Mental Health on Tour: How to Look After Yourself When You’re Always on the Move
Touring can be exhilarating. It can also disrupt almost every routine and relationship that usually keeps you well. Here’s how musicians, crew and other creative workers can protect their mental health when life happens on the road.
There is something undeniably romantic about life on tour.
New cities. Hotel rooms. Airports. Backstage corridors. Late nights in unfamiliar bars. Waking up somewhere different and getting paid to do the thing you once dreamed about doing for free.
From the outside, touring can look like the reward at the end of the creative struggle.
And sometimes it absolutely is.
But there is another version of touring that gets considerably less airtime. The one involving a 4am lobby call after three hours of sleep. Eating whatever is still open after bump-out. Missing your partner. Forgetting what day it is. Wearing the same three outfits for a month. Trying to find somewhere to exercise. Drinking more than you intended because everyone else is still awake. Performing at full emotional voltage and then attempting to fall asleep in a strange room two hours later.
The road can be thrilling. It can also dismantle many of the ordinary structures that keep a human being psychologically steady.
And that matters.
Research involving international touring professionals has found elevated levels of depression, anxiety, stress and burnout among artists and crew. In one study of 508 touring professionals who completed all psychosocial measures, half met the study's threshold indicating high risk for clinical depression.
Australian research paints a similarly concerning picture of the broader creative industries. Support Act's 2024 Mental Health and Wellbeing in Music and Live Performing Arts survey found that 53.5% of participants reported high or very high psychological distress.
So perhaps we need to stop thinking about wellbeing on tour as part of the infrastructure that allows you to keep doing the job.
Why can touring be hard on your mental health?
Most of us have a collection of things that quietly help keep us functioning.
Your own bed. Your partner. Your kids. Your dog. The gym you know how to navigate. The walk you take every morning. A kitchen containing actual vegetables. The friend you call when things are shit. The psychologist who knows your history. A relatively predictable sleep schedule. Twenty minutes alone after work.
None of these things seems particularly revolutionary.
But together they form an ecosystem.
When you tour, much of that ecosystem disappears at once.
Your environment changes. Your schedule changes. Your social world changes. Your food changes. Your opportunities for movement change. Your sleep changes. Your workload may intensify while your opportunities for recovery shrink.
Touring-specific mental health guidance highlights many of these same pressures, including lack of sleep, late nights, early starts, demanding schedules and separation from usual support networks.
The problem isn't necessarily that you suddenly become terrible at looking after yourself.
The conditions in which you normally look after yourself have changed.
And that distinction matters. Because if your wellbeing strategy only works when you are at home, well rested, near your favourite people and in complete control of your calendar, it isn't particularly portable. And creative careers require portability.
Your wellbeing has an infrastructure
Before you leave, it can be useful to ask a deceptively simple question:
What normally keeps me well?
Not what should keep you well. Not what some wellness influencer does before 6am. What actually keeps you relatively sane.
Think across a few basic domains:
Sleep: What helps you wind down? How much sleep do you realistically need to function?
Movement: Do you train, walk, stretch, run, swim or simply need regular opportunities to move your body?
Food: What happens to your mood and energy when meals become irregular?
Connection: Who are the people who help you feel like yourself?
Solitude: How much time do you need away from other humans?
Regulation: What reliably helps your nervous system come down after stress or performance?
Mental health support: Are there medications, therapy appointments or other supports that need to continue while you're away?
You probably can't reproduce your home routine exactly.
That's not the goal.
The goal is to identify the function each routine performs and find the smallest viable touring version of it.
Your usual 60-minute gym session might become twenty minutes in a hotel gym.
Dinner with your partner might become a ten-minute FaceTime before soundcheck.
Your elaborate nighttime routine might become headphones, a shower and the same playlist every night.
The ritual can change while the function remains.
Build a minimum viable routine
Tour is probably not the moment to embark upon your most ambitious self-improvement project. Think: maintenance mode.
Instead of designing the perfect wellbeing routine, decide on your minimum viable routine: the small collection of behaviours that make a noticeable difference to how you function.
It might be:
getting outside once every day
having one proper meal
drinking water before the first coffee
moving your body for twenty minutes
calling someone from home
taking medication at the same time
getting ten minutes completely alone
protecting sleep whenever the schedule allows it
On an easy day, you can do more.
On a brutal day, you know what matters most.
This removes some of the decision-making from an environment already full of logistics, unpredictability and cognitive load.
Protect sleep wherever you can
Sleep on tour deserves particular attention because touring schedules are almost perfectly designed to interfere with it.
Late performances, adrenaline, travel, unfamiliar beds, changing time zones, shared accommodation, early calls and post-show socialising can all make consistent sleep difficult.
You may not be able to achieve immaculate sleep hygiene while somebody is wheeling a road case past your head at midnight.
But you can protect the conditions around sleep where possible.
Think eye mask. Earplugs. A consistent wind-down cue. Limiting unnecessary late nights when tomorrow's schedule is punishing. Making the hotel room dark and cool. Getting daylight when you wake up. Giving yourself some time to come down after performing rather than expecting your nervous system to move directly from HELLO SYDNEY!!! to unconsciousness.
Stay connected to people who know you outside the tour
Touring creates its own little universe.
The same people travel together, work together, eat together, drink together and experience intense highs and lows together. That can create extraordinary closeness.
It can also make your world very small.
Maintaining contact with people outside that bubble can be psychologically grounding.
Talk to the person who doesn't care whether the show sold out.
Call someone who knew you before anybody cared what you did for work.
Ask what's happening in their life.
