With no access to a kitchen or gym, she says her lifestyle was unhealthy, relying on restaurant meals three times daily, every day, for years. Her personal life suffered, too: “I didn't have any hobbies because they had been too difficult to maintain while living out of a backpack,” she adds.
In addition, maintaining productivity while on the move proved challenging. Trying to manage work, explore new places and cope with often unreliable internet connections became too daunting. "I struggled to effectively run my business ... working while lying in bed because I rarely had access to a desk."
The breaking point came when the panic attacks, which she attributes to her nomadic lifestyle, pushed her to find a home base. Upon settling down in Portugal and signing a lease on an apartment, Juliff saw her income triple within a year. She credits the improvement to the consistency of being in one place and not traveling constantly. Her panic attacks vanished, she joined a gym, started cooking healthy meals and built a solid community of friends.
Breaking away from the nomadic lifestyle was a difficult decision for Juliff, as she had built her identity around being a full-time digital nomad. Everything she did was centred on travelling: running a travel blog, planning future trips in her free time and having friends who were all travellers. "Making the decision to stop was hard,” she says, “I did struggle quite a bit with learning who I was as a person if I wasn’t travelling full-time.”
Beverly Thompson, a sociologist from Sienna College, US, who researches digital nomadism, says many people who elected the digital nomad lifestyle weren’t prepared for the downsides, partly because its community often presents an idealised image through social media and blogging, hiding the negative aspects, such as loneliness, mental health issues and financial struggles.