My wife was 39 weeks pregnant and would give birth literally any day. She had preceded me to a larger city where the medical care was good; I finished my last day of teaching on Saturday, was going to pack on Sunday, and then drive with my other kids to meet her on Monday. Then, the rumors began swirling that our city might be locked down due to COVID. The risk was not just that I’d be unable to leave our city but that, if we didn’t leave our gated community quickly enough, we’d been unable to leave and my wife would give birth by herself. That risk threw us into all-out action to get out of our neighborhood as fast as we could.
The next hours were a whirlwind as I rushed to pack everything my family needed before the dreaded quarantine walls went up. I was full of adrenaline as I literally ran between throughout our house and out to the car to pack. That adrenaline gave me what felt like superhuman power: I was alert, clear-minded, moving fast, and completely focused. We packed up, left, drove through the night, and I arrived at my wife’s location in the early morning. I slept in the next morning and, days later, welcomed our new baby into our family.
That story illustrates exactly what our bodies were designed to do when facing a stress or danger: jump into action, provide clarity of thought, focus our activities, enable use to endure beyond what is normal…and then, when the stressor or danger passes, relax, sleep, and reset to a normal life. This pattern—stress followed by rest—is crucial to mental and emotional health.
A few weeks ago, I asked readers in The Prepared Expat’s social media groups what challenges they currently faced, and a repeated answer was maintaining mental and emotional health as an expat. That’s understandable; in addition to the stresses of normal life that everyone faces, expats face the extra stressors of cross-cultural living, navigating foreign bureaucracies, language barriers, extra educational challenges, and more—and expats face these without the support that having family nearby provides. An expat life is filled with unusual blessings, but also unusual stresses—and so we have to know how to deal with them.
Today’s tip isn’t meant to replace the advice and counsel of a qualified mental health professional—if you’re not in a healthy spot, do seek out qualified help—but rather to share with you practices that I’ve found critical to maintaining my own emotional and mental health as an expat.
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Stress alone isn’t the problem
Despite the common belief that stress is inherently bad for us, researchers have come to take a more nuanced view. The consensus is that short, temporary bursts of stress—called acute stress—actually help us if we view them correctly. Stress triggers hormones that supercharge our abilities, help us focus, give us extra energy, enable unusual endurance, and produce strength to do things we couldn’t normally do. Think of the classic stories of mothers lifting cars to rescue their babies. That’s acute stress and it’s actually good because of what it enables you to do.
However, when we face constantly, unending stress that doesn’t let up—called chronic stress—this is where troubles come in. Acute stress puts your body “on edge” and readies the fight or flight instinct, but when you face unending, chronic stress, your body adjusts to these high levels of hormones. The result is that, when another stressor comes, your body needs even more hormones to get the same jolt. The result is a body that is pumping out more and more hormones and getting less and less of a stimulative effect; the sustained level of high hormones will not only harm your mental and emotional health, but can permanently damage your physical health and shorten your lifespan. If you care to know more about the horrendous effects of stress on your body, check out Dr. Petter Attia’s podcast on stress (it’s quite frightening, given how many people are stressed!)
The key to maintaining your mental and emotional health is ensuring that acute stress doesn’t turn into chronic stress so that your body’s hormone spike is short-lived and not constant. While there are many strategies for dealing with stress, I’ve found nothing more useful than building patterns of rest into my life.
Rest: the antidote to chronic stress
What resets the pattern of chronic stress is rest—and I don’t just mean sufficient quantities of quality sleep, though that’s foundational—but a break from the stressors so that your mind and body have the space and time they need to decompress, rejuvenate, restore, unwind, and be refreshed or renewed. With rest sufficient to reset your body’s hormonal levels, you can re-engage life and its stressors without suffering long-term consequences; rest ensures that stress was temporary (and thus acute) rather than ongoing (and thus chronic).
Everyone’s life situation, responsibilities, and family demands are different and so everyone’s habits of rest will differ, but what I share below is the result of years of practicing and tweaking my habits. If you don’t have rhythms of rest in your life, I encourage you to take the below as a template and tweak these habits as you learn about what patterns of rest you need in your life.
