Favourite Two Readings

HOW TO HANDLE A MOVE
Tips for navigating the stress of relocating and feeling at home in a new place.

Spayde, J. (2014). How to handle a move: tips for navigating the stress of relocation and feeling at home in a new place. Retrieved July 8th, 2016, from https://experiencelife.com/article/how-to-handle-a-move/


Relocating to a new city or town is stressful for anybody, even if the move represents a positive change. Largely this is because uprooting yourself from familiar places and people is never easy, and the challenges of adjusting to a new locale are many. How will you find your way around? How will you make friends? Will you lose all the friends you made in your former home? Does anyone sell your favorite mustard? On top of that, you may have second thoughts — did I really make the right decision? What if I’m miserable here?

Elizabeth Stirling, PhD, a Santa Fe, N.M.–based psychologist and psychotherapist who specializes in helping people navigate major life changes, offers some simple advice for overcoming moving anxiety and easing into a new place.

BARRIERS TO OVERCOME

• Fear of the unknown. Stirling points out that it’s natural to worry about the unforeseeable — what this new place will be like as a home, how you’ll respond to it, and so on. Any major change brings unpredictability, which is unsettling.
• Unfamiliarity with the process. “One big determinant of how stressed a move will make you is how often you’ve moved before,” Stirling says. If you’ve never made the transition or your last move was in childhood, you’re bound to be more concerned about the process than a veteran relocator.
• Concerns about losing old friends and making new ones. Parting with familiar people and setting yourself up in a new place usually brings loneliness — and the worry that old friends will disappear from your life entirely. Meanwhile, the prospect of making new friends can be daunting.
• The sheer labor. There’s no way around it — moving takes a lot of work, and you may feel overwhelmed by the myriad details and decisions, from arranging for the moving van to setting up water and electricity in the new place. Then there’s discovering the best grocery stores, restaurants, and possible schools near your new home.
• Regret. In any major life change, even the most positive, there will be things that you’ll miss about your old life. Some regret is inevitable, Stirling believes, but having second thoughts doesn’t necessarily mean the move was a mistake.

STRATEGIES FOR SUCCESS

• Research the new place. Before you leave your familiar surroundings, learn about your new home through books, maps, online sites, and people who know the area, Stirling suggests. If you don’t have time to do much research before you move, do it when you get there. Pretend you’re a tourist and you don’t want to miss anything.
• Think positive. “One of the greatest rewards of moving is the fact that it represents new beginnings and new excitement — a fresh landscape, new people to meet, perhaps a new and better job,” Stirling says. “If you keep that in mind, you can overcome a lot of negative feelings about the changes.”
• Create and use a support system. Don’t hesitate to get support from your good friends in the place you’re leaving. “If you’re feeling down about the move, before, during, or after, let them know it and ask for their support,” Stirling says. “Contact them after you’ve moved, and go back to visit them, too, if you can, for some TLC.”
• To make new friends, be a joiner. Mutual-interest clubs, classes, and religious gathering places offer easy and immediate opportunities to connect with new people. Stirling suggests finding groups to join as soon as it’s practical.
• Learn from your new contacts. “Finding resources, like good restaurants, doctors, massage therapists, and such, can take time,” says Stirling, “but you can do it best through the people you meet.”
• Involve the kids. If you’re moving with kids, ease their stress by including them in the process. “Show them maps, get them involved in finding information about the new place,” recommends Stirling. Try to minimize disruption to the school year.
• Don’t move alone. “It’s difficult to move on your own,” says Stirling. If you’re single, or the only adult, she suggests asking a relative or friend to help you with the process. He or she can assist with the endless details, like scheduling moving trucks and connecting new utilities, as well as provide emotional support.
• Start by establishing a comforting routine. “It’s good to set up some routines in the new place for a feeling of belonging in your new environment,” says Stirling. A regular walk in your new neighborhood can familiarize you with the streets and with your neighbors. A gym routine can help structure your day and serve as a way to make new friends.
• Seek out new experiences. Instead of lamenting what you’re leaving behind, Stirling says, search for opportunities that are uniquely available in your new locale. If you have to say goodbye to a thriving theater scene, try getting into the hiking or horseback riding that are now available in your new home.
• Reconnect with your partner. If you’re moving with a partner, know that it can strain relationships, says Stirling. Set aside time for connecting to help ease the pressure. “Make ‘us time,’ go on dates, and help each other discover the new place,” she says.
• Hang pictures on the wall. “If there’s one simple thing that can make your new place feel like home right away,” Stirling says, “it’s getting your favorite pictures on the wall, even before you finish unpacking.” Your favorite art and photography — icons of who you are and what you love — are the fastest way to make a new place feel like it’s your own.

