Culture Shock

The Cambridge dictionary defines culture shock as, “A feeling of confusion felt by someone visiting a country or place that they do not know”. It has four main stages namely, the Honeymoon stage where a person often feels euphoric and excited about their new destination, the Negotiation stage where anxiety about the unfamiliarity starts to kick in, the Adjustment stage where a person starts to fall into a routine and get stronger bearings of their new location, and finally, the Adaptation Stage, where a person begins to feel somewhat comfortable with their new country, are better integrated into the culture and the person successfully adapts to their new way of life. To put it simply, a person feels they belong.

We all go through the four stages at different speeds and this can be attributed to several factors such as the similarity of the new country and culture to our home culture, age, reasons for moving, and more. Having moved around a lot as a kid, new schools, new countries, new faces, this is a cycle I’m quite familiar with.

Being naturally quite shy, you can imagine that I didn’t always have the best or easiest time navigating my way to the adaptation stage. It seemed that with each move I’d find myself stuck so to say in the negotiation stage, feelings of anxiety and ostracization surrounding me like a bubble. As stated above, we all go through the stages at different paces. Some of us have an easier adjusting, some of us don’t. But, what if this wasn’t the case? What if there was a way to speed up the process, make it so we don’t have to feel so lonely in these foreign places.

Well, I would argue that we shouldn’t. There’s a famous saying “we grow in the uncomfortable”, and I think we should all embody and strive for this. Being uncomfortable challenges us, it forces us to think of things in new ways, face new experiences, unlock parts of ourselves previously inaccessible, hidden by the routines and familiarity of our day to day lives. Therefore maybe it’s all about perception. If we choose to see the difficulty in accepting new cultures and countries then we immediately become predisposed to have a negative experience, whereas, if we choose to be more open-minded, which we ought to be, then maybe we’ll have an easier time adjusting to the shock.

L.McCluskey, (2020). Culture Shock Stages: Everything You Need to Know. https://www.now-health.com/en/blog/culture-shock-stages/
Cambridge Dictionary, (2020)