Why can they learn a foreign language quicker than me?

Of course there are always people who work harder than others _ they do their homework no matter what. Sometimes I also suspect it's about genetics!? Some people seem to belong to this kind-of-species of people who just seem to enjoy learning a new language: were they born like this!? 

The universal truth is: 1) it's hard to learn a new language, it takes time and require a strong motivation; 2)  paradoxically, everybody can do it 3) BUT, we do not have the same starting point. 

An important factor that will influence our ability and rapidity to learn a new language is the distance between the language(s) that we already know, and the new language we want to learn. This distance can be evaluated according to the historical roots of your native language.

Languages evolve. Populations migrate and encounter each other or, on the contrary, disconnect from each others due to migrations and wars. As people move, and as their new environment changes, so does their language. Grammar and pronunciation change. New words appear often borrowed from encounters with other cultures, while some words disappear because the population does not need to use them anymore. For example many technological words borrowed from English have entered the vocabulary of various languages due to technological developments (we twitt, we google…) while some old jobs have disappeared and with them the names and verbs describing the activities and the objects and tools involved. Did you ever have this experience of visiting our home country and discover new words and new expressions that did not exist or were not use with the same meaning, while we were still living there?  

Among the many large families of languages from the past, the proto-Indo-European language is thought to have been at the origin of many languages now spoken in Europe and Eastern Asia: Germanic languages, Latin languages, Indic languages, Iranic languages, Celtic languages, and others. Common roots, similar features.

English and Dutch, for example, used to be one language, which was of course neither English, neither Dutch yet, but their common proto-language, the Proto-Germanic language. They have the same roots, the same ancestor language, and share a lot of vocabulary and grammatical features in common. 

A practical consequence is that in language classes, you will observe that people learn much quicker than others. It's often a question of previous knowledge of similar languages. People coming from countries where the language has similar roots as the language you are learning will find it easier to learn this second language. For example Chinese expats who never learned English or another Indo-European language will have much more difficulty learning Dutch than people who have already learned English or German. Inversely, languages in Pacific Asia or Sub-Saharan Africa will be difficult to learn for Europeans. For the same reason, as you can read English, you will find it easier to learn Dutch or German than a Spanish, Italian or French person who has never learned any Germanic language before.

See below this 'language tree'. It illustrates the proximity of languages and their common roots. Languages with roots that are closer in time have evolved more recently from a common proto-language and therefore have still many words, phonemes and grammatical points in common.

This should not be an excuse for not trying to learn a local language, but this should also tell you that when people around you find is easy to learn the language and seem to learn it more quickly than you, don't get discouraged! It might just be that they have in head grammatical structures and words similar to the second language that you are all studying, while for you, it's all new and difficult to memorize all together. 
Besides, once you've learned a foreign language, it will tremendously help you to learn others, especially if they have common roots.  

I hope this helps you to feel encourage to pursue your efforts in learning a second language! 
Wherever you are and wherever you come from, good luck! :-) 

 Picture found on many internet websites - if I find its origin I will acknowledge it's authors, unfortunately I couldn't find where it comes from! If you know, please drop a comment, thanks! 

Shamelessly using relaxation to get tough (about building coping skills and resilience with soft methods)

Yesterday I went to a new place to get a coffee and read some Dutch magazines to improve my Dutch _ much more fun than buying my own magazines and reading them alone at home. And it costs less too J !

Anyway, so I made a mistake because there were no magazines in this new place, so I decided to go and buy one, then I would come back to the same place and read. I had a busy schedule for the day: I had an appointment with a girl friend to go shopping for new clothes and boots! I can be a busy woman! 

Next door there was a store specialized in spiritual books and selling a few magazines. They had "how to make a living working 4h a week", CD of music from heaven, books on stress management and "you don't need to shave to head to become a Buddhist" kind of stuff.

I was waiting for my turn to pay for my magazine… and… the ladies behind the Kassa desk didn't seem in a hurry at all to serve us. They all looked cheerful, ahaha, I am so happy to work at this place (did I say 'work'?). Here they were, chatting and helping a colleague... And here I was, standing, surrounded by exotic scents and sweet music.

So what do I do when standing in a line? I start to think about psychology - yes it's terrible, I can't help! A few of my random thoughts then: "Do they practice meditation every morning before starting their work here or is it just this atmosphere that brainwashes them?... It's too much happiness; it's the proof that sometimes too much happiness is just not right... Oh please can't you just do your job?... Or is something wrong with me? Perhaps I should be more patient, oh I am such a bad person.. Come on ladies you can't make a living by working 4h a week AND be that relaxed and happy??"... 

Ok, but as I said, here I was, surrounded by peace and love and really really nice and gentle people… So I shut up and wait for my turn…

Now I want to make a statement: as much as I know that relaxation is good for us, I will not let it make me a passive and slow person (oh dear, am I still a bit angry!?) 

Seriously, relaxation should help us a become more balanced persons, but it shouldn't mean that we will loose our energy and our drive. The purpose of relaxation methods is rather to enable us to focus instead of doing too many things at the same time, and it shouldn't lead us to live in passivity. Even if it makes us feel better and happier, there is still a lot to be done on this planet I am afraid. So personally, I think this should not slow me down when I decide it's time for a run!

In fact, something I read recently made me think that we can use relaxation to make us tougher! I though it was a really powerful idea. I read this idea in a workbook for physically and psychologically abused women (see my recent posting) from an author who is seen as an authority in this field, Edward Kubany. He suggests to women who suffer from traumas to learn to use relaxation. Relaxation is key to recovering from stress but also from traumas.

