Living Abroad Is More Than Culture Shock: The Mental Load of Starting Again

When people talk about moving abroad, the phrase culture shock tends to appear quickly.

It makes sense. Things are different. The language sounds unfamiliar. Social rules are not quite what you are used to. Even buying groceries can take longer because you are trying to work out what everything is called.

Eventually, though, you learn.

You know which supermarket sells what you need. You understand how to make an appointment with the huisarts. You stop checking Google Maps every time you leave your neighbourhood. You learn that appointments with friends may be planned weeks ahead, that bicycles seem to have right of way over almost everything, and that a Dutch “we moeten een keer koffie drinken” may still require opening the agenda before coffee actually happens.

From the outside, the culture shock seems to be over.

But you may still feel unusually tired.

Not necessarily unhappy. Not necessarily homesick. Just mentally full.

That is because starting again in another country involves much more than getting used to cultural differences. For a while, an enormous number of things that once happened automatically require your attention.

And that mental load can be easy to underestimate.

Starting again means becoming a beginner in ordinary life

Before moving abroad, you probably knew how to live in your own environment without thinking very much about it.

You knew how healthcare worked. You understood the school system. You knew what paperwork mattered and which office handled it. You understood how people communicated at work and what was considered polite, rude, friendly or distant.

If something went wrong, you usually had some idea whom to call.

Then you move.

Suddenly, ordinary competence becomes less transferable than you expected.

How do I register with a municipality?

Do I call the huisarts for this, or someone else?

What exactly does my health insurance cover?

Why did I receive this letter?

Do I need DigiD for that?

Can I just visit someone, or should I arrange it first?

Was that person being rude to me, or simply Dutch?

None of these questions is particularly dramatic by itself.

The difficulty is having dozens of them.

The brain is doing more work because routines that once ran quietly in the background have become conscious decisions again.

The mental load is often made up of very small things

When we think about stress, we tend to imagine major events: losing a job, relationship difficulties, financial problems or illness.

But stress can also accumulate through repeated small demands.

You are translating a letter while cooking dinner. You are trying to understand a school email while remembering to call an organisation before its telephone hours end. You have a conversation in Dutch, then replay it afterwards because you are unsure whether you understood everything correctly.

You need a dentist, but first you have to work out how dentists are organised here. Your child receives an invitation that contains a social custom you have never encountered. Someone mentions an institution using an abbreviation everyone else seems to understand.

Meanwhile, normal life continues.

Laundry still needs doing. Children still need collecting. Work deadlines do not disappear because you spent half the morning trying to understand an administrative system.

This is where the mental load of migration can become surprisingly heavy.

It is not necessarily one overwhelming problem. Sometimes it is simply the absence of autopilot.

Language takes energy, even when you are doing well

Learning the local language can make an enormous difference to independence and connection. It can open friendships, work opportunities and access to everyday life.

It can also be tiring.

When you are still learning Dutch, a simple interaction may involve listening carefully, translating part of what you hear, deciding how to respond, checking your grammar and watching the other person's expression to see whether you understood correctly.

Afterwards, you may realise that the conversation was technically successful but still took far more concentration than the same conversation would have required in your first language.

That difference matters.

Language barriers are also recognised as one of the factors that can affect access to healthcare and other services among some migrant populations. WHO identifies language, awareness of available services and the difficulty of navigating unfamiliar systems among the factors that can influence access to mental-health care for refugees and migrants.¹

But outside healthcare, language affects hundreds of smaller moments too.

A joke you understand three seconds late. A meeting where everyone begins speaking faster once the conversation becomes animated. A parent evening where you understand most of what is being said but worry about the ten percent you might have missed.

None of this means you are failing at the language.

It means your brain is working.

There is also a social rulebook to learn

Culture is not only food, holidays and national traditions.

Much of culture lives in expectations that nobody thinks to explain because, to the people who grew up with them, they are simply normal.

How quickly do friendships become personal?

How directly can you disagree?

What does being a “good neighbour” look like?

How involved are grandparents expected to be?

When is asking for help normal, and when is independence valued?

How are birthdays celebrated?

What happens when your idea of hospitality is very different from someone else's?

