Every expat hits a wall at some point. The harder question is how you tell the difference between a wall you can walk off with a weekend away, and one that’s actually trying to tell you something bigger.
Most people we talk to didn’t arrive at a session because of one dramatic event. They arrived because a few small things had been quietly stacking up for months, and a long weekend in Bali or Penang stopped fixing it. If that sounds familiar, here are five things worth paying attention to.
1. You’ve stopped looking forward to things you used to enjoy
Not dreading them — just feeling nothing much either way. The weekend market, the diving trip, the thing that used to be the whole reason you moved here. If it’s started to feel like another item on a list rather than something you want, that’s worth noticing.
2. Home doesn’t feel like an answer anymore – but neither does here
A normal rough patch usually comes with a clear escape hatch: “I just need to go home for a bit.” When that fantasy stops feeling like relief — when you imagine landing back home and feel just as flat — that’s a different kind of tired than jet lag or homesickness.
“I kept telling myself I just needed a holiday. By the third holiday that didn’t work, I figured out it probably wasn’t about the holiday.”
3. You’re more irritable with people who have nothing to do with any of it
Short with the barista, short with a friend who didn’t deserve it, short with yourself for being short. Irritability is one of the most under-recognised signs of being overloaded, mostly because it doesn’t look like sadness — it looks like a personality change, which makes it easy to write off as just being tired or just being you lately.
4. You’ve started avoiding the people who’d actually notice something’s wrong
Letting calls home go to voicemail. Skipping the expat catch-up you’d normally go to. Not because you don’t want to see anyone — because you don’t want to have to explain how you’re actually doing, or perform that you’re fine when you’re not sure you are.
5. The tiredness isn’t really about sleep
You can sleep nine hours and still wake up depleted. That kind of tired tends to be about carrying something — a decision you haven’t made, a problem you haven’t named, a version of “fine” you’ve been maintaining for longer than is sustainable.
None of this means something is wrong with you
It usually means you’ve been managing more than anyone around you realises, including, often, yourself. Living somewhere far from where you started takes a kind of ongoing effort that’s easy to underestimate, precisely because you got used to it.
If two or three of these sound familiar, it might be worth talking it through with someone who’s actually lived this kind of life rather than just read about it. That’s the whole reason this practice exists.