Research shows that repats often experience more intense culture shock returning home than that which they initially experienced when they moved abroad. In one survey, 80% of Japanese, 71% of Finnish, 64% of Dutch and 60% of American managers indicated they had a harder time readjusting to their home country than their host country abroad.

So, what’s the answer?

For some, like Ilouz, finding ways to ensure they’ll maintain a relationship with their expat life, the culture of their host country and the friends they have made abroad, has been key in helping with the transition. Ilouz has already reached out to Israelis living in her new city. “I’m going to need someone to commiserate with about the experience there and about what it’s like to change and come somewhere that feels new.”

She’s right to go to such lengths to prepare herself for the move, says Nan Sussman, a professor of psychology at the College of Staten Island, a senior college within The City University of New York, who has studied repatriation.

“Prepare before you come home by talking about how you’ve changed,” she suggests. “Sometimes change and adaptation happen gradually and it’s helpful to spend a little time reflecting on the changes you’ve made during your time abroad.”

She advises asking yourself what elements of your expat experience and your new self you want to retain, and then working to incorporate these into your new daily life.

There’s much you can do to retain links with your former, short-term home to retain your new bicultural identity, Sussman says. “You can read the foreign newspaper, you can watch foreign movies, you can Skype with your friends.”

Several of those interviewed for this article met their spouses, had their children or experienced other significant life events while abroad.

Stefan Sawh spent 10 years working in Dubai, Hong Kong and Malaysia before returning to the UK in 2016 to work for a technology firm in London. He met his wife, a Polish expat, in Dubai, where they had their two children. Now he’s home, communicating via Facebook and meeting up with expat friends in London, or elsewhere in the world, is very important to him, he says.

When you’re abroad, and in the absence of close family and friends, it’s much easier to get to know people, Sawh says. “There’s a lot more socialising, a lot more time spent together,” he says. “It’s like having three or four years of getting to know each other squeezed into a shorter period of time.”

Now living outside of London, the Sawh family enjoy incorporating elements of Hong Kong and Malaysian life into the everyday, for example by cooking Asian food at home and socialising with people native to Hong Kong, but living in London.