New job, new city, new chapter: the psychology of life transitions

The first week in a new job: everything is fresh, people are friendly, and you are full of drive. The first month in a new city: you explore the streets, the cafés, everything smells of a new beginning. And then, somewhere between the second and the sixth month, comes a morning when you wake up with a strange heaviness: you miss the old office you could hardly wait to leave. You miss the city you could hardly wait to get out of. And you wonder whether you made a mistake.

Most likely you did not. This dip has a name, a shape and — most importantly — a predictable course. The psychology of adjusting to a new environment has been describing it for decades, and the pattern is remarkably similar whether it is a move abroad, a new job, a change of profession or studying in another city.

In this post I want to show you a map of what is happening: the U-curve of adjustment, the blow a new chapter deals to your sense of competence, and the question of the social network you have to weave from scratch. I also add when the dip is no longer just a phase — and a little of my own story, because I once changed my entire profession.

The honeymoon, and then the valley: the U-curve of adjustment

In the 1950s the Norwegian sociologist Sverre Lysgaard studied grantees who had come to study in the United States and noticed a pattern he described as a U-curve: initial enthusiasm is followed by a dip, and the dip by a slow recovery. A few years later the anthropologist Kalervo Oberg (1960) built on this to give a popular description of “culture shock” in four phases: honeymoon, crisis, recovery, adjustment.

Although the model was developed for moves between cultures, it turns out to be a useful parallel for almost every major new chapter. Researchers in organisational psychology have measured a related pattern even in changing jobs: in a longitudinal study of managers, Wendy Boswell and colleagues (2005) demonstrated what is known as the honeymoon–hangover effect: satisfaction jumps when you start a new job, then drops noticeably over the first year before it settles. In other words — the dip after the initial excitement is not a peculiarity of yours, it is a measured, replicable phenomenon.

Why does the curve fall? Because in the first weeks the newness still carries you: everything is interesting, expectations are high, the people around you are forgiving (“you’re new, after all”). Then the newness fades, the forgiveness runs out, and you still do not have what made the old environment bearable: routines, shortcuts, people who know you, the sense that you know what you are doing. Only then do you really feel the cost of the change — and that is precisely when most people conclude the decision was wrong. In reality you are simply at the bottom of the letter U. From here it goes upward, just more slowly than you would like.

You were a master, now you’re an apprentice again

The part of adjustment that hurts most, in my experience, is the loss of competence. In your old job you knew who was who, how things worked, where the landmines were; your opinion carried weight. In the new environment you are asking where the printer is. If you have changed profession, the drop is deeper still: from someone who could do their work with one hand tied behind their back, you became overnight a beginner corrected by people younger than she is.

This is not merely unpleasant — it is a blow to identity. A large part of adult self-image is woven around knowing how to do something and being recognised for it by the people around us. When that pillar disappears for a while, everything else tends to wobble: self-doubt appears, the feeling that you have cheated, that you will be “found out”. If you recognise these thoughts, read the post on impostor syndrome — a new role is one of its most common breeding grounds, and for an entirely logical reason: in a new environment you objectively are not competent yet, while your internal standards are still set to your old mastery.

The organisational psychologist Nigel Nicholson described transitions between work roles as a cycle in which the person and the role adapt to each other: for a while you change (learning, taking on the habits of the new environment), and for a while you change the role — you shape it to your strengths, you bring your own into it. People in the valley tend to forget that second part: it feels to them as though they will be forever playing catch-up. In reality a point arrives when your experience from your previous life becomes an advantage — a fresh eye, knowledge carried across from another field, questions the locals have long since stopped thinking to ask. Being a beginner is a phase, not an identity.

Two things help. First, separating competence from worth: knowing less at the moment does not mean you are worth less — it means you are at the start of a learning curve every master was once on. And second, measuring the right thing: do not compare yourself with yourself in the old role, compare yourself with yourself a month ago. Progress within the new environment is the only fair measure.

The social network: the invisible infrastructure you rebuild

When we move house or change jobs, we usually plan the logistics — the flat, the transport, the paperwork. What we almost never plan for is what we will miss most: people. Old environments carry with them a network we do not even notice until we lose it: the colleague you have morning coffee with, the neighbour who holds the door, the hairdresser who knows your name, friends a fifteen-minute drive away.

That network is not a luxury. Social connection is one of the strongest protective factors for mental and physical health that science knows of — a meta-analysis by Julianne Holt-Lunstad and colleagues (2010) showed that the influence of social relationships on mortality is comparable to established risk factors such as smoking. When you move, you lose a significant part of that protection exactly in the period when you are under the most strain. That is why loneliness in a new environment feels so sharp — and why it is worth taking seriously rather than treating as a whim.

