Why Is My Anxiety Worse After Moving Abroad?

Moving abroad can be exciting. It can be something you wanted, planned for, and genuinely believe was the right decision.

And yet, you may find yourself feeling more anxious than before.

Perhaps you replay conversations that would barely have registered back home.

Simple tasks require more preparation. You worry about misunderstanding people, making mistakes, dealing with bureaucracy, or not knowing what to do if something goes wrong. You may even start wondering:

Why am I struggling when this is exactly what I wanted?

If you are experiencing anxiety after moving abroad, it does not necessarily mean that moving was the wrong decision.

From a psychological perspective, anxiety often makes more sense when we look at what changed around you, not only at what is happening inside you.

Moving abroad can change your language environment, routines, relationships, access to social support, sense of competence, cultural expectations, and the predictability of everyday life. Research on migration and mental health suggests that acculturative stress and post-migration conditions can be associated with poorer psychological outcomes, including anxiety for some groups. At the same time, migration does not inevitably worsen mental health, and outcomes differ considerably depending on the person, the reason for migration, and the conditions before, during, and after moving (Alegría et al., 2017; Lerias et al., 2025; World Health Organization [WHO], 2025).

So rather than asking only “What is wrong with me?”, it may be more useful to ask:

What changed in my environment, and how have I learned to respond to those changes?

If you are experiencing anxiety after moving abroad, it does not necessarily mean that moving was the wrong decision.

Can moving abroad really increase anxiety?

Moving abroad does not automatically cause anxiety.

For some people, migration brings freedom, opportunity, safety, belonging, or an improved quality of life. Research on immigration and mental health shows that outcomes are complex rather than uniformly negative (Alegría et al., 2017).

At the same time, adapting to a new country can introduce significant demands.

Depending on the person and context, these may include functioning in another language, adapting to unfamiliar social norms, losing immediate access to established support networks, financial pressure, discrimination, family separation, or difficulties developing a sense of belonging.

Research on acculturation suggests that the process of adapting to a new cultural environment can be relevant to mental health. A systematic review found that different acculturation strategies were associated with different mental-health outcomes across migrant populations, with factors such as language proficiency and financial hardship also playing a role (Choy et al., 2021). This may help explain why some people experience anxiety abroad, even when they were excited about moving and genuinely want to stay.

So the most accurate conclusion is not:

“Moving abroad causes anxiety.”

It is:

Moving abroad can change the conditions in which anxiety appears, increases, or is maintained.

1. Your environment may become less predictable

Before moving abroad, much of daily life may have happened almost automatically.

You knew how formal to be. You understood when someone was joking. You knew how to book a medical appointment, solve a practical problem, communicate with a landlord, or ask for help.

After moving abroad, ordinary situations may suddenly contain more uncertainty:

Did I understand correctly?

Was that person being rude, or is this normal here?

What if I cannot explain myself?

Am I behaving appropriately?

Things that once felt automatic may also require more active effort.

Making a joke is easier when you know a language deeply. Joining a conversation is easier when you understand its rhythm. Solving a practical problem is easier when you already know where to go.

Abroad, you may still be fully capable of doing all these things. But they can require more planning, attention, and tolerance of uncertainty.

Migration research identifies language and cultural adaptation as relevant to acculturative stress and mental health (Choy et al., 2021).

From a behavioral perspective, this can also be understood as a change in context. Situations that once felt familiar and predictable may now contain more ambiguity. For someone vulnerable to anxiety, this may create more opportunities for overpreparing, monitoring, reassurance-seeking, or avoidance.

The issue is not necessarily that you have become less capable. The environment is asking something different from you.

2. You may lose access to support, connection, and belonging

Back home, support may not have looked like “seeking support.”

It may have been texting a friend and meeting twenty minutes later. Having dinner with family. Asking someone familiar for practical help. Spending time with people around whom you did not have to explain yourself.

After moving abroad, those relationships may still exist.

But your access to them has changed.

A phone call is not always the same as having someone physically nearby. Friends and family continue developing routines that no longer include you in the same way. Meanwhile, new relationships often take time to build.

The World Health Organization identifies factors such as social isolation, family separation, discrimination, and difficulties with integration as relevant to refugee and migrant mental health (World Health Organization [WHO], 2025). Migration experiences differ enormously, and the circumstances of refugees or forced migrants should not be equated with those of voluntary expats. Still, the broader point matters:

Our social environment affects our mental health.

