How to avoid burnout and stress when relocating under Uranus in Gemini

My second to last blog gave up to date highly relevant tips on stuff you absolutely do need to do when relocating. Two months down the line, and after having a major burnout related meltdown last week, plus some previous ones when ill with ongoing major dental surgery, here are some more focused tips to help prevent what I experienced.

This post was also partly inspired by the increasing number of Instagram accounts I see offering packages to help people relocate. Many of them along with many other posts say things like – “I had this and this and then this obstacle, but I persevered, it got solved quickly and now I am living a totally perfect life.”

Newsflash! Never ever true!

Relocating Couples and families

For a start, let’s get this straight. Couples and families have a way easier time of it, folks. Us single gals have to navigate and juggle so much more, and even more again if we are self-employed, as I am. If you are a couple still in your home base, one of you can be researching the visa requirements paperwork whilst the other is prepping dinner. One of you can take time off work to be booking flights and sourcing apartments to rent or buy while the other one continues to work full time. If you have kids, you are usually sharing the raising of them, with one parent usually working at least part-time (yes, still almost always the mother 90% of the time – I have been watching! While the other parent remains the main breadwinner.

Relocating Self-employed

The self-employed amongst us have to choose the new location, check our flight options, rent an apartment (often sight unseen), apply for visas if necessary, buy new suitcases (often very necessary), arrange storage of our possessions, arrange shipping ahead of time, rent out our home base, give up our jobs or apply for leave of absence, check our gadgets, check our passport expiry date, ditto for bank cards, budget for our time abroad, deal with (aka ignore!) friends and family who think we have gone stark raving mad, update or upgrade laptops and phone and every other gadget we can think of (plus several others we have now forgotten). With people all around us talking noisily on their phones, good quality earplugs are now also quite essential.

Airlines change their luggage allowances at the speed of light, which if you are based in Europe, can add up a lot over the course of a year. Once you have relocated, you then are dealing with a new language, different culture, radically different opening hours, culture shock, different mean times (and often obviously also very different food to what your body is used to which can cause a whole other set of issues). So in the lead up to relocating and for the first few months, what constructive steps can you take to avoid the inevitable meltdown?

Tips and Suggestions

For me, the things which made the biggest impact when travelling were:

– Packing a large homemade healthy salad, enough to last a full day and evening.
– Arriving at airports way ahead of time (passport control queues are a real thing here in Europe and have gotten worse).
– Booking an afternoon flight and arriving at my destination at a decent hour, (those 5am or 11pm cheaper flights really isn’t worth it – you end up losing a whole day).
– Paying that bit more for a decent hotel room rather than a cheap budget option – often the room will have a decent fridge which will allow you store salad and fruit and lower the chances that you’ll head straight out for junk food when you arrive!
– Budget for taxis rather than public transport when you arrive to get to your hotel – so worth it to save a few hours. You’ll be exhausted just from the flight!
– Always, but always have a battery pack (preferably fast charging).
– Pack earplugs (loop seem great – haven’t tried them – they are on my “must order” list!).
– Have a packing list – if not, with so much more technology to travel with, you risk forgetting something important.
– Good walking shoes, the best you can get.

Pre-travel and on arrival and settling in – the following have been game changing:

– Leaving my phone switched off and walking around to get to know my local area.
– Yoga, yoga and yes, more yoga…I have had a private teacher for the last few months who comes to my house twice a week. Before this we did yoga outdoors at Vibo Marina to often hilarious reactions from various members of the public, including the local carabinieri!
– Buy or rent a bike – even if you are only there for a few weeks, it helps keep you fit, plus it reduces exhaustion from too much walking.
– Always have a second bank card plus cash. In Calabria, I had no problem having my bank card accepted in Vibo Valentia and Vibo Marina and elsewhere in Rome, Naples and Florence. However, it’s been a whole different kettle of fish in Tropea where the POS/SumUp/bank card machine is frequently “broken” or the internet is constantly “down”. Yeah right! Then on the day the internet really was down for over 25 hours some weeks ago in Tropea there was mayhem! I now carry around €200 cash with me most days as banks overseas will have lower withdrawal limits in a foreign country than at your home base bank. Yes, even my Italian account had a far lower limit in Tropea because I was using a different bancomat machine. And you will also need small denomination notes, plus coins! For the local markets, supermarket trolleys, airport trolleys, bathroom trips.

My Personal Experiences Relocating

In Italy, the constant negotiating of prices starts off being charming but soon becomes exhausting. Usually if you book a hotel direct on their website or in person you get the room a lot cheaper than via Booking.com. Not here folks! They will adjust the price up or down depending on whether you pay cash and then tell you they offered you a special rate because they assumed you knew it was a cash price. You end up giving in time and time again!