Building a new network is slow and, at first, awkward. Research on friendship shows that closeness grows out of repeated, unplanned contact and gradual opening up — which in practice means: regular places (the same sports slot, the same bakery, the same club), patience, and a willingness to make the first move more often than feels decent. The first few months of investing without visible returns are normal.

A map of the curve: where are you?

To sum up the model in four stations — and to add what helps most at each:

• Honeymoon: the newness carries you, energy is high. What helps: enjoy it, but do not draw large conclusions — neither about how wonderful it will be, nor about who you will become here.
• The valley: the newness fades, the deficits show, homesickness and doubt are at their loudest. What helps: knowing this is a phase with a name; looking after routines, sleep and movement; not making big decisions at the bottom of the curve.
• The climb: the first routines start running, the first faces become familiar, the work comes more easily. What helps: consolidating what works, and letting yourself acknowledge the progress.
• Mastery: the new environment becomes the default; you no longer think about it, you live in it. The surprise: at this point many people only then truly grieve the old — because now it is safe to.

Practical strategies for the first months

You cannot skip the curve, but you can walk it more wisely. A few strategies I recommend to people in the first months of a new chapter:

• Move your routines, not just your furniture. The first thing you set up in a new environment should not be a wardrobe but a rhythm: the same wake-up time, movement, meals, an evening wind-down into sleep. Routines are portable housing — through them the body knows the world is at least partly predictable.
• Schedule contact until it starts happening by itself. In the old environment, get-togethers happened on their own; in the new one you have to book them for a few months. Two slots a week that involve people — sport, a course, coffee with a new acquaintance, a call to an old friend — are the minimum maintenance of a social system.
• Keep in touch with the old, but do not live in it. Regular calls with old friends are an anchor; checking daily what is going on at your old job or in your old city is a way of being absent at both ends at once. Let the old be a root, not a comparison table.
• Lower the bar for the first year. In a period of major adjustment, “good enough” is the new excellent. If you demand peak form of yourself while you are in the valley, you will record the difference as a personal failure — instead of as the physics of a transition.
• Keep notes. A short weekly entry (what was hard, what went well, what was easier for the first time) makes progress visible. Memory is biased in the valley — notes are not.

When the valley is no longer just a valley

The model also has its limits, and it is only fair to say where they are. Adjustment is not equally smooth for everyone and the valley is not equally deep for everyone — it is shaped by circumstances (whether you chose the change or it happened to you), by the support you have, and by the stories the change wakes up.

So watch for a few signs that the dip is growing into something that needs more than time: if after several months it is still sinking rather than lifting; if you are withdrawing even from the contacts you do have; if sleep, appetite or the desire for things that used to please you keep draining away; if the thought “it will never get better” keeps returning. These are not signs of weakness, they are signs of an overloaded system. When it makes sense to seek help and what that actually looks like, I described in detail in the post When is it time for therapy.

Particular attention is also due to a combination of several transitions at once — a new job and a move and a separation, for example. Our capacity to adapt is not infinite; when transitions pile up, it is entirely reasonable that the system needs support. Why every change, even a chosen one, takes strength, I explained in the post on why change is hard.

When I turned the page myself: from the theatre to the therapy room

I know this curve from the inside too. For most of my adult life I was an actor — and then I chose the path of psychotherapy. On paper, a nice story about a new profession; in reality, a long drive along the whole letter U. There was a honeymoon, when everything new was sacred. There was a valley, when I sat in lectures beside classmates ten years younger and asked myself what on earth I had needed this for — I, who had known everything on stage, was here on the first rung again. And there was a slow, distinctly uncinematic climb, after which the new profession became mine.

Today I think no book could have given me what that experience gave me: bodily knowledge of what it is like when a person leaves the familiar and does not yet stand in the new. I have described the whole story on the page My Approach — here let me say only what I would most have needed to hear back then: the valley is not proof that the decision was wrong. It is proof that the decision was big.

Support when the new chapter doesn’t run by itself

So if you are in the middle of a new chapter and finding it harder than you expected: first of all — this is the most common possible scenario, not the exception. Give yourself time, keep your routines, invest in people, and do not judge your decision from the bottom of the curve.

And if you feel you could use a companion on the road — because the valley is dragging on, because there are several transitions at once, or because the new chapter has opened old questions — that is exactly what my service of support through life transitions is for. Together we look at where on the curve you are, what you need in order to get moving again, and what the change might be telling you about how you want to live from here. A short message is enough for a first step.

A new chapter does not begin on moving day or with the signing of a contract. It begins on the day the new city, the new role or the new work quietly becomes “mine”. Until then: you are walking a curve that countless people have walked before you. And the curve carries on upward.