STRESS AND THE CITY
How urban life affects the brain and what to do about it.

Ellard, C. (2012). Stress and the city: how urban life affects the brain and what to do about it. Retrieved July 8th, 2016, from https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/mind-wandering/201208/stress-and-the-city


More than half of the people of the world live in cities, and all signs suggest that the urbanization of human populations will continue to accelerate in coming decades. In some ways, this is a good thing. One can make the argument that increasing population densities in urban cores is easier on resources than the kind of sprawling car-centric city planning that we’ve seen in so many places, especially in North America. It’s this kind of argument that is behind legislated city planning by-laws that place financial penalties or outright bans on development in the suburban hinterland of a city, while providing incentives for development in the downtown core.

For some of us, the push for higher density is welcomed. We yearn to see central business districts teeming with pedestrian traffic both day and night. We relish the idea of having a greater variety of destinations for shopping, eating, and playing, and we like the idea of being freed from our cars and able to lead more of our lives on foot. Others are more attached to the low-density lifestyle with room to spare, a double car garage, wide boulevards and plenty of parking at the mall. There’s no denying the attractions of both types of lifestyle and it’s likely that each appeals to a particular demographic. For families with young children, for example, the merits of being able to load up the van with the encumbrances of family life as compared with shepherding young kids on foot through busy city streets is not hard to see.

Regardless of which side of the densification divide you might choose to plant your flag, however, there’s no denying that living the city life is taxing on both the body and the brain. It has been known for quite some time that rates of mental illness tend to be higher in busy urban centers than they are in the countryside. Many studies have shown that people born and raised in cities have higher rates of psychosis, anxiety disorders, and depression, and such effects may be independent of confounding factors such as family history and socio-economic status. There’s much that we don’t know about the causes of such associations between place and mental health, but it’s distinctly possible that the stressors of daily life in the city may contribute to the prevalence of such disorders.

One recent study that received an enormous amount of media attention showed that, compared to rural dwellers, city dwellers were much more reactive to social criticism and that these reactions were actually visible in brain activity revealed by functional imaging methods. In this study, participants were asked to carry out difficult math tasks while being criticized harshly for errors. City dwellers showed higher levels of activation in the amygdala—a brain area known to be involved in regulating emotional responses to events—than those from the countryside. In a way, this finding is counterintuitive because one would expect those people subjected to the daily travails of living in a high-density environment to be more immune to assaults on the brain systems responsible for coordinating their emotional lives. But it’s possible that the constant barrage of attention-demanding threats and alerts that occur during an average day in the city overwhelms such systems. After all, human beings have evolved to cope with much more pastoral settings than those of mid-town Manhattan.

So what’s a city dweller to do? There’s now good evidence that exposure to nature, even if brief, can help to immunize our brains against the effects of urban stress and can also improve cognitive function. So one kind of answer would be for city dwellers to be vigilant in the protection of urban oases of green-space whenever they see them under threat. We need our city parks not just for good aesthetics or as festive public spaces but also because they have been proven to heal our minds and bodies.

But other than making sure that we don’t miss a critical public meeting of city legislators about a proposal to change our green-spaces, what can we do to help us regulate the stresses of dodging traffic, negotiating crowded sidewalks, and dealing with honking car horns and the sirens of emergency vehicles on a 24/7 schedule?

An important first step might be to arm oneself with knowledge. When we try to regulate our stress levels by avoiding triggers, we most often think in terms of people or events. I don’t like getting my hair cut, for example, so I make sure that when I go to my hairdresser I make it part of a longer and more enjoyable adventure. I can feel my blood pressure go up when I have to deal with a particularly difficult person at work, so I prepare myself by using some relaxation techniques before I engage with them. But what if we tried thinking about environments of stress rather than the episodes and exchanges that irk us? You might find it takes some practice to become sensitive to the influence of where you are on how you feel. You might even want to take advantage of some of the interesting technological aids that are coming onto the market to help you self-monitor stress levels (I’ll talk more about these in a future post).

But if you take the time to understand what makes you tick and how it relates to where you are, you might find that you can alter your patterns of behavior in ways that lessen your everyday stresses. Are there new routes you can explore that take you into or near urban parks you wouldn’t normally encounter? If you can do this, are you able to monitor how the new route makes you feel? Can you gain refreshment simply by avoiding the well-worn habits of your usual day in the city by exploring a new neighborhood? Do you dare to confront the anonymity of life in the city by greeting a stranger on an elevator? Can you find a busy public space and sit for a few minutes people-watching? As with so much of life, the key to greater satisfaction and enjoyment often lies in taking the time for mindful observation of one’s own habits and movements.