Remote Work Abroad: When "Living the Dream" Stops Working (And What to Do About It)
Guest post from Leigh Matthews, Therapy In Barcelona
You've got the visa sorted. Your flights are booked. You've found a flat with decent wifi and a balcony that gets morning sun. You've told everyone back home about your big move, posted the countdown on Instagram, maybe even bought a language learning app subscription you'll definitely use this time.
You're living the dream, right?
Except six months in, you're eating alone again. You've had the same surface-level conversation with three different people about where you're from and why you moved here. Your partner is working odd hours to sync with their team back home. You miss your friends. You miss understanding what's happening around you. You miss feeling competent at basic tasks like opening a bank account or knowing which bin to put your recycling in.
Nobody warned you about this part. Nobody warned you about the substantial mental health challenges you may need to navigate as a digital nomad.
The gap between the journey and the destination
Most resources for remote workers focus on logistics. How to get the visa. Which countries have digital nomad schemes. Tax implications. Where to find coworking spaces. These things matter, but they're just the scaffolding.
What nobody talks about enough is what happens after you arrive. After the excitement fades and you're left building an actual life in a place where you don't yet belong.
The gap between planning your move and thriving in your new location is where most remote workers struggle. You spend months obsessing over visa requirements and shipping costs, then land in your new city with no plan for how you'll actually feel at home there.
This isn't about being ungrateful or weak. Moving abroad is objectively difficult, even when you chose it, even when you're privileged enough to do it.
Why remote workers struggle more than they expect
Remote workers face a specific set of challenges that traditional expats often don't encounter.
You're Isolated by Default
Traditional expats usually move with a job that provides structure, colleagues, and often relocation support. Remote workers arrive alone, work alone, and have to build everything from scratch.
You might go days without a meaningful conversation. Your coworkers exist in Slack messages and Zoom squares. You're productive, you're hitting deadlines, but you're also profoundly lonely in a way that's hard to articulate to people who haven't experienced it.
The Privilege Paradox
You know you're lucky. You have flexibility, freedom, and the ability to work from anywhere. So why do you feel so awful sometimes?
This is what we call the privilege paradox. You feel guilty for struggling when you "have it so good," so you don't talk about it, which makes the struggle worse. You invalidate your own experience because other people have "real problems."
But privilege and pain coexist. Your struggles are real, even if your circumstances look enviable from the outside.
The Permanent Tourist Trap
Many remote workers never fully commit to their new location. You're always half-somewhere else, keeping one foot in your home country, treating your new city as an extended holiday rather than home.
You don't learn the language properly because "everyone speaks English anyway." You don't invest in local friendships because you might move again next year. You don't engage with the culture because you're too busy working or exploring the next destination.
This approach feels safe, but it prevents you from ever feeling settled. You're stuck in a liminal space that's exhausting to maintain long-term.
Identity Erosion
Back home, you knew who you were. You had context, history, and relationships that reflected your personality back to you. You were funny, or reliable, or the person who always knew the best restaurants.
Here, you're just "the foreigner." You're constantly explaining yourself, proving yourself, starting from zero. The parts of your identity that felt stable are suddenly untethered. Who are you when nobody knows your references or gets your humour?
What you actually need to make it work
Succeeding as a remote worker abroad isn't about perfect planning. It's about building the right foundations for your emotional and psychological well-being alongside the practical logistics.
Build connection before you need it
Don't wait until you're desperate for friends to start building relationships. By then, loneliness has likely calcified into something harder to shift.
Start connecting before you arrive. Join local Facebook groups, subreddits, or Discord communities for expats in your new city. Attend virtual events. Reach out to people who've made the move you're about to make.
Once you land, say yes to everything for the first few months. Language exchanges, running clubs, coworking spaces, random meetups organized by people you barely know. Not all of these connections will stick, but some will, and you won't know which ones until you show up.
Quality friendships take time to develop, so start early and be patient with the process.
Create structure that isn't just work
Remote work gives you flexibility, but too much unstructured time breeds anxiety and aimlessness. You need rhythm and routine that exists outside your work schedule.
Join something regular. A gym class, a volunteer project, a weekly language exchange. Something that gets you out of your flat and around the same people consistently.
These commitments serve two purposes: they create social touchpoints, and they give you a reason to engage with your new environment beyond work and basic survival.
Learn the language (actually learn it!)
Everyone speaks English until they don't. Until you need to explain something important at the doctor's office, or you're left out of the joke everyone's laughing at, or you realize you've been living somewhere for two years and can't have a basic conversation with your neighbor.
Language barriers are exhausting. They make you feel incompetent and isolated. They prevent you from accessing local culture, humor, and connection in meaningful ways.
You don't need fluency, but you need more than ordering coffee and asking for directions. Invest in proper lessons. Practice consistently, even when it's uncomfortable. The return on this investment is enormous.
Accept that adjustment is non-linear
You will have good weeks and terrible weeks. You'll feel settled, then suddenly homesick. You'll love your new city, then resent everything about it, then love it again.
This is normal. Cultural adjustment follows a pattern (often called the U-curve or W-curve), but it doesn't follow a neat timeline. Expect setbacks. Expect to feel frustrated with yourself for still struggling months or even years in.
