The Anti-Anxiety Guide to Disney World

How to protect your bandwidth when the pressure to optimize is at its highest.

Travel is always something I’ve enjoyed immensely. But since having kids, it has proven to be a massive logistical lift—expensive and exhausting. As a result, we’ve just done less of it.

For a while, I wrestled with this expectation that if we were going to go through all the effort to take the family out of town, it had to be the “perfect” trip to make it worth it. And by perfect, I guess I mean I felt like we all needed to enjoy ourselves, the kids still needed their familiar structure of naps and regular bedtimes, and we had to make every single moment count.

But over the years, I’ve realized those ideals were really just setting me up for frustration. I was coming home overwhelmed, stressed, and depleted.

Caitlin Murray actually said it so perfectly in this reel—distinguishing a “family trip” from a “vacation” was the piece I’d been missing in my expectations. Getting out of town with the kids doesn’t serve the same purpose as a vacation does. Shifting that mindset helped me move away from trying to enjoy a vacation while also caring for children.

A perfect case study of this shift is our upcoming family trip to Walt Disney World. It’s arguably the trip that comes with the absolute highest amount of pressure to get your money’s worth, to make the best memories for your kids, and to choose the perfect attractions and restaurants that’ll keep everyone happy.

We did this trip a couple of years back, and I can safely say we did not tackle planning a Disney World vacation the way all the blogs tell you to. And it’s exactly why we’re eagerly going back. Choosing to get clear on what a successful low-stress Disney experience looked like ahead of time made all the difference in making it the perfect trip for us.

Quick note: if you’re a paid subscriber, I dropped all the real-life Disney logistics at the bottom of this post — short, informal behind-the-scenes pieces + exactly how we made this trip work for our family (food, downtime, souvenir boundaries, screen time, and our week at a glance). It’s in the PS. 👯‍♀️

Whether you’ve got a Disney trip (or any family travel for that matter) happening this year or have started to wonder if it’s about time, I know it could be helpful to see what doing a little less actually looked like in practice…

How we managed doing a little less to have more fun at Disney World—

Redefining “getting our money’s worth”

The default expectation is that if you pay that much for a Disney park ticket, you have to go from rope-drop to fireworks to make it worth it. But we knew that would make everyone miserable. So success for us meant explicitly planning to leave the park by 1:00 PM. We went back to the hotel, got in the pool, took showers, and ate an early dinner. We protected our capacity instead of pushing through.

Dropping the emotional responsibility

I also had to do a lot of unlearning around managing everyone’s emotions. I used to feel like I had to prevent my kids from having big feelings just because we were on a trip. But a meltdown in Fantasyland is just a meltdown in a different place than home. It’s not my job to force the magic and make those feelings go away. Building in that massive chunk of daily downtime meant we weren’t constantly putting out fires with emotionally exhausted kids.

Sharing the invisible labor

We went in expecting things to go wrong and knowing everyone was going to be tired. To keep resentment from building, Jason and I got extremely clear on our roles ahead of time. In the mornings, he managed booking the Minnie Vans and getting the brown-bag breakfasts together, and I managed getting the kids dressed and their shoes on. We split the invisible labor so I wasn’t the default person holding the whole morning together.

Refusing to read a million blogs

I completely opted out of the planning noise. You can so easily get sucked into an optimization swirl by reading a million Disney World tips and tricks to find the perfect strategy. I chose one single trusted resource (Ali at Wish Upon a Planner) and entirely blocked out the rest of the internet.

Skipping the expectation for everything to be picture-perfect.

And finally, I skipped the performance of the trip. There was no matching, licensed family wardrobe. I bought myself a hat and saved myself the stress of managing those orders. I took the exact same approach with photos. I refused to force tired kids to stand in the heat and smile. I just took a lifestyle photographer approach: I grabbed video of us walking around and just pulled stills from them later.

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At the end of the day, a trip to Disney—or anywhere else you take your kids—is still going to be exhausting. There will always be tired feet, overstimulation, and moments where things inevitably fall apart. But remembering the difference between a family trip and a vacation changes the entire metric for success.

Dropping the pressure to make every single second “magical” or “perfect” actually gives you the space to just exist there together. Whether you’re in the middle of a theme park or just visiting family a few hours away, if you have to bail on your plans by noon because everyone is tapped out, you didn’t fail the trip. You just honored your family’s capacity. And honestly, that is the only real way to make the effort worth it.

Talk soon,
Erin

P.S.—Paid subscribers, your behind-the-scenes Disney logistics are below, including how we handled food, character meets, souvenirs & the phone/app situation…plus, our exact week at a glance. 👯‍♀️

And if you haven’t checked out the paid section yet, you can join anytime. There’s a free 7-day trial if you want to try it first. 🥰 You can tap below to check it out.

If the first half of this email was about the permission to drop the pressure, this section is about the execution.

Because it’s one thing to say we’re going to protect our bandwidth & it’s another to actually figure out the logistics of how to do that in the middle of a crowded theme park.

So I thought I’d share the details of how we physically removed the friction from this trip. I’m sharing this not as a rigid itinerary you need to copy, but just to show you the exact micro-boundaries and tools we used to keep the noise out…

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Handling the food

People stress so much about where they’re gonna eat every single meal. We found that you don’t really save any money by getting the Disney meal plan.