Tips to overcome culture shock. You’ve moved to a new country and you're living in a different culture. You might be excited about the new adventure or fearful about what’s ahead. Either way, your life is sure to be filled with new emotions. And let’s be real: how you deal with these emotions will greatly affect how well you adjust to the new culture.
In general, during the first phase of adjustment, you’ll live a great time of enchantment and joy. During this “honeymoon” phase, you’ll want to try new food, visit new places and everything will be new. Enjoy this phase as much as you can.
Then, when you least expect it, you’ll start to feel a bit restless. It might be the different pace of life, it might be some food from home that you start to really miss. It can be the language that gets you stuck, and you feel you can’t communicate properly. It usually starts with small annoyances that become magnified. The symptoms of culture shock are as varied as people and their specific contexts, but there are some common emotions we all experience: homesickness and frustration over minor issues.
Even if you’re a seasoned traveller, you might surprise yourself getting very annoyed at delays and miscommunication. When you feel these uncomfortable emotions and catch yourself comparing your current life with “life back home” or idealizing how life was before, you are probably in the culture shock phase. But there’s good news: it’s normal and there are ways to deal with it. When facing a cultural transition it’s normal to feel discomfort at some point.
The following tips are pretty simple and straightforward. The key to mastering this phase is to be mindful of your emotions and be consistent in applying the tips.
Tip # 1 - OBSERVE
Give yourself permission to observe without the need to act. Much of our discomfort in this stage comes from the fact that we feel pressure to “do things right”. Allow yourself time to get acquainted with this new reality without the pressure of DOING something. Observe the people and the way they interact; observe the environment and how it affects you; observe how you react to different situations and observe how you feel.
Tip # 2 - ACT
Once you have information through observation, you can act. Decide for yourself what cultural changes you want to embrace and the ones you don’t want to. Cultural adjustment is very personal and there might be some changes you just do not want to adopt because they are not aligned with your core values. Connect with people from your new country and with other expats. Challenge yourself to try new activities and explore new places, flavors, and sights. Use the new language as much as possible and set yourself realistic language learning goals. For more about setting language learning goals, click here.
While making new connections is crucial for an integrated adaptation in a new culture, it can be easy to lose touch with meaningful relationships. Friends and family help you stay grounded in times when you are outside of your cultural comfort zone. Find your balance between new friends and maintaining meaningful relationships.
Tip # 3 - REFLECT
Make sense of your experience. When we don’t reflect, we end up going through the motions and failing to get feedback, and learning important lessons. Some people like to journal, others prefer to record audios and other people like to register their observations through photography, painting, music. Take your pick and reflect on what is going well, as well as the things that you want to make changes. Then, when you least expect it, you will start to feel more like “yourself” again and find a new space you can call a “new normal”. This “new normal” is an internal place that is more comfortable, where you feel more confident and stronger.
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About me
I am an expat coach and intercultural psychologist. I am also a seasoned expat, born in Brazil, and lived my childhood in the United States.
Throughout the years I have lived, studied, and worked in 5 different countries on 3 continents. In my many moves, I have experienced successful transitions and many more complete failures. My own experience, coupled with my observation of other people’s experiences, motivated me to search for answers as to why do we sometimes fail and how to succeed when moving to a new culture. This quest led me to pursue a Master's in Intercultural Psychology and complete a coaching certification and a practitioner certification in NLP.
With these tools in hand, I found myself equipped to help expats and expats-to-be overcome the challenges of moving so they can create their best life abroad.
For more about me visit www.deborahdahab.com or GET IN TOUCH HERE.
