How to Deal With Homesickness Abroad

Homesickness has a bad reputation. We treat it like something children feel at summer camp — a little embarrassing, something a capable adult should be over. So when it hits you abroad, hard, in the middle of a life you chose, it can feel almost shameful. I want to take that shame off the table first: homesickness is not immaturity. It's love with nowhere to land.

If you're aching for home right now, you're not weak and you're not failing at this. You're missing people and places that genuinely matter. Here's what's actually happening, and how to be with it.

What homesickness really is

Homesickness isn't really about a house or a country. It's grief for the web of familiar things that made you feel safe and known — the people who share your history, the language that needs no effort, the streets your body knows by heart. When you move abroad, you lose all of that at once, and homesickness is the natural ache of that loss.

Homesickness is grief for what you love — not evidence that you made the wrong choice.

That reframe matters, because the mind loves to turn homesickness into a verdict: I miss home, so I must have made a mistake. But missing what you love and regretting your decision are two different things that feel almost identical from the inside. Most homesickness is the first, not the second.

Why it comes in waves

Homesickness rarely sits at a steady level. It ambushes you — a song, a smell, a holiday, a hard day, a Sunday evening — and then recedes. Those waves aren't a sign you're getting worse; they're just how grief moves. Often the sharpest homesickness comes a few months in, once the early excitement has faded, which is one reason month three tends to be the hardest.

How to cope with homesickness

1. Let the wave come. When homesickness hits, don't fight it or shame it. Let yourself feel it — even cry — and notice that it crests and passes. Resisting it only makes it louder.
2. Stay genuinely connected, not just scrolling. A real voice or video call with someone who knows you does far more than passively watching everyone's highlight reel. Scheduled, honest contact steadies your nervous system.
3. Bring a piece of home in. Cook a dish from home, play the music, keep a few objects that carry your history. These aren't clinging to the past — they're anchors that help you feel like yourself here.
4. Build new belonging on purpose. Homesickness eases most as the new place fills with the familiar — a café that knows you, a routine, a friend or two. That's built slowly, through repetition, not found overnight.
5. Reconnect to why you came. Homesickness makes the old life glow and hides your reasons. Write down what you were hoping for in this move, and one small sign it's beginning to happen.
6. Don't decide from the bottom of a wave. If homesickness is screaming "go home," that's the moment to wait, not to book a flight. Make big decisions from steady ground, not from the trough.

It softens — I promise

Homesickness doesn't vanish on a schedule, but it almost always softens as your roots go down in the new place. The waves come further apart and land more gently. One day you'll notice you've gone a whole week without that ache, and then you'll realize this strange place has quietly started to feel a little like home too. Until then, be as tender with yourself as you'd be with a friend who was missing everyone they love. That's all homesickness is — and you're allowed to feel it.

If the homesickness is tangled up with loneliness, you may also want to read why moving abroad feels so lonely — and how to cope. More free tools are in the journal library →