Gemma Spaeg (3:24)
Hello everybody. Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the podcast. It is so great to have you here back for another episode as we of course break down the psychology of our 20s. Before we get into this episode, I just want to say a huge thank you for all of the support and the love and the kindness that you guys have shown the podcast and our video episodes being on Netflix. I'm gonna be brutally honest and say that transition hasn't been all that easy for me emotionally and mentally. And I've definitely been experiencing a lot of self doubt, a lot of panic, a lot of anxiety, a lot of pressure in the past few months. And I feel like I have to be honest with you guys about that. As you know, the people who have been here since day one, I know it's very easy to see like big accomplishments like the one that the podcast has gone through and especially in your 20s, to think that it's all incredible and spectacular and a large part of it has been spectacular, but it's also been very hard and you guys have just been the silver lining and have continued to make it so special. Every time you guys tag me in your Instagram stories, watching an episode on Netflix, or message me saying you've seen it, message me saying like when is it coming to my country? Or you leave a comment, it is just the best feeling ever. So I just, I feel like I haven't said it enough on the podcast. Thank you for making this so special for me. And if you haven't watched an episode yet on Netflix and you are in the US or Canada, you can go and search up the psychology of your 20s right now. Hopefully it will be in many other countries soon. No promises, but fingers crossed. Without further ado, let's get into today's episode. Today My friends, we are talking about homesickness. That deep sadness and melancholy we get from being away from home for just a bit too long. The, like desire to run back to where we feel the safest. This sick feeling in our stomach, the anxiety we get when the sun goes down. The only place you want to be is not where you are. That kind of homesickness, the kind that I'm sure you can all relate to, that we've all experienced at some point in our 20s, at some point in our life. The best way that I've seen homesickness described is as a mini grief. Even when the reason you're away from home is a good thing, is a great thing, even when it's because you. You've gone to college or you're moving on with your life, or you're traveling to places that, like, you only ever dreamed about. You've moved cities for, like, an amazing opportunity for love. There is still this recognition that you are saying goodbye to something and a way of living and a way of existing that is really comfortable and familiar and that you love. You're grieving things maybe never being the same again. You're grieving this security. You're grieving the past. And you're missing not just the place, not just the location, but the memories. You're missing a system, you're missing a routine. You're missing relationships. Homesickness is so much more complicated and hard that I think a lot of people give it credit. That's what makes this also emotionally painful. It is a full body experience. And today I feel like we need to just talk about it in depth. It's also strange because you also know in this period of life that you need to experience some hard emotions, homesickness being one of them, to grow. It's kind of the price you pay for getting out of your comfort zone and seeing the world. There are so many people who feel this way and who feel very frustrated, but also feel very indebted to the experience and guilty. And it can be hard to enjoy the moment that you're in and also to see clearly how life is going and what you want in the future and whether this is the place you should be or whether you should go home. It's a very confusing emotion. Let's really dive into it today and just break down the psychology, what it is, why it is so emotionally painful, when to listen to your homesickness, but also when to not listen to it. And also my tips for the things that you could do today, the things you could do tomorrow the things you could do this week that I can guarantee will make you feel better. So, without further ado, let's get into it. So let's begin with this. Why are you feeling so homesick right now? You're feeling homesick right now because your mind and your body is programmed to avoid drastic changes and to make you very much aware that it doesn't like drastic changes when they happen, whether you like it or not. There is this fascinating study from 2012 looking at university students that found homesickness isn't just like a pesky, annoying feeling, it's actually a stress response. Your body, your mind, your nervous system, likes certainty, likes knowing, likes safety. Because that is where you can flourish best. What is most known, what is most safe, what is most certain? Home, home, your routines, your childhood bedroom, the space you decompress every single night. The environment where you know exactly what to expect. That is where your body and your mind always wants you to go back to. Every single human needs some version of this. It is wired into our DNA and into our way of being to have a home base or to have environment or some space where we feel our safest and where we can just switch off for the day, for the month, for the hour. That is why we literally have something called place attachment theory. This idea, this idea from psychologists and scientists that we form deep emotional bonds with places. That is something that we are hardwired to do, the same way that we form deep emotional bonds with people. And like people, certain places become part of who you are. They become part of how you see yourself. They hold really precious memories. They hold your routines, they hold your sense of safety. They also are what hold our default self, the person that we are at our core, the person we most naturally become when we feel our safest, normally at home. Even for nomads, right? Even for people who give the impression of needing nothing. Just like the wide open space, like the wide open road, the wide open spaces are for them home. There is not a human alive that doesn't have some or need some kind of environmental or external consistency, even if that consistency is inconsistency. So when you leave those spaces and say goodbye, when you leave home, when you move city, it is like a breakup, it's like a death. Your brain has to reprogram where to go to feel safe, what we can and can't trust, what makes us feel good, what feels normal for us now, what whilst managing the pain and the loss and, and the pain of nostalgia, nostalgia and homesickness by the Way incredibly similar emotions. Something you may not know. The word nostalgia was initially created as a medical diagnostic term for sailors who were suffering from homesickness. Literally, that is what the word for homesickness was, nostalgia. You want to know something else interesting? Another interesting psychology history fact. Nostalgia is one of the most intense emotions you can experience. It's also not distinctly good or distinctly bad. But when you feel it, researchers show that you really feel it, if you know