In my first week in Madrid, I found out how long my brain could last in Spanish: one hour.
After exactly one hour of speaking it, I felt a full-body exhaustion, and that number became my benchmark for what has now been over 16 years living in Spain. Even if my fluency has increased and the time has extended, one hour is still the benchmark I keep arriving at whenever I plan a day that requires me to speak in a language I didn’t grow up speaking.
Without realizing it, that hour was about more than translating. My body was tense, bracing slightly. I was concentrating far harder than I ever do in English, my native language, because the words were only part of the work. I was also watching the other person’s body language and listening for their tone, trying to catch what they meant underneath what they said, and parsing through more natural jerga or slang. Translating words directly is not the same as translating meaning, and I was doing both at once.
Later my Spanish improved, and I started doing adult things without anyone translating or coming along with me: a doctor’s appointment, the post office, a bureaucratic form. For those, I brought a notebook. On the metro or the bus, I’d write down the key phrases I would need, so they would come out naturally instead of being invented on the spot.
The notebook gave me a feeling of security, and a sense that I would be understood. If my accent slipped or a word tripped, the risk to me being perceived as “less than” or “different” became lower. I had limited time with the doctor or the person behind the desk, and I knew I needed to get my point across efficiently and credibly.
Afterward I could breathe easier. It reminds me of when I would get ready before a recital to sing or play piano, or before a sports competition at school: the tension, the performance, then the calm and the sigh of relief.
That’s probably where I noticed the low-grade hum most specifically, long before it became the focus of my research.
The low-grade hum is the background effort of ordinary things in a language and culture that aren’t quite yours, with part of your attention on how you are coming across. You mostly notice it by what happens when it stops.
Where the low-grade hum appears
In my conversations with long-term expats and migrants, I've learned that this hum lives in small places. At the supermarket there is an extra calculation running under the transaction: the right word, and the rhythm of the queue. Before opening an envelope or an online portal in a language that was never your first, there is a slight bracing sensation: a tension between the eyebrows, a slow creep of your shoulders toward your ears, a familiar flutter of nerves in your stomach.
Each of these is tiny, and none of them would register as a problem on its own. Over the years it becomes the ambient sound of your days abroad, and you stop noticing it because it has become the baseline.
Recently, I wanted to confirm my online appointment for the Spanish DELE exam, and called the school hotline to double-check what to bring with me on the day of the test. Before I dialed, I was rehearsing the Spanish questions I’d need to ask, keeping my email confirmation in front of me as I spoke on the phone, already noticing a tightness between my shoulders at the possibility the operator would correct me or that I’d broken some invisible rule. The call lasted under three minutes. The person on the other end was kind and had a sense of humor. If I did make a mistake, she answered good-naturedly and didn’t draw any attention to it. But my body behaved the whole time as if something significant was at stake.
Under the language there is the reading of the room: tone, posture, what the other person or the room seems to expect. I’ve written about cultural code-switching and about the small edits people living abroad make to their story before they hand it over to others. Those are things I still do. The hum is what runs underneath while I do them.
What the research shows
A version of the same sentence keeps coming up in my conversations: by any measure, I’ve figured it out, and I don’t understand why it still feels hard. The housing is sorted and the work is real. The hum doesn’t track any of that.
The people I’ve spoken to reach for different words:
One described being a few beats out of step in conversations with locals, composing a reply after the conversation had already moved on.
Another described feeling slightly offshore in their own life.
Another, about a decade into life in their second language, still braces slightly in technical conversations that need more complex vocabulary than they’d usually use.
Another described the hum as a “personal frequency” and said that once they stopped fighting it, it became grounding instead of an alarm.
There is related research on cumulative strain. Allostatic load describes the wear that builds when the body is under sustained challenge.1 It wasn’t developed with migrants or expats in mind, and it’s the closest clinical research I’ve come across to describe the hum.
My research is still ongoing, and this low-grade hum is one of the patterns that keeps returning.
Why it deserves a name
I’m a counsellor-in-training, not a clinician. This essay describes an experience so that it has a word, and it isn’t a diagnosis. If it’s affecting your health, a licensed professional is the right person to talk to.
What I can say is that every time I share the term in my research interviews, nearly every participant’s face, regardless of location or lived experience, immediately lights up with recognition. Followed by something along the lines of, “Oh, that’s what it is!” or a sigh of relief that what they were experiencing wasn’t all in their head. Another interview participant shared that their health scare was the wake-up call that led them to name the low-grade hum they’d been experiencing. Two people in a workshop I ran earlier this year also responded to the term by tracing their physical health challenges back to their own versions of the hum (forms, landlords, cultural context, and uncertainty while navigating life abroad).
These days, for me, the hum is quieter in some places and louder in others. I notice it most when I’m walking away from an interaction in my second language where the stakes were higher, and I feel my shoulders drop slightly.
I still keep track of the hour.
One place to name the hum out loud
What I've come to value, in my own life and in my work, is having at least one place where you don't have to explain what you’re experiencing, where you find someone who can put words to feelings you didn’t even know were yours to carry. Sometimes those spaces take longer to find.
An Expat Orientation Conversation is one version of a room where you can sit with whatever you’re carrying — without having to explain it all first. It’s a 60-minute, one-to-one, non-clinical conversation for sense-making in long-term life abroad. It takes your experience and context into account from the start. It isn’t therapy, treatment or advice, just a confidential space to explore what you might not have realized was humming away beneath the surface.
If you’re not sure whether a full Expat Orientation Conversation is the right next step, you can book a 25-minute exploration call and get a sense of whether this space fits the story you’re writing abroad.
Let’s keep walking the edges together.
Onward,
Kay✨
Who’s behind Edgewalkers Collective?
I’m Kay — Filipina American TCK (Third Culture Kid), based in Spain since 2010, and a counsellor‑in‑training (CPCAB, UK). I spent over a decade working in inclusion and cross‑cultural strategy, helping organizations bridge cultures. I was good at it. I was also quietly burning out from being the bridge. Now I’m training to offer something different: recognition‑based support for expats and global citizens who are done being told they should feel lucky to be here.
If you’d like a sense of what working together could look like, you can read more on the Work With Me page.
If you want access to the guided audios and quarterly pattern reports from my long-term life abroad research I send to paid subscribers, you’re welcome to upgrade your subscription at any time.
Pfaltz, Monique C, and Ulrich Schnyder. “Allostatic Load and Allostatic Overload: Preventive and Clinical Implications.” Psychotherapy and psychosomatics vol. 92,5 (2023): 279-282. DOI:10.1159/000534340.