Once they have developed the ability to control their breath while feeling strong anxiety, they are ready to learn, step by step, to be confronted again with difficult images and difficult situations. For example, learning to watch difficult movies with violence while learning to manage their anxiety and keep it at a manageable level. Of course it's not something you can learn in one day and not even one week. But the idea is that once you master relaxation techniques, you can better control your anxiety, and you can train yourself to go into situations which previously made you anxious. It will still make you anxious, but less and less, as you get used to it. This is a sort of desensitization program.

Relaxation methods are really efficient for many of the psychological issues we face. It helps to diminish stress, it helps to visualise difficult situations and face them better, it helps to become more creative, it can help to diminish loneliness feelings (see previous posting and see reference list for more info).

It is less known that relaxation techniques also help build resilience: it means they help us to get tougher, more able to cope with difficult moments in life. It takes a lot of courage to expose ourselves voluntarily to things that make us anxious. But it is worth it, it really works. You can use it with courage, and, if you are much stressed, use it as a method enabling you to focus better on the most important things. It doesn't mean that you become more passive or slower. It is your choice after all, so relaxation will not turn you into something you don't want to become.

Many people fear that relaxation will just slow them down. It's a cliché. Relaxation will slow down your metabolism, indeed, because that's the point. But at the mental level, it should be used to energize you: focus, cope with tough realities, deal with fears. And dealing better with anger and impatience too, ahah! Easier said than done, isn't it? ;-)

Have a good Sunday!!

The reference from Kubany: Healing the trauma of domestic violence, and workbook for women. Kubany, McCaig, Laconsay. 2004. It contains lots of scales and exercises for people who have been abused in the past, from a partner but also useful for people who have been abused as a child. 

There is a version for patients and a book for therapists. It is meant to heal traumas after they happened (if you are still in such a situation, such a book is not useful in the first place. You should rather  go to my other posting and follow the last two links to see websites with lists of centers to get help).

On relaxation, I like the ' relaxation and stress reduction workbook' from Davis, Eshelman & McKay', it's very simple to read and contains tons of useful exercises to reduce stress, from relaxation to nutrition and exercise.  

Thanks to the people who replied to the 4-questions survey! The survey is still open and it's really quick, no need to register or anything. Would be nice to read from you what you think about the blog! 

Healing places

When I arrived in the Netherlands after one year living in a hilly and very crowded part of Paris, I was surprised by the immensity of the sky. It felt as if I had never watched the sky before! It felt so wide, huge, open, beautiful, deep and a bit mysterious too. Van Gogh and Vermeer would certainly not have painted outdoor landscapes covering two third of their frames with colorful cloudy skies, have they been raised between six-floor buildings in Paris! For me, it felt strange. Nice, yes, but something fundamental was missing.  

We have a physical reaction to new landscapes and new places. People who have lived surrounded by mountains have told me how they miss their presence when they move to a new place. In a comment made on an earlier posting on this blog, a reader mentioned the story of a man from overcrowded Calcutta who experienced a horrible sensation when arriving in an isolated barn located miles away from any other human building.

Coming to a new place generates mild feelings of oddity in the best case, some anxiety for many of us, and for some people panic attacks!

They are many reasons why expats are stressed when arriving abroad: they face major life changes plus many daily burdens. But novelty is another big factor that aggravates levels of stress and anxiety. In the long-term, stress associated with new places affect the immune system. Peaceful places and nature help healing, like familiar places and familiar friends do! This has been demonstrated in a number of scientific studies. In a study often quoted, patients recovering in a hospital who lie down in rooms facing gardens and trees recover slightly more quickly than those who are in rooms with a window facing a building.

Neuroscience helps to understand why this happens. Faced with new geographic environment, new people, new roads, new landscape, new building shapes, new temperatures, and new noises, our body reacts with fear. The emotion of fear takes its roots in the body reaction. The perception of something new and unknown is a potential danger and raises your attention levels. This detection of something new activates a cascade of stress reactions (hormones, body reactions like heart beats, cortisol levels rising). In the long term, chronic stress affects the ability of our immune system to cope with infections and can be linked to the set in of depression and burn outs. Stress is a reaction where body and mind chemistry work in very close interaction.

Arriving in a new place then sends alerting signals to brain centers specialized in reacting to fearful stimuli (in particular the amygdala) which are located in the deepest parts of our brains. The vital parts of our brains are all located in the deeper and lower levels. They are doing the underground job that never or seldom comes to our consciousness: regulating your body temperature, controlling your breath movements, regulating your heart, enabling you to fall asleep when it is needed. They keep us alive but make no big fuss about it, they are pretty discrete fellows!  

In fact, our brains are wonderful machines to detect and analyze what happens in our surroundings, outside of our body: what we see, hear, taste, touch or smell. But they are not hardwired to provide us with detailed report of the activities of our internal organs. This is a shame because that is where raw emotions, like fear, take their roots. And this is exactly why it is very difficult to be aware of many of our own emotions, to 'understand' them. All what comes to consciousness is a feeling of strangeness and discomfort, in some cases we feel our heart beating more quickly and we breath a lot more. But we don't really feel much and certainly not clearly. Our body nevertheless is extremely busy coping with this reaction and to a larger extent than what we are aware of.

