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Get startedMost advice about missing home is really advice about your new city: join things, learn the language, build routines. That is useful and it is only half the problem. The other half is the relationship you still have with the place you left, and almost nobody talks about how to manage that well.
It matters, because contact with home is a dial rather than a switch, and most people set it badly without noticing. Some call constantly and keep the wound open. Others go quiet for weeks and then feel like strangers to people they have known for twenty years. Both are avoidable, and neither is about willpower; they are about a handful of small decisions that nobody tells you to make.
The 24 below are about home: the people there, the contact, the visits, the guilt, and what happens to friendships when you are not in the room. Pick three and start this week.
College Life, the global club for young internationals, is partnering with BetterHelp to support young people with the emotional side of starting over in a new country. BetterHelp is an online platform for psychological counseling that connects members with qualified counselors for live sessions and messaging. As part of the partnership, College Life Club members get 30% off their first three months with BetterHelp.* Become a member of College Life Club (free) to access the benefit.
Set the Contact Dial on Purpose
The single biggest lever is how, and how often, you are in touch. Most people never make an actual decision about it, and drift into a pattern that quietly makes things harder.
Schedule the Call Instead of Drifting
A fixed weekly video call beats a constant low-level drip of messages, for both sides. It gives you something to look forward to rather than a permanent half-presence of home in your day, and it gives your family a shape to hold on to, which sharply reduces the anxious check-ins that make you feel monitored rather than loved. Pick a time that works in both places and defend it the way you would defend a class. Counter-intuitively, less frequent but properly scheduled contact usually leaves everyone feeling closer than a background trickle of half-attention. If time zones make one slot impossible, alternate who takes the inconvenient hour rather than one person always absorbing it.
Call on Good Days Too
If every call home happens on your worst evening, your family will only ever know the difficult version of your life, and you will only ever narrate it. Ring on a good day sometimes. It changes what the relationship is for, and it changes what you notice during the week, because you start collecting things worth telling them. It also makes the harder calls easier, since you are not somebody who only ever appears when something is wrong. It also gives you a reason to notice the good days, which during a flat month is genuinely useful in itself.
Keep a Running Note of Small Things
Through the week, note things you would mention: a strange sign, a lecturer's habit, what you cooked, the weather doing something ridiculous. It costs nothing and it transforms the call, which otherwise becomes a status report on your wellbeing. Specific ordinary detail is what makes someone feel present in your life, and it is exactly what disappears when you try to summarise a fortnight in one sentence. Three lines a week is enough. The note is for the call, not for posterity.
Choose Video Over Voice
Seeing the kitchen you grew up in does something that hearing about it does not, and video calls have a natural ending where voice calls trail off. It also lets people read you, which matters: your mother will know from your face what she will not know from your words, and being known is precisely the thing you are missing. Where a call is not possible, a short voice message beats text, because tone carries almost none of the way through writing.
Mute the Old Group Chat
Watching friends at home make plans you cannot join is a specific and entirely avoidable misery. Mute rather than leave, so the decision is reversible and nobody has to interpret it. This is not abandoning anyone; it is refusing to spectate a life you are not currently living. Reading it every evening is a habit that feels like connection and functions as the opposite. You can always unmute. Almost nobody ever notices, and the ones who do will assume nothing about it.
Move the Important Ones Out of the Group
If one or two of those friendships genuinely matter, take them out of the group chat and into direct contact. You get an actual conversation instead of a feed of things happening without you, and one-to-one is where friendships survive distance. Groups maintain the appearance of contact while delivering almost none of the substance. One-to-one also removes the performance element, since nobody else is reading.
Manage the Guilt Nobody Warns You About
A surprising amount of missing home is not sadness at all. It is guilt: about leaving, about not being there, about enjoying yourself while somebody at home is having a hard year.
Name It as Guilt
Feeling bad because you left is a different problem from feeling bad because you are lonely, and it needs a different response. Conflating them means you try to fix loneliness with more socialising and wonder why the heaviness persists. Simply identifying which one you are carrying usually points at what to do. Guilt responds to honesty and to deciding something once; loneliness responds to people and routine. Reaching for the wrong one is why some heaviness never seems to shift no matter how sociable you are.
Accept You Will Miss Things
Birthdays, funerals, a friend's bad month, your sibling's school play. You will not be there, and no amount of messaging fully substitutes. Deciding in advance that this is the cost of the choice, rather than relitigating it every time it happens, saves an enormous amount of recurring distress about something already settled. Writing that down once, early, is oddly effective. It turns a recurring painful negotiation into a decision you already made with a clear head. Decide it once, in a calm week, and refer back to that decision rather than remaking it.
Do Not Promise What You Cannot Deliver
Saying you will call every day, or come home for every occasion, sets up a cycle of failure and apology that damages the relationship more than honest limits would. Say what you can actually do and then do it. Reliability at a lower frequency beats enthusiasm you cannot sustain. A fortnightly call you always make is worth more to everybody than a daily one you manage for three weeks and then quietly abandon. Under-promise slightly; the relationship will be better for it.