Living in another culture often means discovering these unwritten rules through experience. Sometimes the experience is funny. Sometimes confusing. Occasionally painful.

A response you interpret as rejection may simply reflect a different expectation around friendship. Something you intend as warmth may be experienced as intrusive. Dutch directness can feel refreshing in one situation and unexpectedly sharp in another.

Over time, you usually develop a better sense of context.

But learning a social environment through trial and error takes energy too.

You may have lost your practical support system at the same time

There is another part of starting again that can be overlooked.

You did not only leave familiar systems.

You may also have left the people who helped you navigate them.

Back home, you might have called your mother when you needed someone to collect your child. A cousin knew a reliable mechanic. A friend understood the school system. Someone always knew a doctor, a landlord, an accountant, a babysitter or simply the answer to a question you had never needed to research yourself.

After migration, that informal infrastructure may disappear overnight.

A video call can provide emotional support, but someone thousands of kilometres away cannot easily collect a sick child from school or sit beside you at an appointment.

This difference can become particularly visible during stressful periods.

When everything is going well, independence may feel empowering.

When three things go wrong in the same week, you suddenly notice how much practical support used to exist around you.

Starting again can affect confidence

One of the more subtle effects of migration is what it can do to your sense of competence.

You may have been highly capable before moving.

Perhaps you had a career, managed a household, handled bureaucracy, supported relatives and knew exactly how to solve everyday problems.

Then you arrive somewhere where you cannot make a phone call without rehearsing what you are going to say.

That can be humbling.

Sometimes people begin confusing unfamiliarity with inadequacy.

Why can't I understand this?

Why do I need help with something so basic?

Everyone else seems to know what they're doing.

But needing help in an unfamiliar system says very little about your intelligence or capability.

You are operating without years of accumulated local knowledge.

Someone who grew up in the Netherlands may know instinctively when to contact the huisarts, how school advice works or what a particular government letter means. They did not necessarily learn those things more easily than you.

They simply had much longer to learn them.

Work can create another layer of adjustment

Starting a job in another country involves more than learning the role.

You are also learning workplace culture.

How hierarchical is the organisation? How directly is feedback given? How much personal information do colleagues share? Is staying late considered commitment or poor planning? When someone challenges your idea in a meeting, is that conflict or simply discussion?

These differences can be subtle enough that nobody talks about them explicitly.

For internationals working partly or entirely in English, another dynamic can appear. You may be professionally fluent and still notice that informal conversations shift into Dutch around you. Nobody necessarily intends to exclude you, but repeatedly being the person who cannot fully follow the conversation can affect how connected you feel to a workplace.

For labour migrants, the pressures may be different again. Pharos notes that people working in another country can experience stress related to employment, housing, uncertainty about the future and family.²

This is why it is important not to speak about “the migrant experience” as though everyone is living the same life.

A highly paid international employee, someone who moved for love, an EU labour migrant, an international student and someone who arrived through forced displacement may all live outside their country of origin, but the resources, choices and pressures surrounding their migration can be very different.

Missing home is sometimes really missing ease

Homesickness is often described as missing people or places.

Sometimes that is exactly what it is.

But sometimes what you miss is how effortless life once felt.

You miss knowing what to say.

You miss understanding the joke immediately.

You miss walking into an appointment without preparing vocabulary first.

You miss having people nearby who already know your history.

You miss being able to ask a simple question without first explaining why you do not know the answer.

That kind of homesickness can be difficult to recognise because you may not actually want to move back.

You may genuinely prefer the life you are building now.

What you miss is not necessarily the old country itself.

You miss the familiarity you had there.

And familiarity takes time to rebuild.

Not every difficult period means something is wrong

There is a temptation to interpret emotional difficulty through diagnostic language.

You are exhausted, so perhaps something must be psychologically wrong. You feel overwhelmed, so perhaps you are not coping well enough.

Sometimes professional assessment is absolutely appropriate.

But not every difficult response to a demanding situation is evidence of a disorder.

WHO's current evidence on refugee and migrant mental health emphasises that mental wellbeing is influenced by a combination of individual, family, community and structural circumstances, including identity, community support, security, access to services and experiences of adversity.³ Migration itself can have both positive and negative effects on health.⁴

Context matters.

