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.