Let People at Home Be Proud
Families often express worry when they mean love, and that worry can land as pressure to come back. Telling them plainly what is going well gives them something else to hold, and most parents would far rather have specific good news than reassurance they suspect is edited. Send them the specific thing: a photograph of your building, a grade, the name of a friend. Detail reassures in a way that general statements about being fine never quite do. Worry is often just love with nowhere to go.
Stop Apologising for the Move
Some people at home will be hurt that you left, and a few will say so. You are allowed to have made the choice. Repeatedly apologising for it invites the conversation to keep happening, whereas warmth without apology usually settles the matter within a few months on its own. Warmth without apology is the combination that works. It signals that the relationship matters without reopening the question of whether you should have gone. Say it kindly once, and then stop returning to it.
Send Something Physical
A postcard, a small parcel, a photograph in an envelope. Fifteen minutes, and the opposite of weightless digital contact. People keep the physical thing, and knowing it is on somebody's fridge in another country is a surprisingly durable comfort. It also gives you a small finite task on an empty Sunday, which is exactly the afternoon that otherwise goes badly. Postage is cheap and the effect is out of all proportion to the cost, largely because so few people do it any more.
Handle Visits Well
Going back is the part people most misjudge, in both directions. It is neither the cure nor the disaster it is expected to be.
Do Not Go Home to Escape
A visit booked in a bad week, before you have built anything where you are, tends to reset the clock rather than fix anything. The pattern to avoid is leaving each time it gets hard, because the hard part is the adjustment itself and it restarts each time you interrupt it. There is a difference between a planned trip and a flight from a bad fortnight, and only you will know which one you are booking. If the ticket is bought in the middle of a hard week, that is usually the tell.
Book One in the Future Instead
Having a date to look forward to does most of the emotional work of a visit without any of the disruption. Book something two or three months out and let the intervening weeks be about building where you are. It also gives the people at home a date, which is often what they actually want when they ask when you are coming back. A concrete answer settles that conversation far better than a vague one does. Something to look forward to does a surprising amount of emotional work on its own.
Expect the First Visit to Be Strange
Home has moved on slightly and so have you, and the mismatch can feel like loss. This is not a sign that you belong nowhere; it is a sign you now belong in two places, partially, which is the ordinary condition of anyone who has moved. Knowing it in advance removes most of the sting. Most people find the second visit considerably easier, once the expectation has been adjusted and they are no longer measuring the trip against a version of home that stopped existing the day they left.
Plan Fewer Things Than You Want To
A packed schedule of seeing everybody leaves you feeling like a visitor conducting interviews. Two unhurried days with the people who matter beats six days of appointments, and it is far more likely to give you the thing you actually went back for. Say no to some of it in advance rather than arriving and disappointing people in real time. Nobody minds being told before you land that you only have a few days. Protect one afternoon with nothing in it at all.
Give Yourself a Day at Each End
A day at home before the social schedule starts, and a quiet day back in your flat before term restarts. Both transitions are more tiring than people expect, and going straight from an airport into a lecture is a reliable way to arrive at February exhausted. Travelling itself is more draining than the distance suggests, and the two transitions are where most people quietly lose a week without ever accounting for it. Book the flight a day earlier than seems necessary if you can afford it.
Notice Reverse Homesickness
Missing your new city while you are at home is common, unsettling, and a good sign rather than a betrayal. It usually means you have built more than you realised, which is genuinely hard to see from the inside until you leave it. Missing your own bed, your own routine and your own café while you are back home is not disloyalty. It is evidence that you have built a life, which is exactly what you set out to do.
Get a Listener Who Is Not Involved
Everyone at home has their own feelings about your move, which makes them warm and partial at the same time. BetterHelp matches you with a qualified psychological counselor after a short questionnaire, and you can message them between weekly sessions, so the guilt and the missing get somewhere to go that is not a family group chat. Sessions happen entirely online, which suits two time zones.
Let the Relationships Change
The friendships you left will not stay frozen, and expecting them to is the most common source of avoidable disappointment.
Accept That Some Will Fade
Not every friendship survives distance, and the ones that fade are usually the ones that ran on proximity rather than on anything deeper. That is not a failure of loyalty on either side. Grieving a few of them quietly is more honest than forcing contact that neither person is enjoying. It is worth letting them go gracefully rather than dragging out contact that has become an obligation on both sides. Some of them come back later, in a different form, once nobody is trying.
Invest in Two, Not Twenty
Trying to maintain a whole social circle from another country produces shallow contact with everyone and real contact with nobody. Pick the two or three that matter most and put your effort there. Those are the people who will still be there in ten years. Depth survives distance and breadth does not, which is the opposite of how most people instinctively allocate their effort when they move away. Decide who those people are consciously rather than letting the answer be whoever happens to message most.
