What’s your packing style? It all depends on personal baggage

With airports cranking up security and airlines cracking down on excess baggage, it makes sense to calmly assay your belongings and take less on trips.

As if logic mattered.

Pack early and light, travel gurus exhort us. Don’t be caught at midnight, hours before your flight, wearily culling shirts from an overstuffed suitcase or three -- or worse, frantically tearing them off hangers the next morning as you dash out the door.

Yet many of us, including this writer, wind up doing just that.

What’s behind this mass insanity? Personal baggage, psychologists say.

Pop open the locks on our brains and a bundle of anxieties about packing tumbles out.

Let’s start with fear of change.

“Travel means a disruption of our normal routine,” says Thomas Olkowski, a Denver psychologist who wrote “Moving With Children,” a guide for parents. “If people take a look at how they deal with changes and surprises in their life, it’s probably how they deal with travel.”

At one extreme are obsessive-compulsive personalities. “They’re concerned about making a mistake,” says Jonathan Bricker, a doctoral student of psychology at the University of Washington who has written a study of air travelers’ anxieties after the Sept. 11 attacks. Such people may try to pack for all contingencies: snow, formal occasions, an accident. Problem is, a suitcase or two can’t cover all this territory.

“They could spend two or three nights trying to get ready and still haven’t been able to make a decision by the night before they travel,” Bricker says.

At the other extreme are impulsive personalities, he says. They pack at the last minute because that’s how they do everything. In a thoughtless rush, they may take too much or too little. Impulsives and compulsives can wind up in the same fix -- late and overpacked -- but for different reasons.

Los Angeles actress Megan Gray puts herself in the impulsive camp. I caught up with her recently as she lugged a large duffel toward the Southwest counter at Burbank airport. She was on her way to Sacramento for a five-day family visit. “It took about five minutes to pack last night, right before bed,” she said.

Her sister Kendra is meticulous and makes a packing list. “I’ve always found that very strange,” Gray said. “It just takes too much time.”

Gray probably wouldn’t understand Julie Stephan either. The counseling student at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, who was cooling her heels at an airport cafe down the hall from Gray, had spent about 1 1/2 hours packing for her weeklong business trip to Anaheim. “I like to be organized,” she told me.

Not surprisingly, people who hoard stuff at home also take too much on the road. “Packing is sort of like going on a diet,” says Pat Mattheisen, who teaches a how-to class on the subject at the Boston Center for Adult Education. The former counselor shows students how to take enough belongings in a soft-sided carry-on to get them through three weeks in France.

More subtle insecurities can stuff suitcases too. “People really feel their clothes make a statement about them,” Mattheisen says, so they want to take all of them. A friend of mine grew up taunted by sisters “who would tell me that I had no fashion sense.” Packing for trips became exquisite mental torture. How could she leave anything home and risk being wrongly attired?

For other travelers, packing isn’t about clothes at all.

“People are preoccupied with things going into the suitcase [because] it’s easier than worrying about other anxieties related to travel,” says Jean Ratner, co-director of the Center for Travel Anxiety in Bethesda, Md. These could involve agoraphobia (fear of being in open or public places) or fear of flying, two of the syndromes the center treats. Reluctant to face these larger fears, travelers displace them onto the minutiae of packing.

Procrastination is another matter. There’s no phobia here. It’s just an all-too-normal aversion to a tedious chore.

“Packing is a series of decisions, and most people want to avoid decisions in their lives,” says Dr. Mark Goulston, a Los Angeles psychiatrist and author of “Get Out of Your Own Way: Overcoming Self-Defeating Behaviors.”

Fortunately, there is hope for the perpetually panicked and overpacked. Some suggestions from Mattheisen and others:

* Make a list: Ask yourself: What do I really need? Research your destination’s weather and consider whether you’ll be engaging in sports or formal events. Checklists and tips can be found on www.astanet.com/travel/packingtips.asp (American Society of Travel Agents) and test.ricksteves.com/plan/tips/backpack.htm (Rick Steves’ Europe Through the Back Door tour company).

* Keep a “travel box”: Start putting things aside two or three weeks ahead of your trip, and keep them in a separate area. These items might include a travel alarm clock, earplugs, prescriptions and underwear. Obviously some necessities, such as toiletries, might need to be packed the day you leave. The goal is to reduce the number of last-minute decisions -- and the stress that accompanies them. Check off each item on your list as you set it aside.

* Review security rules: Make sure you’re not trying to take forbidden items. The federal Transportation Security Administration lists these on the Web at www.tsatraveltips.us.

* Travel more: Packing skills also improve with practice, experts say. “The more you travel,” Mattheisen says, “the more relaxed you get about it.”

Of course, you could forget most of the above and emulate Gray, the impulsive packer. She swears by this method: Scoop the top layers of clothes from the hamper, wash them and bag them. “Then you know you like what you are packing,” she says, “and there should be a decent bottoms-to-tops ratio.”

Jane Engle welcomes comments and suggestions but cannot respond individually to letters and calls. Write Travel Insider, Los Angeles Times, 202 W. 1st St., Los Angeles, CA 90012, or e-mail jane.engle@latimes.com.