A template of rest
Here are my “rhythms of rest” that I practice and recommend to you:
- Each day: I spend 20-30 minutes in prayer & meditation in the morning and I spend 20-30 minutes in the evening doing something I enjoy that isn’t work or an errand
- Each week: I rest from work and errands for 24 hours, what many religions (including my own) call a “Sabbath”
- Each month: I take a daylong “personal day” out of the house, by myself
- Each quarter: I take a two-night “personal retreat” away from my home. Two quarterly retreats are by myself, one is with my just wife, (the fourth is combined with my yearly vacation)
- Each year: My family takes a two-week vacation, ideally outside of our host country
Understanding the pattern
A couple of notes on this pattern so that you can understand how it works and then also adapt it to your life.
1. Longer times replace shorter times.
So, a two-week vacation isn’t followed by a retreat followed by a personal day; instead, the vacation takes the place of that quarter’s personal retreat and that month’s personal day.
2. Don’t short-change the time.
There’s a huge mental difference between 5 minutes of meditation and 30 minutes, between a 12 and 24-hour Sabbath, between a one-night retreat and two-night retreat, and between a one-week vacation and a two-week vacation. Plan enough time to be unhurried; your brain and body won’t fully relax if you’re worried about the next task or when it will come. In particular, I’ve found it takes 2-3 days of vacation to “unwind” and my mind begins to “wind up” the last 2-3 days. By taking a 2-week vacation, I ensure there’s one week in the middle where I can just relax.
3. Get out of your host country for vacation
Even if you don’t go back to your passport country, just getting out of your host country is incredibly important. The reason for this is not that another country will be easier to live in—it may actually be harder!—but because you need distance from your stressors. The psychologist and counselor authors of Ethnicity and Family Therapy write:
Typically we tolerate differences when we are not under stress. In fact, we find them appealing. However, when stress is added to a system, our tolerance for difference diminishes. We become frustrated if we are not understood in ways that fit our wishes and expectations.
Getting into a different country changes differences-that-stress-you into differences-that-delight-you. It may cost more, but I encourage you to vacation in a different country than where you live. The distance you create from your stressors will enable you to rest.
Ensuring the time is restful
During all of these times, I seek as much as possible to only do things that are restorative, reflective, revitalizing, refreshing, and renewing. The goal of these times is not recreation (having fun or being entertained) but, rather, re-creation—that is, being refreshed and restored so that you can re-enter your life “anew” and healthy.
You’ll need to figure out what those refreshing, renewing, and recreative activities are for you. For me, making these times restful means I have to intentionally avoid some things while pursuing others.
Things to avoid
- Social media. If this seems hard to do, that’s all the more reason why you need to do it. Post that you’re taking a break and then ignore it. Delete it off your phone if you’ll be tempted to check it. (For my morning/evening time, I set up Focus Modes on my phone to show just what I want to see during those times).
- News. Not because I don’t enjoy it—I do, perhaps too much—but because it’s potentially stressing and it’s decidedly not restorative or relaxing.
- Work, housework, or “errands.” It’s a time to rest, not a time to check things off my list, even if it’s something I enjoy. Intentionally stop doing “work”, even if it’s something you enjoy, and do something that is not work-related. Your brain needs a break.
- Movies or TV. I love movies and TV, but I find that I’m mentally tired after them, not restored, so I don’t watch things during a time of rest (unless it’s a vacation, and then I watch in limited amounts).
- Email. During my weekly Sabbath, I don’t check email at all. On my other breaks, I check email no more than once a day. Of email I receive during a break, 75% can wait; 20% gets the answer of “I’m on vacation and will respond as soon as I can” and about 5% I actually take care of.
Things to pursue
- Sleep. Go to bed when you’re tired, sleep without an alarm clock and get up only when you feel refreshed. Allow yourself to nap. Physical sleep is crucial for mental rest.2 You may enjoy Around the World in 80 Winks: The Expat’s Guide to Sleep.
- A restful environment. For me, this means being close to nature, whether that’s pulling back the curtains for my morning meditation, going on a hike for a day, or going to a beach for vacation. It’s not just me: an increasing body of research shows the immense relaxation benefits of getting into nature. Consider what Dr. Greg Wells relays in The Ripple Effect:
- “Simply looking at a picture of nature can lower blood pressure, stress, and mental fatigue…research has shown that images containing water are more restorative than those without” (p. 137).
- “Being exposed to plants decreases levels of the stress hormone cortisol, decreases resting heart rate, and decreases blood pressure” (p. 138).
- “[W]alking in nature improves measures of revitalization, self-esteem, energy, and pleasure and decreases frustration, worry, confusion, depression, tension, and tiredness far more than light activity indoors does” (p. 139).
