I had just arrived back home to Bansko, and felt more relaxed than I had for most of my travels. It is a great feeling to return to a familiar place, not to be thinking constantly about where to stay next week, or the week after that. The unpredictability of travel is nice in its own way, it makes you feel more alive, but the organising and the admin behind it add a certain weight. That weight is gone the moment I am back inside my own four walls. I am happy to have an apartment I can call mine, and it made me happy to come home.
I love travelling. I love exploring. I love adventurous travels. But coming home, something drops.
I downloaded the data, all of it, from the wristwatch I wear most of the time when I am on the road, a health tracker I have carried for close to ten years now. I keep a travel schedule day by day too, so I put the two next to each other. Then the idea popped into my head. Where am I actually relaxed the most? I did not expect what it said.
Two questions, really: what makes the number go up, and what brings it down. The score is HRV-based, not self-reported. The tracker reads heart rate variability every few minutes it gets a clean signal, and scores it 0 to 100 by how much the pattern looks tense or calm. Lower is calmer. I only mark a day as a place when I wrote it myself in my travel schedule or a GPS activity confirms it. Nothing here is guessed from the shape of the data.
Home. Not some exotic place. Home.
I went into this expecting travel to be the relaxing part and Bansko to be the grey time in between. The data says the opposite, twice, in two different ways.
In 2025 every confirmed trip ran tenser than the two thirds of the year with no travel claim at all. Austria, Turkey, Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, all of them. In 2026 the two calmest months of the whole year were July and August at home, back to back, 20,0 and 20,5, lower than four of the five trips that year. I did not expect home to beat travel on its own measure. Not for a week. Not for months at a time.
But the rule is not "travel is bad, Bansko is good." The calmest stretch of either year was a trip. Turkey, nine days in August, average 16,2, about eleven points under my home baseline, every single day at or below it. And I did not even like the place. The traffic, the cities, the food. Two quiet stays in 2025 matched the pattern: Uzès with a friend, 23,2, and Kyoto with a friend, 26,3, the two calmest named stretches of that whole year. And Bhutan: nearly three times my normal step count, long days, rough hotels, and the score did not move at all.
The exceptions are not random. They share one thing: relaxed company I trust, and nothing left to organise once I was there. The tensest stretches of both years sit at the other end of the same line. Not bad destinations. Logistics and demands. The visa scramble in Thailand. The open-ended limbo on Koh Phangan. A conference week in Taiwan. A work offsite in Thassos.
So it is not "travel is stressful." It is that home is where easy conditions come for free. Turkey shows the trick works somewhere else too, when the people and the logistics are right. Who I am with, and how little there is to organise, matters more to this number than where I am. There is no "company" field in the data to prove it. Only the pattern, repeating across two very different years.
One person, one wristwatch tracker. It has been used consistently for years but never validated against a lab instrument on my own body. Sample sizes for individual trips are small, some only five or six days. I flag those limits inside the data pages instead of smoothing them over. The honest version is more useful than the tidy one.
Two full years, charted day by day, with the travel evidence, the research behind the score, and the caveats attached.
Both pages use the same evidence standard: a date only counts as a confirmed place when I stated it directly or a GPS-tagged activity names it. Everywhere not marked is left unbanded rather than guessed at. Read every number as directional, not exact. The methodology, the research it is built on, and the honest limits are all inside each page, not hidden behind it.