It’s important to establish a circle of support when you’re in a new place, especially if you’re dealing with feelings of loneliness or anxiety. Keep your old friends, but make new ones, too. Use your nostalgia to look for clues about what makes you feel happy in your home, and use those things as guidelines for creating a better today and tomorrow. Miss grandma’s cooking? Ask her to send you some recipes so you can try to recreate them in your own kitchen.
Did you love playing on a recreational sports league in your old city? Find a new team to play on where you live through a site like League Hippo or LeagueLineUp. Instead, look at the most positive aspects of what you’ve left behind and figure out ways to recreate them in your new context. Don’t consider the past something that your present or future can’t live up to. Nostalgia isn’t just about the past-it’s also about the future, according to a study published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Talk to your friends and family back home when you need to, but try to focus less on obsessively keeping in touch and more on building new relationships that can help make you feel more like yourself again. So instead of clinging to what you’ve lost, embrace what’s new. And as such, you do have some control over how you let it affect you. It’s just your emotions and mind telling you you’re out of your element,” says Josh Klapow, PhD, clinical psychologist and associate professor at the University of Alabama’s School of Public Health, in an interview with CNN. “It’s normal and adaptive to feel homesick for some period of time. Unlike depression or anxiety from a mental health disorder, homesickness is situational. Allow yourself to feel sad, but don’t let it define you And just as you can’t control when it starts, don’t stress about trying to control when it goes away. There is no right or wrong way to feel about homesickness and no right or wrong time for it to appear. No matter when the feelings emerge, however, it’s important to acknowledge them and accept them for what they are. Sometimes the feelings don’t hit you until you’ve lived in a new place for months and the newness of your situation has started to wear off. Sometimes you feel homesick before you even close the door on your old home and embark on the journey to your next one. Once you do, you can accept it for what it is and move on to actionable steps toward overcoming it. There are four main risk factors for homesickness, the report goes on: (1) feelings of unfamiliarity brought on by a new experience (2) your attitude toward the new experience (sometimes expecting to be homesick can bring on a self-fulfilling prophecy) (3) your personality and ability to warm up to new people and situations and (4) outside factors, such as how much you wanted to move in the first place and how your friends and family back home are taking it.Ĭoping with homesickness starts with being able to recognize it. So how can you know if you’re experiencing homesickness as opposed to depression or anxiety for another reason? Ask yourself: am I unhappy with my situation because it’s bad, or am I just missing my old life? “The defining feature of homesickness is recurrent cognitions that are focused on home (e.g., house, loved ones, homeland, home cooking, returning home), and the precipitating stressor is always an anticipated or actual separation from home,” according to a clinical report published by the Academy of Pediatrics. For others, it’s more of a general feeling of loss for the security and predictability of wherever they define as “home.” But regardless of how hard you’re feeling it, homesickness is natural. Homesickness can present as anxiety, sadness, or fear all natural reactions to transferring out of comfortable environments and in to the unknown. For some, it’s pervasive and debilitating. It’s common during any sort of transition-camp, college, moving in to your first house or apartment. Homesickness is a longing for the familiar. And if you’ve ever moved away from home, chances are you’ve had similar feelings.
Being so far away from home-not just the physical structure of my house but the family, friends, and familiar sites that defined my comfort zone-was an overwhelming undertaking. And then I moved to college in another state. As a kid, I thought the epitome of homesickness was the four weeks I would spend away at overnight camp every summer.
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