How Can I Avoid Feeling Homesick
Homesickness is actually an impairment or distress, which you have to suffer due to separation from your home environment and loved ones. This is a natural stage for those, who move to a new place to study or to work. However, this can be really stressful for some people. This condition is very common in young people, as they feel dreaded or helpless, when they are away from home. Homesickness can also be associated with grief, nostalgia, adjustment disorders and depression. This can affect some people both emotionally as well as psychologically. In extreme cases, people might also suffer from physical problems with homesickness.
Factors affecting homesickness
To deal with homesickness, you should understand the factors, which affect homesickness. Then only, you will be able to deal with homesickness effectively. The main factors, which affects homesickness are:
- Gender: Some debates are still ongoing about affect of homesickness on different genders
- Age: Children can feel more homesick as compared to adults
- Rigidity: If you are strongly attached to your home life, then this will make coping with homesickness even more difficult
- Culture: Culture can also affect the development of homesickness
If you do not deal with homesickness properly, then it can result into other emotions, leading to psychological damage as well.
Feelings and disorders related to homesickness
You can deal with homesickness by identifying feelings with which homesickness are related these include:
- Grief: Homesickness is similar to the feeling of grief, which is caused because one misses their home a lot.
- Adjustment disorder: This is actually a maladaptive response to a recognizable psychosocial stressor that occurs in between three to six months of the annihilation of stressor. In homesickness, a person can feel depressed mood along with adjustment disorder.
- Topophilia: This is the attachment of a person to his surroundings and it can be the origin of homesickness as well.
Some of the other feelings related to homesickness include Agoraphobia, Sadness, Withdrawal, and Claustrophobia.
Coping with homesickness
Remember that homesickness is actually a condition that involves both complicated emotions as well as cognitive process. It is often difficult to diagnose homesickness and many people just withdraw themselves socially and return to the thoughts of their home mentally. One of the best remedies to cope with homesickness is to go back to your home for some days. However, if this is not possible, then you should address cognitive components.
Try to participate in games, assignments and other tasks to redirect your thoughts away from your home environment. After this, you should address your emotional state, which can be pretty problematic. It is difficult to get relief from feelings like depression, sadness or withdrawal. You can take help of counseling or discuss your feelings with others. Calling your home or writing a letter can ease some symptoms of homesickness as well. Even though, the best way of preventing homesickness is consulting a psychologist.