Fortunately, we soon get used to the surroundings and start to feel comfortable. This happens quite naturally. This will lower progressively our arousal and stress level. We have seen in a previous posting that in Japanese language, there is a word describing this feeling and this situation associated with it: Ibasho. Ibasho describes a place and the feelings associated to being in this place: it evokes the "person's feelings of comfort and security in the places that he or she normally goes" (Bamba & Haight, 2006). It refers therefore to a feeling associated to a place. It is also about the social contacts you have there. It is all about the sense of security, peace, satisfaction, acceptance, belonging and cosiness. Zen gardens have been designed to provide us with a sense of harmony and comfort.  

When arriving in a new place, nothing feels peaceful. There is no sense of home yet. Not in your living room, kitchen or bedroom. Not in the neighbourhood. Not at the office. The pub at the corner of the street is full of strangers who will stare at us or royally ignore us when we enter. Nothing provides this feeling of ibasho. We will have to build it or to find it: Find a place where we'll meet friends, or bring with us things that make us feel comfortable at home, find our Zen garden, a place where there is no stress, no worries, and perhaps no other human beings or perhaps just nice people we trust and have fun with. It's about the place, it is about the people in the place, it is about the feeling of peace that we experience there. It might take some time to find it.

The good news is, the more we have been exposed to new places and new people and enjoyed it, the better our skills to cope with the anxiety associated to it and the better we get at finding new friends and new places where we feel comfortable. And the other good news is: there is not only one place on earth that feels like home. Experts expats will tell you like they told me, home in where you choose it to be.

References:

J. LeDoux, 1998, The Emotional Brain, the Mysterious Underpinning of Emotional Life.

Esther Sternberg, 2009, Healing Spaces, the Science of Place and Well-being.   

Sunday

Started the day with some meditation, it felt good! The last days had been very tense, I did too much and felt to tense to even sit and try to meditate!... I'll have to slow down. I should know better!
But my book proposal is ready.. almost... I'll need to read it again to have a last check. Then will send it with my first 2 chapters to my preferred publisher... tonight... or tomorrow! I will see how the day goes :-)
Enjoy your Sunday too!

Very short survey: tell me what you think about this blog, thanks! :-)

Dear readers,

Could you please complete this very short survey (4 questions) to give me your opinion about this blog:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/BRMTRYK

It will help me to improve its content or design, see if there are technical issues that I am not aware of, and discover what you would like to read more of!

Thanks!
Catherine

Domestic violence and psychological abuse in expat families

Happy Valentine's day!? Four days ago, an article in the New York times reminded us that it's not Valentine's day everyday for women in Afghanistan. The rare shelters (14) that have been built in recent year to rescue women victim of domestic violence are again at risk of disappearing…

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/11/world/asia/11shelter.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=afghan%20women%20shelters&st=cse

Violence against women in Afghanistan is almost of cultural phenomenon. We were reminded of the banality of domestic violence in Afghanistan when watching the results of the context for the best picture 2011 for the National Geographic: One of the winner is the picture of the still beautiful and horribly mutilated 18 year-old Bibi Aisha whose nose and ears were cut by her husband.  

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/02/pictures/110211-world-press-photo-best-pictures-contest-2011/#/world-press-photo-best-pictures-contest-2011-jodie-bieber-portrait-afghanistan-woman_32144_600x450.jpg

Unfortunately domestic violence is not isolated to some particularly poor regions of the globe. The statistics are in fact terrible. In her article (link below), an author mentions that "at least one out of every three women has been beaten, coerced into sex, or otherwise abused in her lifetime, according to a study based on 50 surveys from around the world (Amnesty International, 2008)." From other sources, in the US, 25% of women have been physically or sexually assaulted by a partner (Tjaden & Thoennes, 2000). Two women are killed each week by a current or former violent partner in the Western world.

Immigrant women and expat are much more exposed to domestic violence than women who live in their familiar environment. They are much more isolated socially. They are often emotionally and financially dependent of their partners which makes it very difficult for them to escape. Typically, the abusers progressively isolate their victims and undermine their self-confidence, for example they undermine their efforts to work or find a job, harassing them psychologically first and then physically to prevent them from going to work or going to parties.

The language barrier, the distance from friends or family to whom to talk, the difficulties to understand where to seek help, the opacity of the foreign legal systems and assistance systems (where to find shelters and financial assistance, what happens after the divorce, will she have child custody...) put women in a very vulnerable position. Generally there is a sense of powerlessness (helplessness) that accompanies the expat experience (a stress we talked about in previous postings) that makes it even more difficult for women to escape from a psychologically or physically abusive relationship than if she had stayed home and was not lost in a very unfamiliar environment.  

I found out this article that describes very clearly the issues faced by expat women facing domestic violence:  

http://www.escapefromamerica.com/2010/10/help-for-victims-of-domestic-violence-in-expat-communities/

If you are in this situation or if you suspect one of your friends to be in this situation, some international information centers can help you to find shelter or provide advice on the best and safest ways out.  See the link below: it provides at the end a list of websites and telephone dedicated to providing assistance to physically and psychologically abused women.

http://www.expatwomen.com/expat_confessions/domestic_violence_abroad.php

This article offers also very useful advises to take the first steps and prepare an escape plan while ensuring the maximum safety for the abused person. This is absolutely essential to be very careful in this process.

Being stuck in a psychologically or physically abusive relationships feels for the victim as if there was absolutely no escape. The situation has build up progressively and even the strongest women can end up feeling very helpless and experience emotional numbness after months or years of abuse. It is very difficult to get out of such a place. But many women did it. I can just hope, if you are in this situation or if a friend of yours is facing this, that you will soon find resources to help you get out and find a safe place and start to heal and find the happiness you deserce as much as any of us. 

