Culture shock is more insidious than it seems because many reactions are unconscious.

The subjective factor means that you cannot see yourself clearly. No matter how far off centre you are, it feels like you're balanced and the whole world is wrong. People feel they are being objective about their surroundings but can be in deep culture shock without realizing it, and deny it when others point out their behaviour.

The hindsight factor means that you will probably only fully realize the extent of your culture shock after you have been through the worst of it.

Culture shock causes different reactions, and they tend to be most sharply felt in specific issues. You accept some things, but other things really annoy you. Even then, it might feel that everything (not just the problem spots) eventually is too much. Here are some of the most common reactions:

• Become tired or exhausted, sleep a lot.
• Feel angry or frustrated (without knowing why)
• Feel you've failed, or suffer depression
• Headaches, stomach pains, vague pains all over
• Appear to adjust very well and do everything right, but fail to cope emotionally
• Become afraid or suspicious of people around you
• Become homesick
• Try to withdraw (even set up your room or house like a miniature world of your home country) and form a ghetto with friends from your own cultural or language backgrounds)
• Organize frequent holidays back home (This is an unadmitted strategy to avoid emotionally committing yourself to living in the new culture; your time in the new country is just a series of very long visits.)
• Become critical of your host culture, comparing it negatively to your home country
• Become very defensive that you are coping emotionally when you aren't
• Resent being told how to do basic things (eating, getting dressed, using a toilet, catching a bus) with the result that you become overconfident and unwilling to take advice
• Create stereotypes (overgeneralizations) of the people around you
• Criticize your organization. In some cases it might be blameless, but small mistakes or inadequacies become major traumas
• Become overly extroverted and friendly, believing that by relating to people in this way you are adapting well. (However, others note that you are rather "odd" and not fitting in as well as you think you are.)
• "Go native" This is particularly unhealthy; it involves rejecting your home culture and accepting the externals of the host culture without becoming a different person internally. You're just a foreigner pretending to be a "native."
• An intense feeling of homesickness might recur on your next birthday and at Christmas if you were used to having special times together with your friends and family in your home country. Your first vacation might also bring back memories of vacations in your home country.

The general trend in the last couple of decades has been to provide better mentoring and group sessions, so that these issues get identified as early as possible. By being more fully aware of how culture shock works, people can admit and cope with their difficulties earlier.

BIG Hint Keep a diary of your questions and the answers your were given, your observations, and things to which you had to adjust.

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