Connection to home isn't only about preventing loneliness. It can remind you that you have an identity beyond the role you are currently performing.
Which becomes particularly important when the tour ends.
Be careful when touring becomes an escape hatch
There is another reason some of us love being on the move.
It gives us somewhere else to look.
When every day contains airports, schedules, rehearsals, performances, production problems, new people and new places, there is very little empty space.
And empty space is often where uncomfortable thoughts get loud.
Sometimes being busy can provide temporary relief from a relationship that isn't working. A career we're increasingly ambivalent about. Burnout we've been ignoring. Loneliness. Grief. Questions about what comes next.
Being away can make those problems feel strangely distant.
Until you come home.
This doesn't mean you need to spend every interstate flight conducting an existential audit of your life. Sometimes distraction is useful. Sometimes throwing yourself into work is exactly what gets you through a difficult period.
But there is a difference between taking a break from something and building a life that allows you to keep avoiding it.
If you notice yourself feeling anxious about going home, repeatedly extending periods away, or needing constant work and stimulation to avoid what emerges in stillness, get curious about that.
The road can give you space, but it cannot resolve everything waiting at home.
Watch the post-show comedown
One of the stranger features of performance work is the contrast between what your body is asked to do onstage and what you expect it to do afterwards.
For performers, a show can involve intense concentration, adrenaline, physical exertion, emotional activation and the sensory experience of hundreds or thousands of people directing their attention towards you.
Crew can experience their own version of this: hours of pressure, problem-solving and hypervigilance followed by a sudden stop.
Then the show ends.
Now what?
For some people, alcohol or other substances become the fastest available off-switch.
There is nothing inherently wrong with celebrating after a show. But it's worth noticing when a drink shifts from something I enjoy to the only reliable way I know how to come down.
Experiment with other signals that tell your body the working day is over: food, a shower, stretching, music, breathing, walking, talking, silence, ridiculous television, ten minutes alone.
You need a bridge between performance mode and rest mode.
Build one deliberately.
Wellbeing on tour shouldn't only be an individual responsibility
There has been an encouraging shift in parts of the live music industry towards recognising that mental health belongs backstage too.
Larger productions and festivals are increasingly incorporating mental health professionals and peer-support workers onsite. In Australia, Support Act's Backstage Mental Health Support program provides mental health professionals and peer workers for crew and venue workers at major productions, tours, festivals and conferences.
I've worked in this capacity myself, providing backstage mental health support on major Australian tours.
It is a meaningful change.
Having someone onsite means support doesn't require a worker to recognise they're struggling, research a service, make an appointment and somehow squeeze it into an already chaotic schedule. Support is simply there, inside the environment where people are working.
But this kind of infrastructure is far from universal.
Plenty of musicians and creative workers are touring in vans rather than tour buses. Sharing Airbnbs. Driving themselves between regional shows. Eating servo dinners. Operating on tight margins where adding another person to the touring party is financially impossible.
You still deserve to be well.
If you're touring on a shoestring
You don't need a private chef, personal trainer or travelling psychologist to take your mental health seriously.
Start smaller.
Before you leave, identify the things that tend to unravel first when you're stressed.
Maybe it's sleep. Maybe you stop eating properly. Maybe you disappear from everyone you love. Maybe every night becomes drinks because drinks are simply what everyone does after the show. Maybe you become irritable when you haven't had a moment alone for six days.
Know your patterns before you're inside them.
Then make a plan that is proportionate to the tour you are actually doing.
Find the cheap gym day passes. Pack the eye mask. Buy supermarket food occasionally instead of relying entirely on venues and service stations. Schedule the call home. Take the walk. Put the medication somewhere you won't forget it. Have the alcohol-free night. Tell your bandmates when you need half an hour alone.
None of this is glamorous.
Neither is completely losing your shit in a Travelodge.
Ask: what will Future Me need?
Touring culture can encourage an understandable fixation on getting through tonight. Make the show. Meet the deadline. Get everybody into the van. Find the hotel. Do it again tomorrow. But sustainable creative work requires occasionally looking further down the road.
Ask yourself:
What does tomorrow's version of me need from today's version of me?
Sometimes the answer will be boring.
Go to bed.
Eat something.
Don't have the fourth drink.
Call your partner.
Take twenty minutes alone.
Say no to the afterparty.
Ask somebody for help.
The boring choices are often the ones that make the extraordinary ones possible. Because ultimately, looking after yourself on tour isn't about becoming some immaculately optimised wellness machine who meditates at sunrise beside the airport Holiday Inn.
It's about protecting enough of yourself that you can keep doing what you came here to do. Get on the stage. Make the thing. Do the work. And, ideally, come home with some version of yourself still intact.
Mental health on tour: quick questions
Why can touring affect mental health?
Touring can disrupt sleep, exercise, nutrition, relationships, routines, privacy and access to usual support networks. It can also involve long hours, financial pressure, performance demands, uncertainty and limited recovery time. Research suggests touring professionals can experience significant levels of depression, anxiety, stress and burnout.
How can musicians look after their mental health on tour?
Start by identifying the routines and relationships that normally support your wellbeing, then create portable versions of them. Prioritise sleep where possible, regular food, movement, connection with people at home, time alone, post-show decompression and continued access to professional mental health care where needed.
What is a good wellbeing routine for touring?
The best routine is one simple enough to survive a difficult touring day. Rather than attempting to reproduce your entire home routine, establish a few minimum commitments around sleep, food, movement, connection and recovery.
Where can Australian music and creative workers get mental health support?
Support Act provides mental health and wellbeing support for people working across Australian music and the arts, including a free Wellbeing Helpline.