References: There are no statistics or studies addressing the issue of domestic violence in expat communities specifically. The best resources are mentioned in the two links above. You can read a successfull psychological program for women suffering from post-traumatic disorders asssociated with domestic violence (psychologically or physically): the book of Edward Kubany is of great help "healing the trauma of domestic violence, a workbook for women." and is meant for women who have found a safe place and are ready to start their psychological recovery.

New Twitter account & News

I have created a Twitter account yesterday, so if you want to follow me, just click!
http://twitter.com/#!/Expatscience

I will up-date with the news regarding all my activities.

I've been very busy in the last days! Setting up a website (Thanks Andy!!), working on my own personal development plan (thanks Manuela!!), and running a first series of workshops in an international school  (thanks Nel!!). The feedback we received from workshop participants was absolutely encouraging! There is a big need for expats or international people to share their experiences and understand better why it's difficult to settle abroad in spite of the excitement! We offered to international mothers (7 participants, 7 nationalities!) a 6 h program (2 mornings) to learn to better cope with acculturation stress, cultural learning including communication, and discussed about their main issues and how some techniques can help to deal with painful feelings such as anger, depression, sense of isolation, etc.

I also wrote a paper that will be soon be published on expatarrival.com. When I know more, I will let you know via Twitter! :-)

And finally, great news: I got the first three chapters of my book edited by a native English speaker, so I will made some corrections and send it to publishers & agents in a few days. If any of you have some agent or publishers that you can recommand to me, you are most welcome! I do not have any strong link to the publishing business so far, so any info there will help. I am going to select them from the 'Writers and artists yearbook 2011'. So if you know a better solution, do not hesitate to twitt me or send me an email.

Next posting soon, stay tuned!

New! Facebook group Expat Science

Dear Readers,

Thanks a lot for your interest! So far the blog have reached people in 18 countries!

I've created a facebook group which should make it easier to post your comments & be informed about other activities. Click on the link below and if it doesn't work, make a search on 'expat science' facebook group. It's open to all, you don't need to be a member to read it.

http://www.facebook.com/#!/home.php?sk=group_184540428245878&ap=1

I heard from some people that it's difficult to post comments sometimes on this page. I am very sorry for the inconvience, and hope this facebook group will be an easier way to share your thoughts.

Looking forward seeing you on facebook soon & to read you!
Catherine

Itchy feet

There would be 30% of inhabitants on the Gold Coast of Australia who have been contemplating to migrate (data from 1998) and there would be up to 50% of UK residents also contemplating migration, according to BBC (data 2004). In most cases, they will stay home - however you can tell from such data that a lot of us have 'itchy feet': sedentary people wonder if they should leave or not, and for migrants this question comes back regularly.

There is very little in the scientific literature regarding what happens to migrants before their first departure! It would be important to know more, because this could enable us to predict if their migration will be successful, if they will live happily abroad or if it will be an unbearable strain on them, on their family, their spouse, their children, their health, their career, their well-being and their integration in the new culture and new environment.

A recent publication by Tabor & Milfont (2010) proposes to explore this issue. The authors use a theoretical model of change from another research field: how people decide to go out of maladaptative behaviors. They analysed on-line public forums in which UK citizens consider moving to New Zeeland and discuss openly about issues, inform and support each other. This type of method is new and also quite limited: The authors can just observe spontaneous comments and the participants characteristics are totally unknown. I am not totally convinced that it's a relevant method to use actually. But you could argue that the records correspond to very spontaneous conversations that do not suffer from the issues of trying to give politically correct answers. So why not trying indeed.

The stages of migration would be: Precontemplation (not thinking yet about moving), contemplation (thinking about moving but without having yet taken the decision, getting information), preparation, action (actual departure from the home country), arrival in the new country and acculturation.

What happens before the departure then? A lot of research has shown already that migrants with certain personality traits adapt better than others _ this type of research is usually done after arrival though. The observation of the forum discussions show that migrants who give advise to people contemplating departure have experienced this already: It's important to have a strong desire to discover, be driven by seeking novelty, be adventurous, seeking new sensations, and be curious, i.e. intellectually open. If you have this type of personality, your desire to go away is probably quite strong. This 'push' force will help you cope better with the stress after arrival and will be stronger than fears and worries.

Openness to change and sensation seeking are personality traits and there is not much you can do to change it, you have it or not (see the article 'big five personality traits' on wikipedia if you're curious… but if you're already an international fellow, you probably are!).

I didn't learn much from the paper in terms of new findings, and found their data quite limited. But I really enjoyed the authors' attempt to construct a theoretical framework to explore at least various moments in the migration process and use it to explore systematically each moment and it's own challenges and influencing factors.

Source: AS Tabor & TL Milfont. 2010. Migration change model: exploring the process of migration on a psychological level. International Journal of Intercultural Relations. The authors work at the Center for Applied cross-cultural research, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.

Loneliness

Another long lonely week-end starting here. I wrote a paper about loneliness for the website Iamexpat.nl. It will be published there in a few days. I tried my best to find in the literature what works to avoid the pain of the loneliness feeling. Do you also experience this feeling of oppression in the chest, and falling down as if there was no grond anymore? I used to feel that way very often. Sometimes it comes back. Like yesterday night.

But, ok, shake it up Catherine, there are some things we can do to avoid to be overwhelmed by this pain. I tried to summarize them in this short article. Challenging. I hope you find it useful.

This week-end I'll do some mediation and meet some friends (was invited to two parties!), have a coffee with a former colleague, and go to the market to buy some good stuff... I know the painful feeling will go away slowly... and what about you? Don't stay alone too often. It kills.  

