and the newness and the excitement wore off, I found that I was experiencing this strange physical sensation, like I was untethered from everything that I was almost floating. I would have to grab onto my camp chair, and I would grind my feet into the ground and wonder what was wrong with me. I thought that maybe I made a big mistake, that this was all not for me. And I have found that this happens to a lot of people. Well, let me tell you what I think this is. It's anxiety because of all of the change. It's not just that one thing changes. You get to decide where you go and who you hang out with, and for a lot of us, when we work. So unlike other people that are just maybe quarantined to have the same job and the same house, they go back to the same place every night. And the only change is the isolation, or maybe a change to their social life. For us, we have all of those things, but then it's compounded. Because we give up our old social structure, our old house, maybe our old job. We wake up in a different place every day, and that is a lot of change. Now I had never heard anybody else talk about this on a blog or on YouTube that was full time. You know, they say that you go out on the road and it's all great, and there's these great new places and this great freedom, and that is true. But they don't tell you if they experience this strange anxiety or sensation. So I'm going to tell you what I've heard from a lot of people that I've interviewed over the years. To a person, it happens once the newness wears off, maybe about two months in. I have one guy tell me that he was bumping into stuff a lot, that he was never a klutz before, but somehow he just couldn't get his sea legs under him. And he thought it was because of the motion, and later he realized it was because he was so in his head that he had no body awareness. I had another person tell me that she had to literally physically hold onto her keys, because she was certain that she had not locked her front door, even though she had sold her house two months before. Another lady told me that she had to keep getting on her phone and checking her bank account balance, that she had this ongoing anxiety that everything she had was gone. Think about this, when we are in a traditional life with a traditional job, there is structure built in. So maybe we, in theory, work eight hours, go home for eight hours, go to bed for eight hours, right? Maybe we go to a job, we see the same people, maybe to the gym, to the bar, whatever, you go home to the same bed, you wake up in the same place. As a nomad, you don't have any of that. There is, for a lot of us, no clock. There is no day. I never know what day of the week it is. There's a thing that happens when you wake up in a different place every two weeks, you wake up, and sometimes it takes a minute to adjust because you don't even remember what state you're in. Like sometimes I'll camp on the Nevada, Arizona, California borders, and literally the time zone will change if I go inside my rig to outside my rig, so I've learned to adjust to the rising of the sun and the setting of the sun. Now I'm telling you guys this because if you're experiencing it right now, like some people that have emailed me recently, you might be wondering if you've made a terrible mistake, because when you don't have any external stimulus, like you do in your old life, right, to take up your mind and everything is new, you can really turn inward. But here's the thing, we can totally adjust to it and then begin to thrive on the road. If you're feeling stuck, just remember how lucky you are to have freedom. I mean, those of us that are the full time right now have freedom that people in the past could only dream of, so we're super lucky. Of course, when you have that kind of freedom, you're making all the choices for yourself and you can second guess everything and it can become like a freedom vortex where you just get locked down because there are so many choices. The cool thing though is that when you have freedom, you also have the freedom to pause for a second and decide how you're going to respond to things. So if you're starting to feel a little wonky, take a breath, pause, think about these strategies and just keep it moving. Now I hope you all go enjoy the rest of your Sunday. I hope to see you on the road soon or just doing something you love. Until then, everybody have happy travels and be free.