Expat Loneliness: 5 Best Ways to Overcome it Abroad
Loneliness is on the rise worldwide. Around 16% of people around the globe – one in six – experience loneliness. This might not seem significant on the surface, but it involves 1.28 billion people! Many of them are expats who travel around the world and experience their own sense of alienation. Expatriates undergo different challenges compared to people who don’t often travel. They need their guide to resolve problems.
This article will provide what you can do to resolve your expat loneliness and get the needed support.
The Challenges of Expat Loneliness
The topic of expat loneliness is very niche in the mainstream media, so it’s important to identify the main issues that they face daily. By understanding these problems, expats will be able to overcome their loneliness and travel around the world unworriedly.
There are three central challenges expats experience:
Feeling Disconnected
When an expat leaves their native country, they say goodbye to all their family and friends. All relationships that were built over a long time are now gone from the expat’s proximity.
Yes, it’s still possible to talk to them on social media or through phone calls while living abroad. Expatriates can still use online communication to chat with their close friends. But the sobering fact is that the online space can also intensify their isolation.
Expats can experience a sense of disconnection when they move to an unfamiliar place. In this new environment, where they may not know anyone apart from their colleagues, they can develop anxiety about establishing connections with new people. Consequently, they often retreat into the digital world – a perceived safe space where they can communicate with their closest friends and family without the social pressures of in-person interaction.
The problem is that this reliance on online spaces can deepen their detachment from local society, as they spend more time engaging digitally rather than physically.
What prevents expats from communicating with local people, then? This brings us to the second main challenge.
Language Barriers
Communication is the key to understanding each other, but we don’t all speak one language. Expats experience language barriers firsthand.
When expats live in a country where local people speak English fluently, as in Scandinavia or some African countries, no big issues prevent them from having a basic conversation. However, when expats move to countries that speak languages such as French, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, Hindi, etc., it can become challenging.
Not knowing the language of the country in which an expat works can cause problems, both at work and in social life.
At work, many native workers can speak with each other in their language during their shift. It doesn’t matter even if the workplace primarily operates in English. This can cause distress for expat workers who may feel like they are left out of the group and feel like an outsider. When you understand your coworkers’ language, it’s much easier to get into the workflow. You become part of the larger process, rather than remaining in the tiny English-language sphere.
In social life, if expats don’t know the native language, it can block them from connecting with local people. At a workplace, it’s great to establish professional connections, but it’s much more beneficial to try and meet many people outside the office. What becomes even tougher, unlike the workplace, is that locals have a higher chance of not speaking the expats’ language at all. This situation creates many barriers between people. It can, at some point, become impossible to communicate unless you have learned the language.
At one point, some expats can give up on trying to grasp new languages and continue to stay alone in their own bubble.
But there’s another problem which expats are very terrified about…
Changing Location Frequently
As we see, the disconnection and language barriers are interconnected with each other. They create challenges for expats struggling with loneliness.
Now, take all these problems and imagine an expat was able to fix them while living and working in one country, in which they have finally settled. Then they receive a message that they have to leave their job position, for different reasons, and move to a different country.
All the resolved problems of establishing new connections and learning languages reappear. Everything has to be restarted again, but in a different location, which has its own unique challenges.
And then after expats resolve all these issues again in a new country, they suddenly move again to another unfamiliar location, and have to resolve these problems again. What’s worse is that this can happen constantly as expats tend to move quite often between countries.
This results in many expatriates experiencing so much stress because of its constant continuity that it takes a huge mental toll on them. It’s this stressful pattern that can one day crush expats’ mental health and cause too much internal damage to them, leading to devastating results.
It’s always important to keep in mind what expatriate travel can do to your mental health, and you must always be fully prepared for such consequences.
Another case related to all these issues also happens with expat children, who also frequently travel around the world.
Solutions for Expats
It seems like a very depressing life for expats to live and work abroad. But there are different ways to help figure out all your problems and not drown in them.
Find Language Schools
Learning a new language is not an easy thing to do. And yet there are many language schools, both online and in any large metropolitan city. As a recommendation, try to take these classes in person and on the Internet. You will get hands-on practice from a native speaker, and you will also socialize with many people who face the same challenges as you do.
Look for Local Expat Communities
It’s hard for many expats to fit into the local community, and it won’t happen on the first try. So, instead, look for expat communities in the city you’re living in. There you will be able to meet your peers who also struggle like you, or someone who has more experience in the life of an expat. They can give you great advice. These communities can meet at pubs, co-working spaces, or public locations.
Try Co-Living Spaces or Couchsurfing
Another great option to socialize is to try living in co-living spaces or use Couchsurfing. In these places, you’ll be surrounded by people who, like expats, often travel and want to socialize with you. This may be stressful for expats who cannot handle crowded spaces in one place. At the same time, it’s these kinds of spaces that will never let you feel alone at all. So, try living in shared spaces and see how many new acquaintances and friends you can make.
Limit Social Media Use
Social media has been the most prominent factor causing loneliness nowadays. It isolates you so much that you become addicted to it and lose touch with reality. What should you do? When you come back home, turn the smartphone off. Go outside or spend time in a shared living space to meet new people. Another option is to replace smartphones with basic mobile phones. You definitely won’t be distracted by them.
On first glance, all these helpful tips might seem too simple to be useful in reducing loneliness. In reality, it’s often the uncomplicated concepts that have the most effect on how we resolve our problems.
Most Important Advice
All this advice is useful to overcome expat loneliness. And there is one last piece of advice, which is essential to always remember while traveling:
Never be doubtful about yourself.
It’s super easy to put yourself in a corner and not do anything at all. You don’t have enough courage or are afraid of taking any risks. You calm yourself by saying that it’s your “personality.”
By not breaking all the boundaries around you, you can end up feeling lonely while living as an expat. All expatriates break borders, moving from one country to another; so the borders of personal lives need to be removed, too.
If you have doubt, forget about it and try to say ‘hello’ to an unfamiliar face. If it doesn’t work, do it again, since nothing successfully happens on the first try. For some people, this might be risky, because any failure creates self-doubt. It’s true, but it is only created because you think like this.
Give yourself a different approach to your mentality. Take a look at your failures not as mistakes, but as learning opportunities to grow and change yourself.
Handling loneliness isn’t easy and takes time to work on. But there is a resource that becomes handy in your travels.
It’s the Babylon Radio website. Here you can find many articles on different topics that are useful to you. From finding the right country to move to, to opening a bank account, or what holidays you can celebrate.
If this piques your interest, head to our wonderful website and plan your amazing travels!