At first Tropea was a welcome breath of fresh energy after the sleepiness of Vibo, which is as good as closed until May of next year with only a few restaurants and cafes open. But then the incessant loud music pumping from the speakers of each and every café and restaurant in Tropea also became exhausting. Add in super loud guttural foreign accents where gang packs of tourists routinely plonk themselves down right at the table beside you and you see how easily burnout manifests. Most of the Tropea restaurants and cafes are primarily open air with very little indoor seating. Many of them are now closed for the season, meaning that those which are open are busier than usual.

On top of that, add in the incessant nonstop use of phones for loud WhatsApp video calls, listening of and watching videos loudly on cellphones pretty much everywhere you go, never ending camera phone photo snapping and you see where the extra burnout comes from.

We don’t text anymore. These days it is also Instagram, FB messages, WhatsApp photo sharing (even if you did not ask for photos to be sent to you!), pesky incomprehensible voice notes, and Telegram. It is supposed to be easier to be connected but in fact we are more disconnected than ever, something I have been writing about for some time now.

Amal Clooney recently banned mobile phones from dinner parties or social events in her home, and I am about to do the same. Starting this week. Herself and hubby George recently relocated to France and French privacy laws which are really strict around the taking of photos of children, was one of the main reasons. After witnessing several people shove camera phones into the faces of babies after an event I attended recently, I totally see why they made this decision.

Burnout when relocating

Onto other sources of burnout – renting or purchasing an apartment and repairs. No matter how well you check everything, things will and do crop up. Workmen the world over have a bad rap, sometimes not always of their own making as often their boss is the one telling them to go from one unfinished job to another, having several jobs on the go at the same time. In my case, my two bedrooms were totally refloored, a job that went on a week longer than it should. Then the great workman I got to paint the whole apartment and do some repairs including electrical work, took it upon himself to fix lots of things which were not a priority (without prior agreement), and increased the price twice. After two weeks of this, and after having left him mostly to work away uninterrupted, I pulled the plug, leaving lots of work unfinished for now. This third set of negotiations was after already having had to beg previous house clearance guys to take away tons of the previous owners’ stuff. For which I paid way over the odds, but it was necessary as without a blank canvas, I would not have been able to renovate the way I wanted.

So now I have a missing door panel, a woodburning stove I am not sure I can use, unfinished doors and window frames, a fan/overhead light I specifically said I was not sure about which may need to be removed. Plus, a kitchen that has had nothing done to it, other than the removal of some presses. The sloping ceiling makes it a challenge to decide what to do with, one I intend to relish solving as it turns out the sloping ceiling in my office is just fine and does not affect me the way I expected.

On the other hand, 80% of the apartment is indeed painted and I have a workable office and a relaxing bedroom. My amazing balcony with stunning sea view is now also free of someone else’s stuff and will be a second option area for painting! Yes, even in the winter!
This too, will be your life when you move, if you buy. However, in my case, the weeks Clairvision meditation retreat back in Ireland in August was what gave me the inner strength and Mars like energy I knew I needed to focus on getting this all done, as without this work I would have been unable to set up an art studio and a workshop area for in person workshops.

So, the important stuff is in fact done and has been a huge learning curve. As was buying my dinky Fiat 500! Which merits a whole blog in itself!

All of the above brings me back to the crucial importance of your environment always supporting you. The tiniest thing can make such a big difference. When I was working as a nanny in Lucca a decade ago, I bought extra clothes pegs for the clothesline of the family I worked with, which saved me half an hour running up and down two flights of stairs when hanging up seemingly never-ending washing. Half an hour is a big win when you work a nine-hour day!

If your new home needs tons of work too, then something really simple like buying fresh flowers and fresh pots of herbs will help you feel nurtured. Or a nice coffee pot (Bialetti all the way! Top quality coffee, and some pretty coffee mugs. Or some pretty candles at night, and maybe some incense. Apart from the coffee pot, these small purchases cost less than $20 but can uplift you enormously.
Even if your immediate neighbourhood is scruffy, or noisy or whatever, getting out for a walk will still lift your spirits. My own neighbourhood here is scruffy enough but interestingly, the very day my workman arrived, the local council arrived just before him to dig away overgrown weeds on the pavement area. I cared, so they showed up too! You will honestly see this kind of synchronicity all the time, I promise you!

So do what you can to immediately improve your current environment, even if you plan on leaving it soon. Fix what needs to be fixed, clear and dispose of stuff you don’t use anymore. Have a clear-out evening, let your friends come take what they want! How fun! Or put stuff on Facebook Marketplace. Charity shops are not a thing in Italy which was why clearing the previous owners’ stuff was so challenging. It’s done now however! Doing this all helps make the move far smoother as you will be bringing your present self towards your future self. Your past self is gone, and you don’t need to bring it with you. It will only stress you and hold you back in ways you won’t even realise.

Mind your burnout dear readers. You got this!