Ooops, I forgot to say in the paper: Don't stay on the internet for too long :-)

Here is my article for Iamexpat.nl :

--------------------------------- 

Did you notice how, when you are unhappy, seeing others being cheerful gives you the impression that they are simply… fake? The lonelier we feel, the more irritable we get, and the less we enjoy good company. If loneliness was only painful it would be hard enough. But research indicates that it also impairs our ability to actually make friends. It is a vicious circle! Loneliness is one of the top issues faced by expats according to surveys.

Here you are. You are living in a new flat, in a foreign country, you did not find a job, you have still have billions of things to get done to feel settled in, you are starting to feel worthless and spiraling down… If only you had your good old friends to talk to right here and right now. All this time spent alone is getting on your nerves, and you're starting to suffer from loneliness. What comes next? 

Cacioppo is a researcher at the University of Chicago specialist of loneliness and social isolation. He has studied extensively its consequences on health and behaviors. Chronically lonely people (those who report feeling lonely more than two days a week) are more susceptible to viruses and to cardio-vascular diseases. In 2007, Cacioppo and colleagues demonstrated that lonely people have an increased activity of genes encoding molecules that promote inflammation and a decreased activity of genes encoding molecules that slow down inflammation. In other words, they demonstrated that chronic loneliness has a direct impact on the immune system. Lonely people also recover less easily: last year, a study showed that although lonely people sleep as much as others, they feel more fatigue during the day.

Cacciopo also observed the consequences of loneliness on people's behaviors. Lonely people judge their interactions with others less satisfying than non lonely people. In a scanner, their brains show less activation of the reward centers when they see smiling faces! They also produce worse impression to the people they meet _which is easy to imagine. It creates a vicious circle and it's difficult to get out of it!

Loneliness never goes away from our lives, but it can be made less common, less painful and less overwhelming. One way is to find ways to meet new people. It's a real challenge in a new country. The best is to try to join a group, like a sport lesson, a reading club, or volunteer for school. It's harder than back home: people are different, they come from other countries, other regions, or even simply from other social classes, and it makes the encounter more worrisome at first. It will take more courage, openness and tolerance than back home. But that's what makes the whole experience so worth it!

Joining a club will not fill in the days, but it will enable you to meet, not just one, but a group of new people. It will help you to develop a sense of belonging, feeling useful again, feelings appreciated by others for your contributions, and help to avoid seeing your self-esteem fading when you feel like the entire world seems to ignore your very existence!

Another remedy is to change your representations, by bringing back positive emotions when thinking about others and about ourselves. In fact, in sedentary people, loneliness is only moderately related to the number of acquaintances and friends: To a large extend, feeling lonely depends on mental representations and expectations. Cognitive therapy has proven benefits (see references below). Relaxation associated with visualization or meditation have generated a lot of encouraging results in the last decade. Relaxation relieves stress by decreasing heart rate and muscles tensions. It has a positive impact on the immune system. Meditation will help developing mindfulness and compassion by reducing fears that often prevents us from meeting new people. Studies suggest that 10 to 20 minutes mediation a day for a few weeks is already enough to see many positive effects.

References.

All you ever wanted to know about loneliness is in Cacioppo's 2008 book: Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection.

A number of stress reduction techniques (including cognitive therapy) are very helpful to manage loneliness feelings or prevent them. A good self-help book is: Stress reduction workbook, M. Davis & E. R. Eshelman, M. McKay.

A new feeling to add to our international repertoire: Do you feel ibasho today?

My old professor of psychology used to tell us about the Inuit people who would have ten words to describe snow. I've never been invited to a high tea by an Inuit family so I didn't have a chance to check if he was right. His point was: there are some concepts that we are lacking because every language invents his own concepts - and this limits and shapes our ways of thinking. Something that has no name just can't be discussed, analysed, compared, and so scientists will tend to ignore it. In the best case, they discover it by chance and will go back to Latin or classic Greek to name it.

A team of researchers from Clemson University decided to explore and test the Japanese concept of Ibasho. This concept doesn't exist in English. The feeling it describes has been extensively discussed and studied in Japanese, but hardly ever discussed in the international (understand: English) scientific literature. What a pity! When I read their paper, I was immediately hooked by this concept. It sounded like a very important concept that could describe some of the stressful consequences of living abroad. As a disclaimer I must admit I don’t speak Japanese and I have never been to Japan.

According to the paper, Ibasho describes a place and the feelings associated to being in this place: it evokes the "person's feelings of comfort and security in the places that he or she normally goes". They say that more than 100 books contain this word in their title in Japan! Ibasho refers to a feeling associated to a place, but it's also about the social contacts you have there, about the sense of "security, peace, satisfaction, acceptance, belonging and coziness" (Bamba & Haight, 2006).  

It's a really useful concept to use for expats, internationals, and travellers of all species. When arriving in a new place, nothing feels peaceful. There is no sense of home yet. Not in our living room, kitchen or bedroom. Not in the neighbourhood. Not at the office. The pub at the corner of the street is full of strangers who will stare at us or royally ignore us when we come in. Nothing provides this feeling of ibasho. And we will have to soon build our ibasho: Find a place where we'll meet friends, feel comfortable, feel at home, feel a sense of belonging to the community. A place where there is no stress, no worries, just nice people we trust and have fun with. This will take a lot of time. Can this ever be reached when security is a big issue and you have to live surrounded by high walls and protected by armed guards? Is this possible for international employees working for the poorest? Some of them described to me their guilt when coming back home in a comfortable place and leaving behind those who won't eat for another 24h.

