How Long Does It Take To Get Past Moving Depression And Feel Happy In A New Place?

One part of military life that we do not talk about enough is the moving depression that comes with moving over and over and over again.

Then there is also the moving ANXIETY, which may actually be inescapable, but I think it all goes hand in hand. You are going to have stress with moving, and sometimes you are going to feel down too. The feeling depressed part can come and go and take a long time to get past.

When you are constantly changing the setting and ENTIRE cast of characters in your life again and again in short time spans, that is exhausting. Also, it leaves you without a very solid support system for a while.

We have been a military family for over twenty years. In that time, we have moved twelve times, with all of our household goods.

Some of the moves were for only nine months. The longest we have lived anywhere was three years. There have been two houses that we got to live in for three years. I love it when they let us stay for longer amounts of time.

I tell you all of that so you know where I am coming from when I talk about moving depression. I have had many different experiences with moving depression.

You may not even realize that moving depression is a thing, but it most definitely is. It does not happen with every single move, but it probably happens with most of them for me. It is not always displayed the same way, but it is usually there.

So what is “moving depression” exactly?

At its core, moving depression is one kind of situational depression. It is feeling sad, alone, despondent, or overwhelmed by the circumstances that result from a major move.

Don’t let people belittle you if you experience moving depression. That just means they do not know your struggle. It is the most normal thing in the world to take a long time to adjust to living in a new place, especially a whole new city or state or even country where you may have never been before and not know anyone.

The Many Reasons Why Moving Can Make us Feel Depressed, Stressed, and in Need of Hibernation:

There are a billion reasons that moving is hard. Oh, this is an easy list to make. Gracious.

-First, you have to say good-bye to an entire support system in the place that you are leaving.

-You lose all of your friends and family from your last place. One day a moving truck comes, and boom. All of the daily characters are wiped out of your life. Sure, you can call them, but gradually you will see and hear from them less and less. Most of them you will never see again.

-Often, your kids are sad to leave their school and friends. So then you have guilt because you feel like you have caused your family sadness.

– You lose all of your dentists, doctors, hair stylists, job, church, grocery store everything. All the places you “always go”, gone.

-Moving is extremely expensive, adding a financial strain to it all.

-By the way it is the 2020s, and there are not enough houses for people in the summer moving season, so you need to pay way more than you would normally pay for a four bedroom, two bath house. In fact, good luck even finding one.

-After four months of looking, you finally find a house and sign for it. Now you must line up movers that work for your closing date and your lease dates and……

Y’all! This list is too depressing to even finish. Point is, you have a billion reasons to feel like a stressed out declawed cat surrounded by twelve barking dogs.

I did not even get to the part where you have to call all the utility people, get the fifty billion forms to enroll your children into a new school, and try to come up with a name for the emergency contact blank. Heaven forbid you also need to go find a new job. I quit even trying to do that ten moves ago.

Then once the dust settles on your move, there you are, a loner in a new place with no friends, kids who are nervous about their new school, and missing everything and everyone you left behind.

And maybe you are like me and you find yourself getting lost all the time.

I am so amazed at people who move all the time and how we get through this without any public nervous breakdowns, or at least very few.

Let’s pause to give ourselves a hug and pat on the back. Great job!!!!

The Different Ways We Experience Moving Depression:

Now this is the part I actually wanted to talk about. This can be so different, but usually there is some element of tired sadness. You feel tired, wistful, maybe a little hopeless and alone, like it is just you versus the world. There are a billion new things that you have no idea about.

“How do I register my kids for school?” Oh, okay, they do it differently than at our last town, of course.

“Where should we go to church? Why are they dressed so differently here?”

“It is September. How is it already cold? We need to go to the store because I do not even know where anyone’s pants are.” (That one happened to us in DC back in 2009.)

“Why can’t I find a decent Mexican restaurant? Man, I miss Texas.”

Another thing for me is I feel like I often am on the outside for a long time, and I need to be on my best behavior to win over the locals. Ha!

My motto over the last six years has been, “Oh well, we’ll win ’em in the end.” I say this when I have a feeling no one likes me at all, or that people have me all wrong, which my paranoid brain is always sure of.

It is so nice when we get to move back to a place where we have already lived, like here. We have lived in the same area three times, so I deal with many of these things a lot less here. I actually still have friends! Hurray!

