When I arrived in the Netherlands after one year of living in a hilly and very crowded part of Paris, I was surprised by the immensity of the sky. It felt as if I had never noticed the sky before. A beautiful, wide, huge, open, deep and somehow odd, blue-and-white sky. Van Gogh and Vermeer would certainly not have painted outdoor landscapes covering two third of their frames with colorful cloudy skies, had they been raised between six-floor buildings in Paris! For me, it felt strange. Nice, yes, but something fundamental was missing.
We have a physical reaction to new landscapes and new places. People who have lived surrounded by mountains have told me how they miss their presence when they move to a new place. A reader told me the story of a man from overcrowded Calcutta who experienced a horrible sensation, close to a panic attack, when arriving to an isolated barn located miles away from any other human-inhabited building. Coming to a new place generates mild feelings of oddity in the best case, anxiety for many of us, and for some people, it can induce a panic attack.
Why New Places Feel Uncomfortable
There are many reasons why expats are stressed when arriving abroad. These include: their major life change; an overwhelming amount of set-up issues to solve; administrative issues and red tape; unanswered questions (about school acceptance and housing, for example); and culture shock when adjusting to the local environment and local customs. Geographic novelty is also a factor to add to our list of stressors.
Neuroscience helps to understand why this happens. Faced with a new geographic environment, new people, new roads, new landscapes, new building shapes, new temperatures and new noises, our body reacts with fear. The emotion of fear takes its roots in the body reaction. The perception of something new and unknown is a potential danger and raises your attention levels.
This detection of something new activates a cascade of stress reactions (hormones, body reactions like heart beats, cortisol levels rising). In the long term, chronic stress affects the ability of our immune system to cope with infections and can be linked to the onset of depression and burnout. Stress is a reaction where body and mind chemistry work in very close interaction.
New Places Raise Stress Levels Outside of Our Awareness
Arriving in a new place sends alerting signals to brain centers specialized in reacting to fearful stimuli (in particular the amygdala), which are located in the deepest parts of our brains. The vital parts of our brains are all located in the deeper and lower levels. They are doing the underground jobs that never or seldom come to our consciousness, like regulating our body temperature, controlling our breathing movements, regulating our heart, and enabling us to fall asleep when needed.
Our brains are wonderful machines to detect and analyze what happens in our surroundings, outside of our body: what we see, hear, taste, touch or smell. But they are not hardwired to provide us with detailed report of the activities of our internal organs. This is a shame because that is where raw emotions, like fear, take their roots.
This is exactly why it is very difficult to be aware of many of our own emotions and to 'understand' them. Instead, what comes to consciousness is a feeling of strangeness and discomfort - and in some cases we feel our heart beating more quickly and we breath a lot more.
Healing Places Strengthen Our Immune System
On the contrary, peaceful places and nature help healing. This has been demonstrated in a number of scientific studies. In a study often quoted, patients recovering in a hospital recover slightly more quickly when they lie down in rooms facing gardens and trees, compared to those in rooms with a window facing a building.
Interesting Lessons from the Land of the Rising Sun
Fortunately, we soon become familiar with our new surroundings and start to feel comfortable. This happens quite naturally and will progressively lower our arousal and stress level.
The Japanese have a word describing this feeling and this situation associated with it: Ibasho. Ibasho refers to a person's feelings of comfort and security in a familiar place. It refers therefore to a feeling associated to a particular place. It evokes a sense of security, peace (like in Zen gardens), satisfaction, acceptance, belonging and cosiness.
Building and Finding a Sense of Home, an Ibasho, Again
When arriving in a new place, nothing feels peaceful. There is no sense of home yet: not in your living room, kitchen, bedroom, neighborhood or office. The pub at the corner of the street is full of strangers who will stare at us or royally ignore us when we enter. Nothing provides this feeling of ibasho. We will have to build it or to find it: find a place where we will meet friends, or bring with us things that make us feel comfortable at home. We need to find our Zen garden - our place where we do not feel stressed or worried. It can be a place where there are no other human beings or it could well be crowded, but the best is when it is frequented by people we trust and have fun with. It is about the place, it is about the people in this place, and it is about the feeling of peace that emanate from this place and these people.
The good news is, the more we have been exposed to new places and new people and enjoyed the experience, the better our skills to cope with the anxiety associated with new places - and the better we get at finding new friends and new places where we feel comfortable.
And the other good news is: there can be more than one place on earth that feels like home. Long-time expatriates will tell you that home in where you choose it to be. You can make your new location home. You can find your Ibasho.
For the last 14 years, Catherine Transler PhD. has passionately led research programs for children and families in the field of developmental psychology. Catherine has recently created a freelance business, Transler Consultancy, which delivers information and support programs to people who live and work abroad. Her vision is to provide insights and psychological support for families in transition to help develop better resilience skills, enhanced cross-cultural adaptation abilities, and to develop optimism and creativity by living and working in a multicultural environment. Catherine can be contacted via her website, Expat Science.
May 2011
General References
J. LeDoux, 1998, The Emotional Brain, the Mysterious Underpinning of Emotional Life.
Esther Sternberg, 2009, Healing Spaces, the Science of Place and Well-being.
