Published on 12, July, 2020
Hi everyone
My wife and I are currently selling our house and looking to buy somewhere else. It's a decision we made together and have discussed loads, and it's definitely something I want to do, but it's making me feel so anxious.
I'm particularly struggling with the uncertainty of not knowing what our next home will be, and it feels scary to have to sell ours before being able to offer on somewhere else.
It's really affecting my day-to-day, I just feel unsettled and weird all the time to the extent that I called in sick to work.
Any advice on how to shake this feeling or make this process easier?
Thank you
We sold and moved out in December of last year, the whole process caused anxiety. We are moving about 230 miles from where we have always live to Cornwall. What we have done is to move in with family for a year, it has given us time to find the perfect house and not to be confined by dates.
We recently moved house and I too felt really weird, anxious and upset for a long time, before, during and after moving. What worked at the end for me was just getting used to the new place over time, it took atleast one month I think. And maybe listing good aspects of the new place helped too, cause I was specifically upset about the many many design flaws of our new house.
Emily said:It's really affecting my day-to-day, I just feel unsettled and weird all the time
It helps to try to frame it as an adventure - something that lets you clear out all the clutter and junk you have built up over the years to streamline what "stuff" is in your life, and also to find somewhere that is more like the place you really want.
The whole chain of buying / selling is so common that most homeowners have done it at some stage - I personally tend to sell without a chain (it makes it much more attractive to buyers), move into rent for 6-12 months while I find a new place to buy then renovate the new place before moving into it.
Not the most common approach but it means I know where I'm going at any stage.
Uncertainty is commonplace in life so it helps to focus on the known things - who you will be staying with, the fact that you will be cash rich (even if briefly) so can always do something wild like travel the world with everything in storage (done that!) and that all your stuff will be there in storage for when you are ready in the new place.
It may be worth considering some anti anxiety meds for this process if it is impacting your work - losing your job for poor attendance is not something you want to add to the stresses.
It's so stressful isn't it!
That's a good idea, until we've bought somewhere I struggle to imagine what it might look like so planning the decoration could help. We're staying in the same village thankfully so no change in terms of location.
I've moved house many times and I feel the same way, unsettled, scared, anxious, have nigthmares etc, it's not just an autistic thing either, moving house is in the top three most stressful things in life, along with divorce and death of a partner.
If you're buying then maybe making a mood board of the type of house you want, how you want to decorate it, maybe different types of decoration for different houses? Are you staying in the same area or moving somewhere totally new?