Progress isn't linear. Give yourself permission to have hard days without catastrophizing about your entire decision to move.
Know when to get help
Struggling doesn't mean you've failed. Sometimes the smartest thing you can do is talk to someone who understands what you're going through.
If you're dealing with persistent anxiety, depression, relationship strain, or just feeling stuck in a way you can't shift on your own, therapy can help. This isn't about being broken or dramatic. It's about having support while you navigate something genuinely difficult. Read more in our article on 12 Compelling Reasons Internationals and Digital Nomads Should Consider Therapy
At Therapy in Barcelona, we specialise in working with remote workers, digital nomads, and expats who are navigating exactly these challenges. Our therapists are internationals themselves, so we understand the specific pressures of building a life abroad while managing work, relationships, and the constant low-level stress of cultural adaptation.
We offer both in-person sessions in Barcelona and online therapy across Europe, so you can access support wherever you are. Sometimes just talking to someone who gets it, who won't tell you to be grateful or remind you how lucky you are, makes all the difference.
The questions nobody asks before moving
Most people research practicalities before moving abroad. Here are the questions you should also be asking yourself:
What does community look like for me? Are you someone who needs a tight group of close friends, or do you thrive with many loose connections? How will you build that in your new location?
What am I running from versus running toward? Are you moving because you genuinely want this experience, or because you're avoiding something at home? Both can be valid, but knowing which one drives you helps you make better decisions.
What support do I need to function well? Some people need regular contact with family. Others need access to specific foods, cultural events, or types of social interaction. What are your non-negotiables?
How will I measure success? If success isn't just "staying abroad," what is it? Feeling at home? Building friendships? Learning the language? Getting clear on this helps you make choices that align with what actually matters to you.
What's my plan if this doesn't work out? Knowing you can leave if you need to often makes it easier to stay. Give yourself permission to change your mind without framing it as failure.
What success actually looks like
Living abroad successfully doesn't mean loving every moment or never wanting to leave. It means building a life that feels sustainable, where the good outweighs the hard more often than not.
It looks like having people you can call when you need help. Understanding enough of the language to feel competent in daily life. Knowing your neighbourhood, having routines that ground you, feeling like you belong somewhere, even if it's not where you're from.
It means accepting that you'll probably always be a bit of an outsider, and that's okay. You'll straddle cultures, reference things nobody else gets, feel homesick for multiple places at once. This in-between space can be disorienting, but it can also be rich.
Success is making deliberate choices about how you spend your time and energy, rather than letting circumstances dictate your experience. It's asking for help when you need it, saying no to things that drain you, and saying yes to opportunities that might feel uncomfortable but could lead somewhere good.
The work nobody mentions
Moving abroad for remote work requires emotional labour that nobody puts in the visa requirements.
You have to grieve what you left behind, even if leaving was the right choice. You have to rebuild your sense of self in a context where you're constantly explaining yourself. You have to tolerate ambiguity and discomfort for far longer than feels reasonable.
You have to be gentle with yourself on the days when everything feels hard, when you can't understand why you moved here, when you'd give anything for a familiar conversation with someone who knows you.
And you have to keep showing up anyway. Keep trying to connect, keep practising the language, keep exploring your new city even when you'd rather stay home.
This work is invisible. It doesn't show up on Instagram. Nobody gives you credit for it. But it's the work that determines whether you thrive or just survive.
Making the dream actually work
The gap between the dream and reality isn't a sign that you made the wrong choice. It's just the space where real life happens.
Most remote workers focus all their energy on getting to their new destination. The visa. The logistics. The countdown. Then they arrive and realise they've planned the journey but not the life that comes after.
If you want this to work long-term, you need to think beyond arrival. Build connections intentionally. Create a structure that supports your well-being. Learn the language. Accept that adjustment takes time and isn't linear. Know when to ask for help.
The dream can work, but it requires more than luck and good wifi. It requires paying attention to your emotional health, social needs, and sense of identity in a place where nothing is automatic.
And sometimes, the smartest thing you can do is talk to someone who can help you navigate it all. Whether that's through therapy, or just finding your people in your new city, don't wait until you're in crisis to reach out.
You don't have to do this alone. You're allowed to struggle even when you're living the dream. And with the right support, you might find that the reality becomes something even better than what you imagined.
About the Contributor
Leigh Matthews is an Australian psychologist who founded Therapy in Barcelona in 2011 after moving to Spain for love and discovering firsthand how disorienting life abroad can be. What started as a solo practice has grown into a group of internationally-trained therapists who are all foreigners in Spain themselves, serving English-speaking and multilingual internationals across Spain and Europe.
Leigh knows that privilege and struggle coexist. That you can choose something and still find it hard. That living abroad means constantly explaining yourself to people who will never fully get your references. After more than a decade working with internationals navigating identity shifts, cultural exhaustion, relationship strain, and all the other tribulations of human life abroad, she's built a practice for international clients where therapists actually understand what clients are going through because they live it too.
Learn more, meet the team, follow them on instagram or book a free discovery call at www.therapyinbarcelona.com.