Our very first major move as a married couple was to Texas. On our way to our new base, we learned Alan was getting deployed. We heard it on the radio!!! I had to pull over on the side of the road and cry it out.

Then we had all those deployment feelings we were dealing with more so than just moving struggles. We still had the moving stuff to deal with. It was just eclipsed by learning we’d spend our first year of marriage apart. You can read more about that whole story here.

Our next two moves went much more smoothly, and I did not deal with moving depression.

That is wonderful! I am thankful for those moves. Alan was able to be around, and we had a new baby we were excited about. It was just different.

When we were young, the excitement of it all numbed a lot of the hard things. I was not worried about my kids yet, as babies were happy any where so long as their needs were met.

Then came the recruiting job.

We thought moving to Alabama would be all roses and rainbows. That is where we are from, but it most certainly wasn’t. It was still four hours from my parents, and Alan was at work from before I woke up in the morning until 9 o’clock at night!

If the Army offers you recruiting, my advice is to try to avoid it at all costs.

I was so sad and lonely there, and I was always on the verge of tears.

Two things got me through those two years:

Alan talked his dental hygienist, who also went to our church, into calling me and inviting me to go walking with her. See, I have always enjoyed walking.

So then I had a friend.

Then a year later, I gave birth to Caleb. Having two babies to take care of, plus by then we had been in place for a solid year, snapped me out of my misery. I was too busy figuring out how to meet this new huge challenge to be depressed.

Oh! And side note, Flylady.net was a life saver for figuring out how to keep house with two babies under two.

Other Moves

For my other moves, I just had phases where I would be too busy and overwhelmed to be sad, followed by loneliness or feeling lost or like I did not belong.

After the 9th move, I began to just be sick of moving. There were five years there that we moved four times, and that was HARD. I wrote all about that 9th move here.

I just feel like a less energetic, less enthusiastic, sadder more worried version of myself the first year after moving. That is mostly how I experience moving depression.

Often I can only get so much done in any given day when I am still overwhelmed from the move. That is okay. One thing at a time is all we can do anyway, and sometimes we all need some time to zone out, especially when dealing with such huge changes.

“Though youths grow weary and tired, And vigorous young men stumble badly, Yet those who wait for the LORD Will gain new strength; They will mount up with wings like eagles, They will run and not grow tired, They will walk and not become weary.”

Isaiah 40:31

When Does it End Already???

For most moves, I begin to feel “settled in” by the end of the first year. That is only a surface level “settled in” though. I am not fully enmeshed into a community until the end of the second year. Then just when I begin to feel pretty happy in a place with a full network of people, the Army moves us again.

All of these things took even longer from 2019-2021 because our state shut down so hard that there were no opportunities to meet people. Everything was cancelled, even school. Remember that? So that made for a special level of difficulty.

So basically, it takes about two years to put down some roots in a new town and fully belong in that place.

Two moves ago, I remember six months was a good turning point for me.

You can read more about that here. At six months, I was finally at a place where I knew some people’s names and had earned a seat at the table with a few people. Having someone to sit with is such a big milestone when you have moved.

How long the moving depression lasts depends on who you meet, what is going on in your life, and what is going on with the rest of your family.

These days the hardest part for me is if any of my children are struggling. I cannot have total peace with the move if they are not adjusting well to their new school or able to make friends and feel okay.

Two years seems to be a big deal for me. By two years, I tend to like most places and feel fully back to being myself.

Right now we are six months into the last move, and I still am not sure where I have placed some of our things. At Christmas, we gave up on finding the Christmas stockings and used gift bags!

I think all those feelings of frustration over not finding things adds to the moving anxiety and depression too. There are just so many frustrations to work through!!

How We Get Through the Feelings:

#1. Always look for hope.

You must get out and go if you want to connect to your community. Everywhere we go, we look for places where we might potentially belong.

When we go to church, we think about where we might want to serve there or what class we want to be a part of.

At the boys’ schools, we look around for people we would like to meet.

In our neighborhood, we try to meet the neighbors, especially the ones with kids the same ages as our kids.

We are always looking for hope in the form of places where we have potential friendships.

#2. Commit to something, but not too many things.

Definitely do not even try to join all the things. Look for just one thing to start out with to commit to. This time I committed to helping with the college class at our church here. Last time we lived here, I committed to volunteering at school.