- A change in environment. Physically removing yourself from stressors and your normal environment helps you get perspective on your daily life. How far you can go from your normal life differs with how long your rest is; I go to a quiet place in my house to meditate in the morning but we go a long way away for vacation.
- Good food. My first few retreats I allowed myself to eat whatever I wanted (ie junk food) and I felt worse. Now I intentionally eat foods that I love but which are also good for my body and I end up feeling refreshed.
- Re-creational, refreshing activities. For introverted me, this means reading books, both fiction and nonfiction (on longer trips, I like to start with fiction books that don’t require thinking and later transition to “thinking” books on topics important to me). For you, it may be something else—but make sure the goal is restoration, not just “fun.”
- Reflective activities. Even though I don’t journal daily, I journal extensively during my personal days, retreats, and vacations. I’ve found that journaling helps “clear my head” of stressors and things that are unsettled, enabling me to make critical decisions about them. As much as I practice GTD for my day-to-day and week-to-week life, I find retreats are crucial times for processing bigger-picture things in my brain.
- Evaluate your life. This is a good time to set or review goals, to make a life plan, to think through what habits you want in your life, and more. Sometimes you need a break from the busyness of living your life to evaluate whether or not the life you’re living is the life you want to be living.3
Rest takes intentionality
The above patterns of rest don’t happen by accident; you have to plan them into your schedule or else they won’t happen. If you’re married, you have to plan how both you and your spouse can get rest. If you have kids, you have to plan how they, too, can have rhythms of rest. Put breaks on the calendar and plan your life around them.
Then, you have to protect them—people and tasks will constantly pop up that would disrupt your rest and you need to protect that time. Sure, you can give yourself permission to reschedule a personal day when something pops up, but don’t cancel it—and yet I’ve found that when I say I have a prior engagement, others tend to adjust their plans to fit mine. When someone asks me to do something on my Sabbath, I just tell them I’ll do it on Monday and it’s amazing how many “urgent” tasks can actually wait one more day.
Financing rest
You also have to plan these rhythms of rest into your finances; though none of these activities have to be extravagant, the longer times away from home will cost money. I know that money is tight for many people, but let me encourage you to specifically set aside money for these times of rest.
First, because in financial terms, preventing a mental health problem, depression, or burnout is far cheaper than fixing one. Counselors typically charge $120+ an hour and take a few weeks to work through issues; spending $300 on a retreat is inexpensive in comparison, and that’s ignoring the non-financial costs of mental stress.
Second, because you’ll find that you’re more productive, creative, and make more money after your time of rest. You’re investing money now to make more money. The payoff is so great that, if/when I hire employees, I will pay for them to go on personal retreats.
Third, if time and finances really are tight—I’m thinking single moms or people working multiple jobs to make ends meet—then I encourage you to take shorter breaks rather than focus on the longer ones. Most people save and scrimp so they can go on a nice vacation once a year, but it’s better for your mental health to have frequent, smaller, breaks rather than one infrequent long one. If all you do is protect 30 minutes a day for your mental health, you’ll be in a healthier spot than someone who sacrifices that daily time so that they can have a vacation once a year.
Conclusion
I intended this to be a short tip about resting; it’s obviously become much more than that, but I hope it’s been helpful for you to learn from my experience. While much more could be said—this isn’t the last time I’ll cover mental and emotional health at The Prepared Expat—I hope this overview of stress, the power of rest, and the template of rest can help you survive and thrive as an expat.
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Footnotes:
1. The book Why We Sleep by Dr. Matthew Walker, which I’m currently reading, is rocking my world. Sleep is one of the most important things you can do to be physically healthy, emotionally resilient, live long, and prevent dementia, and yet the vast majority of people don’t get enough quantity or quality of sleep. I encourage you to read Dr. Walker’s book.
2. I’ve learned to allow myself to pay for a nice hotel as a result. I used to find the cheapest hotel for my personal retreat, but after one experience of swatting mosquitoes all night long, I decided it was worth paying more to ensure good rest. If sleep is a challenge for you, or if you normally get less than 8 hours of sleep, I encourage you to check out my article Around the World in 80 Winks: The Expat’s Guide to Sleep or read the excellent book Why We Sleep by Dr. Matthew Walker.
3. Books that I would HIGHLY recommend to read and think through during your retreat and vacation are: Goals by Brian Tracy, Living Forward by Michael Hyatt, and Atomic Habits by James Clear.
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