The research doesn't explain how to create this place and this feeling of well-being associated to it. But it underlines that this feeling is very important for the expats to buffer stress and feel satisfied with their life.

I wonder how many concepts like this one, describing complex feelings, have yet to be discovered and imported from other cultures. The world has about 6800 languages.

How many other feelings don't have a translation in English? Send me other examples if you think about any J

References. H.A. Herleman, T.W. Britt, & P.Y. Hashima. 2008. Ibasho and the adjustement, satisfaction, and wel-being of expatriate spouses. International journal of intercultural relations, 32, 282-299.

Free but Lonely Europe

According to the last Expat Explorer survey commissioned by the international bank HSBC, the top emotional concerns for expats moving in a new country are to re-establish a social life (41%), and feeling lonely and missing friends and family (34%). Only next come worries about career prospects, language barriers, relocation issues, healthcare, adapting to culture, and many other. Women suffer from those issues slightly more than men:  48% of women and 37% of men have concerns about re-establishing their social life in a new country. But this gender difference is not very large. There is something much more intriguing.

Surprising and massive differences are observed depending on the country where you live. It is surprising because it means that to a large extent this issue doesn't only depends on us. We all feel lonely when moving abroad and leaving family and friends behind, but some places make it even worse!

The percentages of people feeling lonely, without friends and missing their family are particularly high for expats living in many of the European countries, compared to other regions of the globe. The worst scores on the question " do you find it easy to make friends" are sadly won by Belgium, Switzerland, UK, Germany, and the NL (the lowest, with 38%)

There could be several reasons for that. There are language barriers in many European countries where locals don't see English as an international language and assume that everybody who crosses the border should learn the local language. But it's not the case everywhere: in the Netherlands, it's easy to live when you only master the English language, because most Dutch people speak English really well and will enjoy talking to you in a foreign language.

So is there another explanation? Many European countries have more individualistic values than middle East or Asian countries. According to the same survey, expats find it easier to make friends in Bahrain (80%!), Thailand (70%), South Africa, and many Asia countries (overall 80% to 60%), compared to most countries in Europe! These cultures are notoriously collectivist, as opposed to Western societies where independance, rather than interdependance, is valued. I've been a few times in India for my work, and indeed, I was never left alone for a lunch or a diner: my guests took turn to accompany me and my colleagues eventhough they lived very far away from the office. If we were left alone sometimes, it was because we insisted that we were ok to be left alone. We actually felt embarrassed to take private time from them! That's unlikely to happen in Western cultures where locals don't want to 'bother you' and assume that you will actually appreciate being left alone for diner,. They might invite you. Once. Or they may not even invite you at all. It happened to me a few times to my surprise when I visited US academics, also for work. Why? Perhaps it's about valuing freedom versus friendship? The expats in Europe and perhaps the entire Western world would trade friendship for freedom without knowing?

But that's more complicated than that because the survey doens't show bad scores for other Western nations. Why don't we see the same numbers then for the US, Canada and Australia which are also Western cultures with high individualism? Perhaps immigration in Europe is a marginal phenomenon and there is not a strong culture (or respect?) for immigration, and therefore locals lack an awareness of the social isolation of the migrant? In the US, Canada or Australia,  immigration is part of the national history, and perhaps locals are more used to welcome foreigners and provide them with more assistance, including time and friendship? 

But to tell the truth, I don't really know. I don't think anybody has a serious set of data that replicate or explain those differences. 

And actually, when I think about it, I am not even totally sure what we can yet generalize from this survey. The authors indicate that similar results were found in previous years, so it suggests that the results seem consistent, and not just obtained by chance. But we really lack facts and statistics about expats and internationals! So there is probably something true about those results (where there is smoke there certainly is a fire) but scientists still have a lot of work to do to make sense out of those data!  

References: The HSBC surveys are on line. Thanks to the Blijberg International school in the Netherlands for sending me the link!

On individualisms and collectivism: G. Hofstede & G.J. Hofstede, Culture and organizations. A very readable book presenting Hofstede's massive amount of data on cross-cultural differences in organizaitons.   

Dear Diary, can you hold this for me?

Great! I’ve just read a paper in the Science magazine last Friday that illustrates very nicely my point: managing our emotions and thoughts (the ‘control’ I was talking about in my last post) can really improve our emotional well-being. It is so simple that I wonder everyday why psychology is not taught in primary schools! 

We are in Chicago, and a team of researchers observes 9^th grade students just before and after passing important exams. As you can expect, many are very anxious before passing their exams. Cold sweat, stomach clutch, and “OMG I’ll screw it up again I can feel it”.  For the researchers, it’s a great example of anxiety, and provides a large number of people in the very same situation the same day: ideal opportunity to study anxiety in well controlled conditions! And it's not only about students: What they will find will be of relevance for other disorders, anxiety disorders but also depression.

So how to lower anxiety and worries? They ask students to write down their worries about the coming exam, and this is done just a few minutes before the exam starts. Nothing more. These students are compared to other students who are given another writing task without emotional implications, and another set of students who aren't given any specific task at all.

The results are very clear and replicated in several experiments. Students who wrote their worries before the exam ended up less anxious and performed better (or less worse) than the other groups. This worked especially well for students who were particularly anxious. The worse the issue, the better the remedie worked.  

It certainly doesn't mean that we should on purpose think about our worries: when we evoke our worries on purpose, we don't feel better at all and we start to ruminate. This is what happens during depression for example. But putting our specific concerns regarding a situation is very different. It helps to realize for ourselves that these negative thoughts are not so big, not so terrifying, and that they may sometimes be even irrational. 

