Nobody warns you about month six.
The first weeks in a new country run on adrenaline. Everything is a small adventure, including the supermarket. You send photos home. Then the paperwork starts, and the winter, and one evening you realise you've spoken to no one outside work for eleven days, and the anxiety you thought you'd left behind is back and louder. My clients usually book the first call somewhere between month four and month nine. Almost all of them open with the same apology: "I know I have no reason to feel like this. I chose to come here."
You did choose. That's not the same as having no reason.
The move is the stressor, not the weakness
I'm a Bulgarian psychotherapist who works mostly with people who've moved here or elsewhere in Europe, and I want to say something that expat forums tend not to: relocating is one of the biggest stress events an adult voluntarily takes on. You lose your language, your shortcuts, your doctor, your friends, the shop where they know you, the version of yourself that people already understood. All at once. Then you go to work on Monday and are expected to perform at the level that got you the job.
Anxiety in that situation is not a malfunction. It's the nervous system doing exactly what it does when the ground is unfamiliar. The question is not why you're anxious. It's why you expected not to be, and what to do now that you are.
The four areas, emptied in one flight
In Positive Psychotherapy we use a model that splits your life energy into four areas: body, achievement, contacts, and future or meaning. A move abroad does something unusual to that picture. It doesn't drain one area slowly the way burnout does. It empties three at once.
Contacts go first and most completely. The friends are still there, on the phone, but a friendship on the phone is a different thing from a friendship you can walk to. Body suffers next: new food, disrupted sleep, a climate you didn't grow up in, a healthcare system you can't read. And the future area, which was full of plans while you were packing, goes strangely quiet once you arrive. You had a goal called "move to a new country". You achieved it. Now what?
That leaves achievement. Work. And work, for the expat, becomes the only place where you're a competent adult rather than a person who can't figure out the parking app. So it swells to fill the space, and you get the anxious high performer who is fine between nine and six and falls apart on Sunday afternoon.
Where your rules stop working
Peseschkian, who developed the method, was himself a foreigner in Germany, and he built the approach around a simple observation: every culture weights the same everyday capabilities differently. Punctuality, directness, tidiness, how much you're allowed to complain, whether you help a stranger or leave them alone. You learned one weighting at home. You are now living inside another one, and the mismatch produces a low, constant friction that's easy to mistake for something being wrong with you.
Bulgaria has its own versions for e.g. Bulgarians nod for no and shake their heads for yes, and I've had clients who felt, for months, that every conversation was going slightly wrong and couldn't say why. Directness here can read as rudeness if you're from a softer culture, and softness can read as evasion if you're from a blunter one. The bureaucracy assumes you know things nobody told you. None of this is hostile. It's just a different set of rules, and living by rules you can't see is tiring in a way that's hard to explain to people back home.
Naming the specific mismatch is often the first thing that helps. "I feel judged all the time" becomes "my sense of politeness and theirs are calibrated differently", and that's a problem you can work with rather than a feeling you have to endure.
The conversation you can't have with anyone at home
There's a particular loneliness in this that I think deserves its own paragraph. You can't fully tell your family, because they'll worry, or say "come back", or feel that their country wasn't good enough for you. You can't fully tell your new colleagues, because you're still establishing yourself. And the other expats are performing the same "loving it here" that you are.
So the honest version of how you're doing has nowhere to go. It sits. Anxiety likes a sentence that has nowhere to go.
This is, practically, why an English-speaking therapist who isn't part of your life here or your life there tends to help fast. Not because of any special technique. Because you finally get to say the whole thing to someone who won't be hurt by it, doesn't need you to be fine, and understands both the country you're in and what it means to be a foreigner.
When to talk to someone
If you've been waking up at four with your heart going, if the Sunday dread has started spreading into Saturday, if you've had a panic attack or something you suspect was one, or if you've started quietly planning an exit that you haven't told anyone about, it's time. Not because any of those means something is badly wrong with you. Because each one is easier to work with early.
I see people online, in English, from wherever they've landed. If you'd like to know what a session actually looks like before you book, I wrote that down here.
Todor S. Simeonov is a clinical psychologist and certified Positive Psychotherapist. He works online with expats and English-speaking professionals in Bulgaria and across Europe, and leads employee wellbeing for a company operating in 16 countries. More about him.