From a behavioral perspective, you may also have lost access to many small sources of reinforcement:

• a colleague you liked

• your usual gym

• spontaneous plans

• feeling competent at work

• understanding humor effortlessly

• your favorite café

• having a clear role in your family

• feeling like you belonged somewhere without having to work for it

  
  

Your new life may eventually become deeply meaningful. But that does not mean your new environment immediately provides the same access to connection, competence, pleasure, familiarity, and belonging.

Behavioral models, particularly in depression, have examined relationships among activity, environmental reinforcement, avoidance, and mood (Ekers et al., 2014; Wang & Feng, 2022). This does not mean research has proven that moving abroad reduces reinforcement and therefore causes anxiety. Rather, it offers a useful behavioral lens for understanding a major context change.

A helpful question might be:

“What meaningful sources of connection, competence, pleasure, and belonging changed when I moved — and what has replaced them?”

3. Acculturative stress can exist even when you chose to move

You do not have to hate your new country to find adaptation difficult.

You can be grateful and overwhelmed.

Excited and anxious.

Happy you moved and exhausted by the effort of adapting.

Acculturative stress broadly refers to stress associated with adapting to a different cultural environment. Research links acculturation processes and stressors with mental-health outcomes across migrant populations, although experiences differ depending on factors such as migration history, language, discrimination, social conditions, and the population studied (Choy et al., 2021).

This can be particularly difficult for voluntary expats because people often invalidate their own distress:

“I chose this.”

“Other people have it worse.”

“I should be grateful.”

“I wanted to move.”

But wanting a change does not remove the demands created by that change.

You can choose to move and still miss your family.

You can love learning a language and still feel exhausted by using it.

You can prefer your new country and still feel disoriented.

You can be proud of your independence and still feel lonely.

Wanting the move does not remove the demands of adaptation.

This is one reason expat anxiety can be so confusing: distress may coexist with gratitude, excitement, and a genuine desire to remain abroad.

4. Anxiety can lead to behaviors that make adaptation harder

Imagine that you feel anxious speaking the local language.

So you avoid making phone calls.

You ask someone else to speak for you.

You only go to places where you know exactly what to expect.

You feel immediate relief.

And that relief matters.

Because the behavior worked, at least in the short term.

Avoidance is central to behavioral accounts of fear and anxiety. It can be maintained through negative reinforcement: when a behavior reduces or prevents an aversive experience, that immediate consequence can strengthen the behavior (Dymond & Roche, 2009; Krypotos et al., 2015).

The same pattern can appear while living abroad:

You feel socially anxious → you stay home → anxiety decreases.

You fear making a mistake → you avoid speaking → immediate relief.

You feel uncertain → you repeatedly seek reassurance → temporary certainty.

These behaviors are not irrational.

They often make complete sense in the short term.

The problem is what happens over time.

If you repeatedly avoid speaking the language, you may get fewer opportunities to learn that you can cope with mistakes.

If you stay home whenever you feel socially anxious, the social environment may remain unfamiliar.

If you depend on reassurance every time uncertainty appears, uncertainty may become increasingly difficult to tolerate without reassurance.

This is why, from a behavioral perspective, I would not ask only:

“How can I reduce my anxiety?”

I would also ask:

“What does anxiety lead me to do — and what happens next?”

That question can reveal patterns that symptom-focused advice often misses.

So does feeling anxious mean you should move back home?

Not necessarily.

One common trap is to treat an emotion as a verdict:

“I feel anxious here, therefore I should leave.”

But emotions do not always function as instructions.

Sometimes anxiety may signal a genuinely unsafe or unsustainable situation.

Sometimes it reflects isolation, discrimination, financial pressure, or lack of support that needs attention.

Sometimes it is amplified by the demands of adaptation.

And sometimes it is maintained by patterns such as avoidance, withdrawal, overpreparation, or repeated reassurance-seeking.

This is also why context matters. Not all anxiety abroad is an internal coping problem. If someone is experiencing genuine discrimination, legal insecurity, precarious housing, or exclusion, the answer cannot simply be to “challenge anxious thoughts.” Sometimes the environment itself needs to change.

So the useful question is not simply:

“Do I feel anxious?”

