13 October 2026 · By Thiago Pires

Burnout when you live abroad

Why being tired in another country is not the same tiredness

People who live abroad often describe their exhaustion with a certain embarrassment. “It’s not even the job,” they say. “The job is fine. I just can’t understand why I’m this tired.”

I think the tiredness makes sense. It is just coming from a place most of us don’t look.

At home, a large part of life runs without you. You know which queue to stand in, how to ask for a discount without sounding rude, what the silence of a colleague means, which shop closes early on Saturdays. You don’t decide these things. Your body already knows them. Merleau-Ponty called this the habit body: the layer of us that has absorbed a world so well that we no longer notice we are living in it. It works like the floor under your feet. You only think about the floor when it moves.

When you move to another country, the floor moves. Everything that used to be background becomes foreground. Buying medicine is a small project. A phone call to the bank needs preparation. A joke at lunch needs translation, first of the words, then of the tone, then of whether you are allowed to laugh. None of this is dramatic. That is exactly the problem. It is a thousand small decisions a day that nobody sees, including you, and they are all made from the same reserve of energy you were counting on for work.

So when burnout arrives, it often arrives disguised. It looks like irritability with your partner. Like not wanting to answer messages from home. Like scrolling until two in the morning because it’s the only hour when nobody needs anything from you. Like a strange flatness on weekends, when you finally have time for the city you chose and you don’t want to go out.

There is a second layer, quieter and heavier. Many people who move abroad carry a sentence with them: this was my choice, so I have no right to complain. Or: everyone at home thinks I’m living the dream. That sentence closes the door on the very conversation that could bring relief. The tiredness has nowhere to go, so it goes into the body. Sleep changes. The stomach changes. The shoulders rise and stay there.

I am not going to give you a list of tips, because I don’t think the answer is to optimise the foreigner’s life so it costs less. Some of it will always cost more, and that cost is part of what it means to live where you live now. What usually helps is something simpler and harder: to recognise the invisible work as work. To say, to yourself and to someone else, I am tired because I am doing much more than it looks like. That sentence does not fix anything. It changes where you stand. You stop looking at yourself as someone failing at a normal life and start seeing someone doing a very demanding thing, often alone.

A few questions worth sitting with, without rushing to answer:

• What did your life at home do for you automatically that you now do by hand?
• Where in your body do you feel the week by Thursday?
• Who, here, knows how tired you really are?
• What are you not allowed to say about this move, and who made that rule?

Sometimes burnout abroad is a sign you need to change something about work. Sometimes it is a sign you have been treating a whole life transition as if it were a change of address. Both deserve attention. Neither is a personal failure.

If you recognise yourself here and want to talk about it in your own language, I work online with people living away from home, in Portuguese, English, Spanish and French.