I do not always do the same things at each place. The variety is one of the perks of moving.

Being committed to something helps tie me to the new town and become a part of the community. Plus, I am a little shy, so I need to show up at that same spot about a dozen times before I feel comfortable enough to relax and talk to people.

#3. Have an old friend or family member who you miss come for a visit.

This one is a life saver if you are struggling hard with moving depression. Someone you miss can come and lift your spirits like no one else can.

When we moved to Maryland in 2019, I had a very hard time with this, and so did our children. The Lord saw our hardship and enabled THREE different visits for us in one month, just about four months after we moved. It was a total life saver. These visits gave us the big scoop of joy that we needed to continue forging our way forward in our new path.

I wrote all about the magic of visits here.

#4. Prayer!!!

It is easy to forget to pray about your most practical problems. Adjusting to a move is an extremely practical issue. It is a challenge you are working through. Pray for help from God. Maybe he will send you exactly what you need. He has bailed me out of a great many scrapes in life, and He has provided me some amazing friends at our different duty stations.

#5. Call someone and talk it out.

Whether it is your mom or a good friend who likes to talk on the phone, some times you just need to call someone.

#6. Throw yourself into the task of setting up your new house.

Unpacking is one thing, but turning your house into a pleasant, decorated, and organized home where you know where everything is is a whole other thing. I love trying to get a house just how I like it. It always takes me at least a year to do this.

#7. Get out and explore your new area with your family.

You have more time than ever to do this when you first move because you probably are not getting invited to anything. Ha! So while you have no friends, make your family your friends and get out and explore. Even quiet, land-locked areas usually at least have a state park or cute shopping area. There is always something to go see.

#8. Look for local Facebook groups you can join to connect with more people like yourself.

And while you’re at it, do not be shy about friending all the new people you meet on whatever social media you use the most. This will make you feel so much more connected.

#9. Make your world as small as possible.

Try to find everything you get involved with in the same community area. If your church and your school and your rec center are all fairly close together, this increases the odds of you seeing some faces in more than one place. You are far more likely to become friends with people you see more frequently.

We had one move where we were able to send our kids to school at the same place where we attended church. That was incredibly helpful.

When we cannot afford to use private schools, we use a school and a church that are both near our house. Many people at our church live in our same neighborhood, which automatically can give you a deeper connection. The more you see people, the closer you become to them.

#10. Try not to turn down invitations.

I mean you will basically be getting zero invitations for a while when you first move to a place. Find a church to get involved in and attend any fellowship they offer!

Go to any functions your kids’ schools offer.

This can be extra hard if your depression is already setting in because our brains like to protect us and stay home to avoid further hurt. But that is extremely counterintuitive. So often what we want is the opposite of what we NEED. What we need is not always what is easy. Make yourself get out and meet people. Yes, it will be so awkward, but do it. Your future self will thank you.

In conclusion, feeling some degree of moving depression is extremely normal.

But please know that there are a lot of ways to get through this and that you are not alone. That can be one of the best parts of the Facebook groups. You can find other military wives who are in your same situation on there sometimes, especially if you can find a group affiliated with your duty station.

I have dealt with the sad feelings that come with moving so many times. I can remember just sitting and looking at my “Virginia” plate on display and crying. Even worse was the time my toddler saw a photo of his grandaddy and sat at the front door of our house and cried to go see him, but we had just moved five states away.

It can be heartbreaking.

But I promise there IS light at the end of the tunnel. Sometimes it feels like a sudden thing, but usually it is more gradual. Bit by bit, you pull out of it and begin to feel like yourself again, a better version of yourself who has seen and been through more things and is better able to relate to more people.

You will have friends again, I promise. And one day you will even feel sad to leave your new place, if you move again. Keep trudging on, one step at a time.

Sometimes you have to make yourself put one foot in front of the other and march through your day. Trust God that he will take care of you, and watch a good comedy movie that will help lift you up. There is something powerful in laughter, even when it is at Will Ferrell.

Here are other helpful articles I have written about moving and settling into a new place.

Actually, I have written a ton of articles about moving between three different websites, but you can find 75 of my articles about moving here. I am not even exaggerating. Wow, I had no idea I had written that many. Now I am beginning to wonder if I would know how to function if I were not moving all the time. Ha! It is apparently my part-time job.