How to cope with moving to a new country?

A short guide on the psychology of homesickness and culture shock, paired with a grounding meditation to go alongside it. Read the guide, then use the meditation whenever you need a few quiet minutes to come back to yourself.

You moved. Maybe it was the right call. Maybe you're still not sure. Either way, some night in the last few weeks you've probably lain awake wondering if you've made the right choice. Nobody warns you about that part. The photos show the beach, the new apartment, the adventure. Nobody posts the night you cried in the kitchen, missing a language you didn't even know you'd miss the sound of.

I'm not going to tell you it just takes time, even though it does. I want to actually explain what's happening in your body right now, because once you understand it, it gets easier to work with instead of fighting it.

This isn't in your head, it's in your nervous system

Moving abroad is a real, physical stressor, not just an emotional one. In the 1930s, a researcher named Hans Selye discovered something that became the foundation of how we understand stress today. He found that the body responds to demanding situations in a predictable pattern, regardless of what the specific stressor actually is. He called it the general adaptation syndrome, and it happens in three stages.

First comes alarm. Your sympathetic nervous system, the body's accelerator, fires up. Cortisol and adrenaline flood your system, your heart rate rises, and you're primed to react, exactly like your ancestors needed to be when facing a real, immediate danger. This stage is useful. It gets you through the actual chaos of moving, the paperwork, the unfamiliar streets, the sheer logistics of building a life from nothing.

The problem is what happens next. If the demand doesn't let up, you move into resistance, your body keeps supplying stress hormones to help you cope, working harder than usual just to maintain normal function. And if that goes on too long without real recovery, you reach exhaustion, where your resources run low and things genuinely start to break down, sleep, mood, immunity, patience. This is why month two or three of a big move can feel harder than week one, not easier. You're not failing. You're moving through a well documented biological sequence that happens to almost everyone who takes on something this demanding.

Here's what actually helps: your nervous system has a second half most people forget about. Where the sympathetic system is the accelerator, the parasympathetic system is the brake, the part responsible for rest, digestion, and recovery. Research on the relaxation response, going back to Herbert Benson's foundational work at Harvard, has found that specific practices, slow breathing, meditation, deliberate stillness, measurably activate this parasympathetic side. Heart rate drops. Blood pressure drops. Cortisol drops. It's not a metaphor for calm, it's an actual, physiological shift out of alarm and into recovery.

That's exactly why I've recorded a short guided meditation to go alongside this guide. Not as a nice extra, but as a genuine tool for shifting your body out of the stress response this section just described, even for a few minutes.

The stages of moving to a new country

"Did I make the right decision" is one of the most common thoughts people have after a big move. Researchers have mapped out what this process tends to look like, and knowing the shape of it can make it feel less like something going wrong and more like something moving through you.

The classic model describes four stages: a honeymoon phase of excitement about the new life, a culture shock phase where irritation, stress, and disorientation set in, a recovery phase where things start to click, and finally an adjustment stage where the new place genuinely starts to feel like home. Researchers originally estimated the honeymoon and shock stages alone could take three to nine months, with full adjustment sometimes taking years.

Here's the part worth actually knowing: a 2022 study published in Current Psychology, following expatriates through their early months abroad, found that most people never really get the honeymoon phase at all. Most described feeling unprepared, anxious, and unsettled from the moment they arrived, not after some initial high wore off. If you never had a honeymoon period, that doesn't mean you're doing this wrong. For most people, there isn't one.

The same study found genuinely good news too: the hardest stage, the disorientation and stress, lasted only two to three months for people with real support around them, far shorter than the nine months older models predicted. What made the difference wasn't toughing it out alone. It was having someone check in on them regularly, and staying connected to people who understood where they'd come from.

The same research also breaks adjustment into three separate areas that don't all move at the same pace: how you interact with people day to day, how you're doing at work, and how satisfied you feel with daily life itself, food, housing, the practical texture of things. You might be struggling badly in one of these and doing fine in the other two. That's normal too, and it can help to notice which one is actually the hard part for you right now, rather than assuming everything is equally difficult.

A few ways to find your ground

One more thing worth hearing before the practical part: "what if this doesn't work out" deserves a gentler answer than your anxious brain is currently giving it. Most of the time, this question isn't actually asking for a yes or no. It's asking for reassurance that you'll be okay either way, whatever happens. And you will, even if "okay" ends up looking different than you originally pictured.

Build a routine, on purpose, starting now. This isn't just comforting advice. Predictability genuinely helps a stressed system settle, a mind that knows what's coming next doesn't have to stay as braced as one facing constant unknowns. It doesn't have to be complicated, the same coffee order, the same walk, the same time you check in with someone back home. Small repetition does real work here, not just emotional, but practical.

Name what you actually miss, specifically. Not "home" in the abstract, but the exact things, a particular smell, a friend's laugh, the way your mother says your name. Specific grief is easier to hold than vague grief.

Let yourself feel two things at once. You don't have to resolve whether you're happy or homesick. You can be both, in the same afternoon, sometimes in the same hour.

Talk to someone who understands both worlds. Not everyone around you will understand what it's like to belong to two places and feel fully at home in neither. Finding even one person who gets it, a fellow expat, a therapist who's lived it too, changes how heavy this feels to carry.

Give the timeline more room than you think you need. Most people underestimate how long real adjustment takes. Six months in is still early. A year in is still early. This isn't a flaw in you, it's just how long it actually takes for a new place, and your nervous system, to catch up to each other.

You don't have to figure this out alone

If any of this feels familiar, you don't need to just push through it by yourself. I understand this from the inside, not only professionally. I've lived across three countries myself, rebuilt a sense of home more than once, and I work specifically with people navigating exactly this kind of disorientation.

I offer online sessions in English and Hungarian, and in person in Ericeira, Cascais, and Lisbon. If you're in the middle of this right now, I'd be glad to help you find your ground.

Sources: Selye, H. (1936), general adaptation syndrome, Nature. Benson, H., the relaxation response and parasympathetic activation, Harvard Medical School. Zakaria, N. & Yusuf, B.N.M. (2022), stages of cross-cultural adjustment among expatriates, Current Psychology.