When moving in a new place, there are many good reasons to feel anxious: new place, new people, and perhaps worries about our safety, our future, our children, our marriage, our family back home, our finances, our visas, our taxes, our next move…!

Writing down systematically our fears and worries, in a diary for example, will help. It is not equivalent to procrastination; some other studies even suggest that it decrease the amount of rumination in depressed people. It help to get control over our confusions and diffuse fears.

Several mechanisms can explain this: it might be that once the worries are on paper, they aren't permanently turning in our memory (like when you make a shopping list on paper, you don't have to think about it anymore and can focus your attention on something else). It's also one way to consider our feelings with more distance, more critically, from a safer place. By the way, learning to observe our own thoughts from a distance (an emotional distance) is also something trained during relaxation or mediation. So there are other ways to manage your feelings in a gentle way… but we'll leave this topic for later, it's getting late J!

Good night!

References: Science 14 January 2011: Vol. 331 no. 6014 pp. 211-213

When controlers lost control

One important factor that increases drastically your stress level is the lack of control. Moving abroad can too easily lead to feeling helpless and having few resources to changing our situation.

For example, many spouses follow their husband or wife for a positive career move, but start to feel that they have little control over their live suddenly. They may not have the legal permission to work in the country; they may not be able to retrieve a secure job as they had back home; they may realise their diplomas won't help to find a job there in particular when their jobs involved local regulations: a lawyer can be highly skilled in her country but feel 'worthless' in the new place. They may become financially dependent for the first time in their relationship and feeling diminished and weakened by the situation. They may have a sense they are loosing their identity and feel helpless about it.   

Evidence of the terrible effects of helplessness and loss of self-confidence on physical and mental health was provided in a large scale study involving US air traffic controllers. Air traffic controllers have very difficult jobs because they have to pay attention to complex information for hours, and inattention and mistakes can cost lives.

In the context of a controversy opposing employers and unions, a researcher named Bob Rose was asked to explore if the working conditions of those workers could explain some high rates of health issues. With his colleagues, he observed their psychological and physical conditions at the time of the controversy and was able to find them and test them again 20 years later! In their 30s, some of them were developing blood pressure at an early age, more than in the average population. At age 50, a number of them had developed heart disease, cancer, alcoholism, or depression, again more than in the average population. A powerful finding was that the psychological factors measured when they were 30 year old had a big impact on developing diseases at 50, and more than the other body health indicator (more then for example blood pressure). In fact, the sense of alienation and of abandonment that they felt at 30 was closely related to depression and anxiety 20 years later.

This study, and others that corroborate this type of conclusion, illustrate how the lack of 'feeling in control' play a very important role in influencing the level at which people start to experience stress: when not feeling in control, the same situation feels much more stressful than the same situation when people are experienced and prepared.

In order to feel better, you need to feel (and be!) in control. There is at least one thing you can control: the way you think. It's not about lying to yourself: actually, by changing some ways of thinking, you actually put yourself in a more optimistic mode and you will have much more positive impact on your environment! Overcoming our feeling of being stuck in life is a first step in helping to actually change and get a life which is much more exciting and fun.

The lack of control over situations experienced by expats and migrants can be quite high. In most situations, we are extremely disadvantaged compared to locals, and even with lots of efforts local knowledge is still very difficult to get in full: The difficulty to master the language, accompanied by the frustration that we can't express ourselves precisely and be fully understood; the lack of understanding of some implicit rules in social encounters or at work; the lack of knowledge of institutions, administrations, education system, job market, health system… Those 'holes' in our knowledge can lead to a feeling of helplessness.

Getting your life back. Building a strong identity which will not depend upon the place you are in or the job you have at some point. I'll discuss that in the next postings.

Artic Terns. So beautiful! They are sea birds from the Swallows family. The Arctic tern is the animal that makes the longest migrations ever recorded on Earth by far: 80,000 km per year and 2 summers a year! This is equal to traveling to the moon 3 times in one life time. When I see this picture, I dream about flying over oceans, discoveries, joining north and south, freedom and feeling light. It makes me think that our migrant lives are fragile, special and precious. It's a difficult journey, sometimes, and a gift, always.

Zebras don't get ulcers.. till the day they move!

Overall, short-term stresses are quite positive for mental health: stressing ourselves with challenging goals makes life more interesting. It's a driver for our motivation to learn or do new things.

The problem arises with chronic stress, after weeks and months of emotional or physical strains! In the 30s, Hans Selye discovered that a surprising number of 'stressors' can make animals very sick. He observed that rats in his laboratory were developing symptoms where exposed to some conditions, for example injections, or staying in crowded cages.They lost weight, they became more susceptible to infections, and their autopsy showed a high proportion of stomach ulcers. He was the first scientist to make the hypothesis that many and various tensions against the organism weaken its internal balance. Tensions start to produce excessive amount of adrenal hormones which produces a number of unwelcome events in the entire body. It particularly targets the immune system, but 80 years ago, the fluids composing the immune system were not yet discovered!   

Nowadays, there is still a lot to be discovered on the relationship between stress and immune functions, but we are starting to know a bit more. When the stress is intense and repetitive, there is then a constant rush of cortisol in the blood, getting to the brain as well. And the problem is that one of the cortisol's jobs is to shut down immune response, and over time the immune system becomes desensitized to cortisol. After weeks or months of an intense stress regimen, the body and mind may reach exhaustion.