what I mean. Like you feel it like nothing else. And that's what you're enduring right now. Again, it's like a breakup. It's like a breakup where you idealize all the good things, you don't remember any of the bad things. Your brain has this natural positivity bias towards the past, towards home, compared to the reality of the present, which is very colorful and vivid and real that you're experiencing right now. And the rose colored glasses that we have for the past versus the accurate vision we have for the present means that the present feels a lot stalker. Essentially what this explanation basically says is that being away from your home, even for great thing, even for a fantastic thing, is always initially going to mean that there will be a time where you don't have a strong place attachment that you can go home to immediately. And that feels really threatening to your brain. Your body is responding to that, responding to that threat, trying to process that. And it does that by activating that stress response. A stress response, your stress response is basically just your body speeding things up internally to help you find a solution quicker, speeding up your thoughts, speeding up your nervous system, speeding up all these things. Hence why you feel anxious, hence why you idealize home. Hence why you may be withdrawn socially. You may want to spend more time inside. You may not be sleeping well, you may not be hungry, you may be really worried, especially social and physical withdrawal. It's interesting, some researchers actually suggest this is a natural hermene instinct. When we feel homesick, we're trying to. It's trying to drive you to spend more time in whatever space you're in, to become more familiar with it or to make it feel like home. That can obviously not be great if that's the only thing you do. But all of this is this reaction to stress and to not having that homeostasis, that equilibrium. The confusing thing is that you don't always feel this way straight away, right? Or all at once. That's because when we initially enter a new space or a new place, there is always going to be like a honeymoon or an adjustment period. Basically, there is always going to be a period where your brain is like, this is really fun, and still kind of thinks, like, oh, we're just here temporarily. Like, home is still home. We'll be back there soon. And because of that unconscious belief, like, you can kind of let loose and have a fantastic time. Like, you're exploring, you're meeting new people, like, you're trying new foods, you see the Eiffel Tower, I don't know, like, you're going out all the time, you're trying on a new version of yourself and it lulls you into like a false sense of security, of like, oh, I've avoided homesickness altogether. Like, I really just got into the thick of it. It's always going to come, whether it's for a minute, whether it's for a month. I found this when I moved to London. Honestly, I was so naive. All my friends were warning me. They're like, you have to be prepared. Like, you think you just, it's going to be at some point. And I genuinely believed that I had avoided it. Like after the first month or two, I was like, this has been easy. And only at like three months time. Like, I was swiftly taken out. Like, it, it came for me, the way that it comes to every one of us. And the first wave of homesickness, this wave that I'm definitely experiencing right now, is often the worst because again, you've been lulled into this idea that you're fine. You've been lulled into a false sense of security by the honeymoon period. So the emotional whiplash increases, the intensity of all these really hard feelings. It can also be particularly brutal because I don't know if you're a university student, if you're at college, if there are all these other people around who have made the same move as you sometimes, like, they're having a great time, they look like they're adjusting fine, they look like nothing is bothering them. And you're probably thinking, like, why can't I be like these people? Why am I not finding this easy? The answer isn't just, you know, maybe they don't have as much to miss. It's probably because of the person you are. People who feel really deeply, people who are sensitive, people who are in touch with the world, who are empathetic, who are big feelers, who are emotional, and I say that as a positive thing, often struggle more with adjustments like this because they just feel everything on a bigger scale, including this nostalgia, including the pain of saying goodbye, including the people they miss. It also means that when the time comes, when the tide turns, when things start feeling good, you're going to feel really good. Literally, you're going to feel this better than anybody. In 2014, there was an FMRI study done on, on this very thing that looked at the emotional processing of people who were self reported, highly sensitive people and those who are not. And the hard emotions for them definitely registered hugely and enormously. But so do the great emotions. Like the happy moods showed up so much more brilliantly in their mind and as a feeling compared to those who weren't as sensitive. So that's maybe a little bit of a silver lining to look forward to. It's hard right now, but it's going to be matched with such a, an amazing greatness on the other side. It's also really important not to fall too much into a comparison trap here. Just because you're experiencing this differently from somebody who moved, you know, six months before you or somebody else in your dorm doesn't mean it's something about you, that you've made a mistake, right? It's not because the situation isn't right for you. Every situation, every person, I guess, just adjusts at their own time and pace. And you know what, who knows? I. Those people are sometimes still in the honeymoon phase. That's why it looks like it's all working out for them. I remember when I was at college, I had this friend who for like the first two years that we were there, she was having the best time. She was like the biggest, like, supporter of the university. She had all the merch. She would wear like her au hoodie everywhere. She was like the life of the party. She was having such a great time. Genuinely. She could have been the school mascot. And then at like year two, she was like, I, I miss home so much. Like, I don't know if I can stay here. I genuinely was at times thinking like, oh, she's gonna, she's gonna leave this person who was like the most pro, who just seemed to be adjusting better than anybody. The homesickness came for her eventually. Like it comes for all of us. You simply just, you cannot compare apples to oranges. Your time and the time it takes for you to adjust is going to be different. So now that we kind of understand why homesickness happens, because it is a stress response, because of our sense, the sense of safety we need and the place, attachment we need as humans. Let's talk about when you should say, like, enough is enough. When do you know this isn't just homesickness this is something else. And also, how can you deal with homesickness? How can you make yourself feel better during what is a very stressful time? We'll be right back after this short break.
