Culture shock is the overall swing of excitement and depression that comes with being in a foreign country for an extended period of time. Almost everyone has some form of culture shock, but it is different for each person and each person deals with it in different ways.
It can sometimes happen abruptly from a situation or incident, or slowly build from small problems over time. Sometimes, incidents of culture shock can happen immediately upon arrival. Other times, it might be months until feeling some kind of culture shock. For me, there have been two periods where I've lived in Japan, now and study abroad in college. Both circumstances for living in Japan were entirely different, so the conditions of experiencing culture shock were entirely different, too.
Either way, when living in a foreign country, culture shock follows 4 (or 5) overall stages and the overall graph of your steady mood usually looks like this.
Going up, then down, back up and eventually returning to equilibrium. The four main stages are The Honeymoon Phase, The Frustration Phase, The Adjustment Phase, and The Adaption Phase. The fifth extra phase is The Reintegration Phase, when returning to your own country.
When people think of culture shock, they often think of it as something negative. But, the overall feeling of experiencing life in a new country is often met with excitement. There are so many new things to experience differently from your own country. New food, new buildings, new money, new people, new stores. If you're a fan of your new country, touching things that you've dreamed of for the first time is an amazing experience you'll probably never forget.
All of these new experiences raise your overall mood level, and we move up the curve.
If you're only in a foreign country for a short amount of time, especially on vacation or a very short study abroad, this is probably the only part of the curve that you'll experience. This was the case when I studied abroad. Every day felt like a vacation. Exploring Nagasaki and writing blog posts about it was an amazing adventure that had something new and interesting each day. I never experienced any cultural problems large enough to pull me down.
So, in short, the honeymoon phase is meeting differences in culture with joy and excitement.
The shock phase is the opposite. This is what happens when meeting differences between your countries and cultures has problems. This is also what people think of when they hear, Culture Shock.
Again, this can happen gradually over the course of several incidents or perhaps even one big incident. Problems are caused by not really understanding what people are saying. Or by people not really understanding you. Problems are caused by something someone said or did that was different than what you expected. Problems are caused by someone putting you into a situation where you felt uncomfortable and you felt trapped. And problems are also caused by small differences in culture that annoy and bother you that built over time.
It's easy to feel alone when you're in a foreign country. People often describe this feeling as being put into a box. In a foreign country, you don't have the same comforts as your normal routine. If you have a problem, you may not have a way to comfort yourself. And often when seeking those comforts, you can't find an equivalent and often don't know how to ask for it. So, for any problems, you hide in your box and you wait for this feeling to pass. Or, you wait until you're back home.
Often as you recluse, anything foreign or anything outside of your normal will reinforce these feelings and put you further into a spiral you cannot break from.
Often when you're in a foreign country for a short amount of time, you probably won't have enough time for these problems to really build and hit you. And if you do have problems, you only have to wait until the end of trip. There's a fast-approaching light at the end of the tunnel.
That doesn't mean it won't happen for short trips, but be prepared that it might. It really comes down to expectations. Making too many assumptions without verification often leads to problems.
Frustration and Shock is much more common to occur after several months of living in the country. After meeting with people and working with people, making friends, and hanging out, you begin to feel like you're accepted, and like you've become part of the society.
But, you are pushed away. Your friends or co-workers do something that clearly shows they do not truly accept you as part of their society. You're just the foreigner, and you'll always be the foreigner. Once again, you made an assumption that you thought was fact.
The overall strategy of Culture Shock is not to avoid it, but learning how to deal with it. This is the adjustment phase. Much like frustration, the ways that people naturally adjust are different for each person, but there's always room to learn and try new ways of returning back to natural mood level.
Skipping to the punchline, the overall best way of adjusting and understanding the situation better is to talk about it. Talk with your co-workers and friends about why you felt uncomfortable. Talk to other foreigners about similar situations, how they felt and how they overcame it. By talking about it, I mean opening a dialogue and expressing ideas. By talking about it, I do not mean to confront them about what they said and try to teach them why it's bad.
On one hand, they could absolutely be out of line and did something worthy of being called on. But, on the other hand, within their culture, it could be a socially-accepted action. If you call them on it, you're only reinforcing your foreign divide between them, and possibly reinforcing their behavior. Often in these scenarios, it's up to you to change. It's up to you to ask others and inform yourself about why any misunderstandings may have happened.
Above is the overall best way to adjust, but there are several tricks to help elevate your mood.
If you're being overwhelmed by too many things outside of your comfort zone, try to reconnect with things from your home country. It's a good way to feel like you're normal. Buy some foreign food from your country. Or watch a movie. Or visit somewhere that reminds you of home. Call your parents or call your friends back home. If you feel like an outsider, take a vacation and be an outsider, if only for a few hours or a day.
It's also pretty simple, but exercise. Exercise is a great way to mentally relax. Often as you blow off all of your physical strength through exercise, your mental strength will get exhausted, too. Then, you're able to move through your emotions and process them. Maybe meditation is your thing instead of exercise? Singing is fun, too.
Whether its food or exercise or singing, finding some way of centering yourself can slow or stop your downward fall, so you can begin the climb back up.
The Adjustment Phase course corrects your mood and brings your back up to normal, through the Adaptation phase.
The more you understand about your foreign country, the more you can understand about how you fit into it. When you can successfully apply that knowledge to your life, you feel like you've had a win. You feel like you've overcome a barrier and become closer to your new home. This is your overall goal. Overall understanding and adaptation isn't something that happens over night. It takes time, patience, and communication. And often new problems occur.
Culture Shock and frustration isn't a single event. It's often multiple events throughout your life in a foreign country that make you feel like a foreigner and not accepted. Once you feel you've adapted, it's not uncommon for something new and unknown to happen and bring you back down.
Also, it's not uncommon for people to cling to quick fixes or escape rather than truly reach out, communicate and understand the problem. If you hold on to grudges and problems, you will never fit in and you'll always be an outsider.
Ultimately, your goal is to fit in society as best as you can. You must adapt in some ways in order to do this. This doesn't mean losing part of yourself. It means gaining a new part of yourself. Gaining the ability to fit into both societies.
If you're in a foreign country to live forever, then adaptation is the goal. But most foreigners will eventually go back to their country, either for a trip or for good. Then, the whole cycle begins again, but often it can be more severe. This is The Reintegration Phase, also sometimes known as Reverse Culture Shock.
If you've adapted and integrated in your foreign country, now YOU are the foreigner when you return home. You are expected to pick up life exactly as you left it, but you are different. You've changed. You do things differently than before. You talk different than before. Your personality may have changed, too. Depending on the length of time you've been away, your country has changed, too.
If you've been integrated in your foreign country for a while, you can often forget what it's like to no longer have a foreign bubble around you. You suddenly instantly passively understand everyone and everything around you, whereas in your new country, you become comfortable in certain levels of understanding.
People make a lot of assumptions about you, too, because they don't see you as anything different than themselves. Adjusting is often a harsh reality of what you've left behind.
This is normal. But, you've been here before. Honeymoon phase, Frustration phase, Adjustment phase, and Adaptation phase. Do your best, and don't give up. Communicate, Exercise, and Adapt.