Even while travelling is a fantastic experience that fills your mind with new memories, friends and experiences, there is no feeling like going back home. Even the most comfortable hotel beds are nothing compared to your own bed, the most amazing new people you met aren’t as important as your family and friends back home and there is nothing like finally eating your favourite food as it really should taste, instead of the foreign versions. The only problem is that if you were travelling for a while, settling back might be a little difficult for some people.
If you find yourself struggling with the adjustment you need when you get back home, you should follow these five useful tips:
1. First of all: spend an entire day in bed
Flying or travelling by car can be incredibly tiresome, and if you passed different time zones, the exhaustion is even worse. The first tip to properly adapt to being back home is to spend an entire day in bed, if you can.
If you don’t have to work or do anything of crucial importance, you should reschedule your family gatherings and reunions with friends who want to know everything about your trip and have an adjustment day. Regardless of what hour is in your city when you get back home, you should sleep immediately after getting back home and then stay in bed –sleeping, watching movies or just generally resting- until a new morning comes.
This way, you will reprogram your body to the current time zone, relax and rest from the trip you had and you will be in the best conditions possible to recover your old habits, which, by the way, probably are very different than when you were abroad.
2. Meet with your family and friends
Even when it is incredibly amazing to meet new people and make new friends from different cultures, one of the most frequent feelings people experiment when travelling for long periods of time is nostalgia for their old friends.
As soon as you are well rested and well adjusted to your regular time zone, you should meet with your friends and family. Telling them all your amazing stories from your trip is certainly one of the most enjoyable experiences related to travel, but just talking to them about anything can go a long way to help you readjust to your regular lifestyle.
3. Create a new routine
Being abroad for a long time certainly changes the way you do pretty much everything. Whether you travel for leisure or work, you create an entirely new routine when you are in a different country to adjust to the local lifestyle, and returning back home after a long time abroad can make you feel like you don’t fit anymore, if your friends are at work when you used to be resting or if they want to party when you used to be cleaning your house.
Obviously, the new routine will be different depending on what you do or how you live, but here is a useful example in a hypothetical situation:
If you were travelling for leisure and now have to get back to work, you should rearrange your entire schedule to revolve around work. You are going to need to start waking up earlier than you did while abroad, you probably won’t be able to have as much free tie as you used to and the working hours of several stores and public transportation are certainly going to be different.
As long as you plan a schedule for the first week, you will eventually get used to it again and you will stop mixing up times or activities, which is one of the most common problems that people who were abroad for a long time have.
4. Explore your hometown
If you find yourself missing the adventurous feeling you experienced while travelling that allowed you to discover new places and meet new people every day, you should definitely try to explore your hometown as if you were a tourist.
Not only you will get a similar feeling than when you were in a different country, but if you adopt a tourist mindset in your own city, you could be surprised by discovering that there are several new parts, stores or landscapes in it that you had never seen before. Besides, you could make new friends that actually live in the same city, which is always a great thing.
5. Remember that you can always travel again
The most frequent unpleasant feeling that people get when they return home after a long trip, is missing the road or the new places, and all the feelings and sensations that travelling brings to their lives.
The important thing to remember is that there is always another plane, there is always a new city and you can always travel again. Don’t feel like the adventure of your life has already finished and you are bound to stay home forever: perceive everything as a journey about to begin and you will feel more optimism than ever, and you will be ready for your next journey, no matter how long it takes for you to actually travel again.