Homesickness: Soothing the Ache of Being Far Away

To deal with homesickness, meet the wave as real information, not weakness: name the one specific thing you miss most, then use a short round of bilateral stimulation, the left-right technique behind EMDR, to calm the spike. From that calmer place, reach out to home intentionally rather than reactively, and give the new place time to become familiar.

Maybe you’re three weeks into a new dorm room, a first apartment in an unfamiliar city, or a job posting on the other side of the world, and the ache shows up out of nowhere: your mom’s kitchen, a specific song, the smell of your old street after rain. It doesn’t matter that you chose this move, or that everyone keeps telling you it gets easier. Right now, it just hurts, and that reaction makes more sense than it might feel like it should.

Why does homesickness feel like grief?

Homesickness used to be classified as a diagnosable, sometimes fatal illness. In 1688, Swiss physician Johannes Hofer coined the term nostalgia to describe soldiers stationed far from home who developed appetite loss, heart palpitations, and fever, symptoms serious enough that commanders sent some of them home to recover, according to a 2025 NPR account of the term’s medical history. Doctors don’t diagnose it that way now, but the underlying experience is the same one you’re feeling: separation from a familiar home is a genuine stressor, not a character flaw.

A landmark 1996 review in Psychological Medicine by researchers Van Tilburg and Vingerhoets describes homesickness as a real psychological response to separation, one with measurable cognitive, emotional, behavioral, and physical symptoms. Poor concentration, low mood, disrupted sleep, and appetite changes are common parts of it, not signs you’re handling the move badly. A 1999 follow-up study in Stress Medicine comparing homesick, homesick-prone, recovered, and non-homesick adults found self-reported health and mood measurably lower in the homesick groups, evidence this is a real state, not just a mood you can talk yourself out of.

Some researchers argue homesickness works like a mini-grief. A 2016 paper in Clinical Psychological Science by Margaret Stroebe, Henk Schut, and Maaike Nauta applies the dual process model built for bereavement, the idea that healthy coping oscillates between facing a loss directly and engaging with a new life, rather than forcing one and ignoring the other. That framing matters here: missing home and building a life where you are now aren’t opposites pulling against each other. If a specific person is the shape of what you’re missing most, What to Do When Loneliness Hits covers that overlap directly; if it’s more the disorientation of everything being unfamiliar, Adjusting to Change When Everything Feels New goes deeper on that side of it.

A bilateral-stimulation practice for a homesick wave

Homesickness rarely stays a vague cloud. It usually narrows to one specific image: a person, a smell, a particular room. That specificity is exactly what this practice works with.

• Rate it. On a 0–10 scale, how strong is the ache right now? Note the number.
• Name the exact image. Not “I miss home” in general, but the one scene on repeat: your dad at the stove, your dog by the door, the view from your old bedroom window.
• Add bilateral stimulation (BLS). Move your eyes smoothly left and right for 20 to 30 seconds, alternate tapping your knees or shoulders, or use alternating left-right audio tones, while holding the image lightly in mind.
• Pause and notice. Stop. Breathe. Notice whatever shifted, without forcing it.
• Repeat 3 to 5 short rounds, re-rating the number in between.

A 2013 meta-analysis in the Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry found that adding eye movements while holding a distressing image in mind reduced how vivid and emotionally charged it felt, which is the mechanism this practice leans on. If the number climbs instead of easing, stop, use grounding, and stay inside your window of tolerance, the zone where a feeling is present but you can still think clearly.

Pacing rounds yourself while you’re already missing home is one more thing to hold. EmEase, a self-guided EMDR app, runs the same left-right technique for you with a moving on-screen target or alternating tones, at app.emease.com.

Does calling home make homesickness better or worse?

It’s tempting to assume more contact with home always helps. The research is more nuanced. A study in the International Journal of Psychology tracked first-year university students for two weeks using real-time check-ins on their phones, and found momentary homesickness peaked at their current residence, while talking with parents, and during video calls, exactly the moments many people reach for as comfort.

That’s not a reason to stop calling home. It’s a reason to notice that a reactive call, placed the second a wave hits, may leave you feeling worse right afterward, and that’s a documented pattern, not proof something’s wrong with your family or your resolve. Scheduling contact for a set time, rather than reaching for it mid-wave, and using the practice above to settle the spike first, tends to serve you better than calling on impulse.

When homesickness needs more than this

This practice fits the ordinary ache of adjusting to somewhere new, the kind that softens as the unfamiliar becomes familiar. If it hasn’t started to ease after several weeks, if it’s disrupting your sleep, appetite, or ability to function day to day, or if it comes bundled with a hopelessness that scares you, that’s worth bringing to a licensed therapist rather than managing alone. The same is true if distress during this practice rises above a 7 out of 10 and won’t settle back down; stop, ground yourself, and consider reaching out for more support. Our grief and life transitions guide goes deeper if this ache is tangled up with an actual loss, not just distance.

Being far from home is harder than it looks from the outside, including your own. Missing it doesn’t mean you made the wrong move. It usually just means the move mattered.