It is:

“What conditions are contributing to this anxiety, and what happens when it shows up?”

What can help with anxiety after moving abroad?

There is no single solution because there is no single reason people experience anxiety after moving abroad.

For one person, anxiety may be connected to losing access to close relationships and familiar routines. For another, it may be maintained by avoiding situations where they feel uncertain or exposed. Someone else may be struggling with loneliness, pressure to make the move “work,” or a growing dependence on a partner as their main source of support.

This is why generic advice does not always help.

You may already know that exercise, routines, social connection, and relaxation can be useful. You may even understand that some of your fears are unlikely.

But understanding anxiety intellectually is not always the same as changing the patterns that maintain it.

You might know that making a phone call in another language is not dangerous — and still avoid it.

You might know that one awkward social interaction does not mean people dislike you — and still replay it for hours.

You might know that repeatedly asking for reassurance only helps temporarily — and still feel unable to stop.

You might know that staying home is making you lonelier — and still find yourself cancelling plans when anxiety shows up.

This is often where therapy can become useful.

Rather than only asking:

“How do I make this anxiety go away?”

Therapy can help you explore:

What tends to trigger the anxiety?

What do you do when it appears?

What does that response give you in the short term?

And what might it be costing you over time?

For example, avoiding a social event may reduce anxiety tonight — while making it harder to build a support network abroad.

Repeatedly asking for reassurance may create temporary certainty — while making uncertainty increasingly difficult to tolerate alone.

Depending heavily on a partner may reduce loneliness — while making conflict or separation feel even more threatening when that person has become your main source of connection abroad.

From a behavioral perspective, the goal is not simply to tell you to think more positively or to eliminate difficult emotions.

It is to understand your specific patterns in context and help you develop more flexibility in how you respond.

You do not have to wait until living abroad becomes unbearable

Many people minimize their difficulties because moving abroad was their choice.

They tell themselves:

“I wanted this.”

“I should be happier.”

“Other people have it worse.”

“Maybe I just need more time.”

And sometimes, time does help.

But if anxiety is gradually shaping your decisions — where you go, who you speak to, whether you socialize, how much reassurance you need, or how much of your life you avoid — it may be worth looking at the pattern more closely.

The aim of therapy is not to convince you to stay abroad.

And it is not to convince you to move home.

It is to help you better understand what is happening, what is maintaining the difficulty, and how you want to respond.

Online therapy for anxiety while living abroad

If you are living abroad and struggling with anxiety, overthinking, avoidance, loneliness, or feeling emotionally overwhelmed, I offer online therapy for expats and international clients.

Having lived abroad for more than seven years myself, I understand that emotional difficulties abroad do not happen in a vacuum. Your relationships, language, routines, identity, sense of belonging, and the practical realities of living in another country can all be part of the context.

My approach is grounded in evidence-based behavioral therapies. Rather than offering generic advice, we work to understand your individual patterns:

what triggers difficult emotions,

how you respond when they appear,

what those responses do for you in the short term,

and what they may be costing you over time.

From there, we can work toward more flexible ways of responding — so that anxiety has less influence over the life you are trying to build.

[Book a free introductory call]

References

Alegría, M., Álvarez, K., & DiMarzio, K. (2017). Immigration and mental health. Current Epidemiology Reports, 4(2), 145–155. DOI link

Choy, B., Arunachalam, K., S, G. M., Taylor, M., & Lee, A. (2021). Systematic review: Acculturation strategies and their impact on the mental health of migrant populations. Public Health in Practice, 2, 100069. DOI link

Dymond, S., & Roche, B. (2009). A contemporary behavior analysis of anxiety and avoidance. The Behavior Analyst, 32(1), 7–27. DOI link

Ekers, D., Webster, L., Van Straten, A., Cuijpers, P., Richards, D., & Gilbody, S. (2014). Behavioural activation for depression: An update of meta-analysis of effectiveness and subgroup analysis. PLOS ONE, 9(6), e100100. DOI link

Krypotos, A.-M., Effting, M., Kindt, M., & Beckers, T. (2015). Avoidance learning: A review of theoretical models and recent developments. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 9, Article 189. DOI link

Wang, X., & Feng, Z. (2022). A narrative review of empirical literature of behavioral activation treatment for depression. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 13, 845138. DOI link

World Health Organization. (2025). Refugee and migrant mental health. WHO source