Someone trying to learn a language, raise children without nearby family, understand unfamiliar systems, establish friendships, maintain relationships across countries and build a career at the same time is carrying a substantial adjustment load.

Feeling tired by that does not automatically mean something is wrong with them.

Sometimes the environment is simply asking a lot.

What can make starting again a little lighter?

There is no single strategy that makes migration easy, and I would be cautious of advice that turns adjustment into another list of things you are supposed to do perfectly.

Still, a few shifts can reduce some of the unnecessary pressure.

Let yourself learn slowly. You do not need to understand every Dutch system immediately.

Ask questions, including the ones that feel embarrassingly basic. Local knowledge is learned, not inherited through intelligence.

Build practical support as well as friendships. Knowing one person you can call when you do not understand a letter can sometimes be as valuable as having someone to meet for coffee.

Keep parts of your previous life that still nourish you. Familiar food, language, music, traditions and relationships do not prevent integration.

And notice how much you have already learned.

Things that are automatic today were probably exhausting two years ago.

That is easy to forget.

Eventually, some of the mental load becomes invisible again

One day you realise you made an appointment without thinking about it.

You understood the letter.

You gave someone else directions.

A newcomer asked you how something works.

Perhaps you corrected someone's Dutch pronunciation and then laughed at yourself afterwards.

Little by little, the unfamiliar becomes ordinary.

Not everything becomes easy. Some parts of living abroad may always require translation, adjustment or negotiation. And certain life events can make the mental load heavier again, even after many settled years.

But starting again does not mean remaining a beginner forever.

You are accumulating knowledge, routines, relationships and confidence all the time.

Perhaps that is one of the quieter truths about migration.

A new life is rarely built through one dramatic act of courage.

More often, it is built through hundreds of ordinary things that gradually stop feeling difficult.

Until one day you realise:

You know how to live here now.

When the load becomes too much

There is a difference between feeling understandably stretched by a major life transition and struggling to function for a prolonged period.

If stress begins affecting your sleep, relationships, work, ability to manage daily responsibilities or overall wellbeing, it may be worth paying closer attention to what you need.

That does not automatically mean therapy.

Sometimes practical support, rest, social connection, language assistance, changes at work or help navigating a particular system can reduce the pressure. Pharos, for example, explicitly frames stress among people working abroad as something that can be discussed early and provides information about self-support and when professional help may be appropriate.²

At other times, preventive counselling can provide space to understand what is becoming overwhelming. And when symptoms are persistent, severe or suggest a mental-health condition requiring assessment or treatment, contacting the huisarts, POH-GGZ or appropriate GGZ service may be the better next step.

Support should fit the problem rather than assuming every form of distress requires the same solution.

If this feels familiar

Finding Home Within is an Astramía Counselling pathway for internationals and migrants navigating migration stress, cultural adjustment, identity, belonging and the emotional demands of building a life in another country.

Astramía provides preventive, psychosocial and non-clinical counselling. It does not replace medical care, crisis support, psychological assessment or specialist GGZ treatment when those forms of care are needed.

Explore Finding Home Within →

Sources & further reading

1. World Health Organization. (2023). Mental health of refugees and migrants: risk and protective factors and access to care.WHO's global evidence review examines factors influencing refugee and migrant mental health and access to care, including self-identity and community support, security, cultural understandings of mental health, adversity and navigating services.

2. Pharos. (2026). Wat is stress en wat kun je doen? Informatie over mentale gezondheid voor arbeidsmigranten.Developed by Pharos and HollandZorg, this Dutch resource addresses stress among labour migrants, including pressures involving work, housing, family and uncertainty about the future, and provides information about support and the Dutch healthcare system.

3. World Health Organization. (2023). Mental health of refugees and migrants: risk and protective factors and access to care.The evidence review emphasises that mental health is shaped by interacting individual, family, community and structural factors rather than by migration status alone.

4. World Health Organization. (2026). Refugee and migrant health.WHO notes that displacement and migration can have both positive and negative health effects and that outcomes are influenced by social, economic, environmental and structural circumstances.

This article provides general psychoeducational information and is not intended as individual psychological or medical advice.