How It Works: You Don’t Realize How Much Your Society Shapes Your Anxiety—Until You Leave It
Leaving the U.S. didn’t erase my anxiety — it helped me understand it better.
People think moving abroad erases anxiety. It doesn’t.
What it does—at least for me—is change how it feels. I no longer deal with the environmental anxiety that’s baked into daily life in the United States. This lets me better see what’s mine and what isn’t.
The anxiety I feel now comes from wanting to maintain and build on all we have accomplished during our first year in Spain—not from wondering if something bad will happen on the street, in traffic, or in a random interaction.
I still feel anxious here, but it’s a different species of anxiety. In the US, it lived differently in my body because of so many elements of the society around me: cars, noise, random hostility, the sense that something could break at any second. Here, my anxiety is narrower and more concentrated because it’s not being fed by my surroundings all day long.
These are the things I don’t see many people discuss when they talk about moving abroad. Online you usually get one of two extremes:
The US sucks and everything about my life is 110% better in—for example—Spain, or
Spain wasn’t what I thought—it’s too bureaucratic, too expensive, too whatever—and I’m moving again. This camp rarely owns the fact that their anxiety travelled with them. In the US, it was the society. In Spain, it becomes something else.
Let’s get a few things straight:
The US absolutely does suck in so many ways. But a higher quality of life somewhere else does not mean you’ll suddenly be anxiety-free. People with anxiety—or whatever psychological weight they’re carrying—don’t quit cold turkey when the plane lands.
And, Spain is everything it’s cracked up to be. But only if you see it for what it actually is: not a cure, not a healer—just a better, saner physical and social environment to be yourself and get a little better every day.
Spain has actually helped me do a better job of looking within.
And that’s exactly what I try to write about every week—living abroad without the filters, myths, or clichés. If you want more real talk, here’s a deal.
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And if you pay in euros—which helps me build the euro-denominated life I’m writing about—you get 30 days free. After your initial subscription processes, I’ll tack on a month. So a monthly plan gets a month free and a 12-month subscription becomes a 13-month subscription.
Just a way to say thank you and to bring more of you into the work I’m building here in Spain. To get the deal, follow this link or the button below.
Let’s break down what actually changed for me—and why the quiet, structural differences between Spain and the US matter far more than people want to admit.