If this happens to you, you become less able to defend yourself against a common cold or flu, but more critically you can develop serious diseases, in particular heart diseases. Studies have shown that stress reduction techniques (through social support) can actually help the immune system of patients infected by HIV virus (the virus responsible for the AIDS disease in the long-term) and also augment life duration in patient suffering from cancer. It doesn't mean that stress reduction cures those diseases, but reducing stressors influence the ability of the body to cope better when it's under 'attack' by various infections.

At the psychological level, chronic stress affects mental health, and in particular long-term intense stress periods can be followed by depression and burn-out. Burn-out is a psychological and physiological reaction when the body and brain can't adapt properly to the demand anymore: the body doesn't seem to be able to respond to small stresses any longer. The cortisol is always very high. Burn-out occurs when stress has been intense, for example it's often seen in very stressful jobs (nurses and teachers have high rates of burn-outs).

Some extreme examples of stress are seen in people suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome such as survivors, holocaust survivors, war survivors, people who have been raped or mugged. It also exists, though less intensively, in many other conditions. A work place can be stressful. The most powerful stressors are the loss of the loved one (especially the spouse), a divorce, and the loss of a job. Basically, chronic stress targets anybody who's experiencing changes or many difficult tasks to do at the same time and for a long time: working full-time while taking care of children or taking care of a parent with Alzheimer.

So moving to a new country is also of course an important source of chronic stress! It seems odd to compare the stress of moving to traumas like being a war veteran or loosing a spouse, because there doesn't seem to be a lot of distress and emotional turmoil to moving. But a move and especially a move to another country could lead to burn out, physical and mental exhaustion, diseases, because of the constant demand to adapt over many months. It's not initiated by a trauma, and we definitely made the decision to be there... but it's the result of a high number and accumulation over time of many daily 'small' and not-so-small stresses (dealing with issues in a foreign language, the unknowns, the fears of making wrong decisions, sometimes fears for our safety, loss of most of our familiar social contacts, loss of career opportunities…).

Our job is to help our bodies to avoid the chronicity of stress, the permanent state of being and feeling under constant pressure to get things done.

The respiratory system is connected to the cardio-vascular system: when you inhale, your heart accelerates slightly, and when you exhale it slows down slightly. It is also related to our ability to regulate emotions and to our immune system. This is why a basic stress reducing technique is deep breathing and relaxation!

But stress is also very easily generated by our own thoughts! As Robert Sapolsky explains in his fabulous book "zebras don't get ulcers", many of the stresses come from our worries and feelings and exacerbated by life style and things like our lack of physical activity, overwork, or social isolation. We evolved to deal with very short-term stresses like running or hiding from predators to avoid being the next course on their menu. Evolutionary, we are not prepared to being stuck in traffic jams on Monday mornings with our baby crying in the back seat and worrying we will be late at work. So another important aspect of stress reduction, besides working on relaxing the body, is to reduce the amount of negative thoughts that invade our mental life.

Body and mind, not one or the other. Both are strongly connected, and it's never as obvious as for scientists whose job is to study stress!

Sources:
Robert Sapolsky. Why zebras don't get ulcers. 2004 (everything you ever wanted to know about stress by a very entertaining author!)
Elizabeth Sternberg. The balance within, the sience of connecting health and emotions. 2001.
A good workbook to reduce stress: Martha Davis, E. Robbins Eshalman & M. McKay. The relaxation and stress reduction workbook. 2008.

Feeling depressed and stressed after arrival

Did you feel euphorical and ready for a great new adventure when you arrived in a new region or a new country to settle in? Most people don't. On average, around the first month after the entry in a new country, feelings are quite negative towards the entire experience. Many studies done in sojourners show that levels of depression are higher after the arrival than before (observations were done in international students and visiting scholars, for example Japanese arriving in New Zeeland, Chinese arriving in Canada, Singaporians arriving in New Zeeland) . Even 6 months after arrival. Things start to get better after about 4 months, 6 months or one year depending on people's expectations at start and their preparation, and depending on the differences between the culture of origin and the culture of arrival. A small portion of people, about 10% according to one study, seem to do better after the arrival, show great enthusiasm and happiness, but the overwhelming majority feels really low. In some studies, more than 50% of the sojourners interviewed in the first months after their arrival showed clinical symptoms of depression!

There are big problems, big life changes, the anxiety of the unknown, the daily hurdles that aren't easy to solve anymore... and a terrible lack of resource: poor if any language skills, little prior information and few ideas on where to find information (from getting a visa to finding a good shampoo!). And most of the times no family and no friends, sometimes no partner, to share the daily frustrations and get some comfort when it's time to melt down. So the adaptation challenge is massive, and the stress very high! After a few months of stress, mental health and physical health are at high risk.

[source: Ward et al. The Psychology of culture shock. 2001 gives an overview of the studies run in 'sojourners': international students, visiting scholars, and expats]

Day 1: Stressed or excited?

It's day 1 for this blog and the first thing that comes to my mind is: how do I feel right now at the beginning of a new adventure? Very excited! Very nerveous too! Where am I heading with this blog? What will happen next? I didn't think too much about the details yet. Oops!
Did you experience this excitement and suddenly also lots of unexpected questions and surprises the last time you started a new project? Remember the time you arrived in a new country to get settled? Isn't it confusing? What does the science tells us about this transition? That's what I'm trying to figure out. I'm looking for answers in science books and in the real life as well. How does it feel for me? How does it feel for you? What would you like science to explain to you when it comes to better understanding the challenges we're facing in our lives as expats or migrants?