Tell One Person the Truth
Pick somebody who knew you before the move and be accurate with them rather than performing a good time for everybody. They have a baseline for how you normally sound and can tell you when you do not sound like it, which is genuinely hard to judge from the inside. One honest conversation a fortnight is worth more than daily cheerful updates. It also gives them the standing to say something if you sound wrong, which nobody else currently has, because your new acquaintances have no baseline for you at all.
Ask About Their Ordinary Life
Distance makes conversations drift towards headlines: exams, jobs, big news. Ask about the small things instead, the way you would have if you were in the same room. It is the ordinary detail that keeps a friendship feeling current rather than like a periodic status exchange. It also stops every call becoming about you, which is quietly exhausting for the other person and makes the friendship feel one-directional over time. Specific questions get specific answers; general ones get fine, thanks.
Make Room for Their Bad News
If people at home suspect you are having a hard time, they will edit their own difficulties out to protect you. Saying plainly that you want the real version keeps the relationship two-way, and being useful to somebody else is one of the more reliable ways to feel less adrift yourself. People protect somebody they think is fragile, and being treated as fragile from two thousand kilometres away is its own kind of isolation. Say it explicitly once and most people will believe you.
Do Not Compare the Two Lives
Measuring your new social life against the one you spent fifteen years building is not a fair comparison and it always produces the same answer. The relevant comparison is with where you were three months ago. Our guide to balancing study and life covers building the new one without abandoning the old. You are comparing year one of something against year fifteen of something else, and the comparison will keep producing the same answer until enough time has passed for it to become fair.
Protect Your Sleep Around Time Zones
Calls at two in the morning to suit somebody else's afternoon are a fast route to a wrecked week, and everything about missing home is harder on no sleep. Find a window that works for both, and if there genuinely is not one, alternate the inconvenience. Our guide to sleeping abroad covers the rest, and our guide to learning a local language covers the other thing that quietly costs you energy all day. A wrecked week costs more than one well-timed call is worth.
Talk to Someone Outside It
Family and old friends are inside this, which makes them comforting and partial; they have their own feelings about your move. A qualified psychological counselor does not, which is exactly the point. They can help you separate ordinary missing-home from guilt from something worth acting on. BetterHelp connects you with a counselor you can message whenever something comes up, plus a live session by video, phone or chat, usually once a week, and everything happens online, which suits a life across two time zones.
The Short Version
Missing home is not only about where you are now. It is also about how you handle the place you left, and that half is far more controllable than most people realise.
Set the contact dial on purpose rather than by drift. Ring on good days as well as bad. Mute the group chat and invest in two people properly. Decide once that you will miss things, instead of relitigating it every time. Book a visit for the future rather than escaping into one now. And let the friendships change, because they will whatever you do.
Pick three of these and start this week. If the ache is not shifting after a few months, that is not weakness; it is information, and it is worth talking through with somebody who is not inside it with you.
College Life is working with BetterHelp so that talking it through is an ordinary option rather than a last resort. Members get 30% off their first three months. *Offer for first time members only. Join College Life Club for free and claim it here.
Frequently Asked Questions
How often should I call home when studying abroad?
There is no correct number, but a scheduled weekly or fortnightly call tends to work better than constant messaging. A fixed slot gives both sides something to anticipate and reduces the anxious check-ins that make you feel monitored. Constant low-level contact keeps home permanently half-present in your day, which makes it harder to be where you actually are. Whatever you choose, deciding deliberately beats drifting into a pattern.
Should I go home if I am really struggling?
A visit can help, but it rarely works as a cure and sometimes makes returning harder, because home has moved on slightly and so have you. Going back in an emergency, before you have built anything where you are, tends to reset the adjustment rather than complete it. It is usually more effective to book a visit for two or three months ahead and spend the intervening weeks building routines and people where you live.
Is it normal for friendships back home to fade?
Yes, and it is not a failure of loyalty on either side. The friendships that fade are usually the ones that ran on proximity rather than on anything deeper, and maintaining an entire social circle from another country produces shallow contact with everyone rather than real contact with anyone. Most people find that investing properly in two or three relationships works far better than trying to keep twenty alive.
Why do I feel guilty for leaving?
Because guilt and homesickness are different things that arrive together and get confused. Guilt is about not being there: missing birthdays, not helping during a difficult year, enjoying yourself while somebody at home is struggling. It needs a different response from loneliness, which is why more socialising does not shift it. Deciding once that missing things is the cost of the choice, rather than reopening it every time, removes most of the recurring weight.
When should I talk to a counselor about missing home?
The useful test is whether the feeling moves. Ordinary missing-home is situational: it lifts when you are busy or with people and returns in quiet hours. If low feelings are constant rather than situational, persist for weeks without shifting, or are affecting your sleep, your eating and your ability to get through the day, that is worth talking through with a qualified professional rather than waiting out alone.