Sleeping badly abroad: when insomnia settles in

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"I go to bed exhausted, but my mind will not stop." "I wake at four in the morning and start thinking straight away." "I sleep, but I wake more tired than when I lay down." These complaints repeat, almost word for word, among people living abroad. It is not coincidence: life abroad brings together several of the conditions research links to insomnia.

Why sleep gets worse abroad

Sleep is the first to pay the bill for overload. People living abroad often work demanding or shift hours — hospitality, construction, healthcare, cleaning, factories — which scramble the body clock. Add constant worry (work, documents, money, family back home), which finds in the silence of night its favourite stage.

There are less obvious factors too: the phone in bed acting as a bridge to home until late, the difference in daylight through northern European winters, and the bedroom itself — which in many migration journeys is shared, noisy or temporary. Sleeping well requires safety and predictability; living abroad, especially in the early years, offers little of either.

Signs your sleep needs attention

• Consistently taking more than 30 minutes to fall asleep, with your mind reviewing problems.
• Waking in the middle of the night or early hours and not managing to get back to sleep.
• Tiredness, irritability and lapses in concentration during the day, affecting your work.
• Relying on pills, alcohol or total exhaustion in order to sleep.

What you can start doing

Some measures genuinely help: regular bed and waking times (even at weekends, even on shifts, as far as possible), keeping the bed for sleep — worries and the phone stay out of it — limiting caffeine from the afternoon onwards, and a wind-down period before bed without screens. If you wake and do not fall back asleep within twenty minutes, it is better to get up and do something calm in low light than to lie there fighting the clock.

When to seek professional help

If insomnia persists despite these changes, the reference treatment is psychological: Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I), with demonstrated long-term effectiveness superior to medication. Hypnotherapy can be a useful complement in reducing the arousal that blocks sleep. And when insomnia comes with anxiety or depression, a psychiatric assessment allows the whole picture to be treated. All of this can be done online, in English or Portuguese, fitted around your hours — even if you work shifts.