Montenegro for an Anxious Person

For two years in Moscow I lived at a pace that felt like the norm. Morning was already a race. The day was a to-do list that never ended, even when the day itself did. I didn't notice that anxiety had become the background noise of my life; it was simply always on, as if that were my natural state.

Then I moved to Montenegro.

The first thing I felt was that time here is different. Not in the sense of time zones, but in how people relate to it. In Moscow, time is a resource you have to spend efficiently. In Montenegro, time is something you simply live inside. People here don't rush, and it isn't laziness, it's a different relationship to the day. Coffee isn't drunk "in between things," it's its own event. A conversation with a neighbor can take twenty minutes, and no one checks their watch.

It took me a while to stop treating this slowness as somehow suspicious. In the first months I kept catching myself thinking, how do they get anything done? And then I understood: they get done exactly what needs doing. It's just that their sense of "needing" is built differently. They have a rhythm in which slowing down isn't a malfunction but part of the system. And it works.

For someone with anxiety, this turned out to be almost therapy I never asked for.

Anxiety often feeds on the feeling that you're falling behind, that time is slipping away faster than you can react. But when you're surrounded by an entire culture living at another tempo, anxiety starts losing its footing. There's simply nowhere to rush to: restaurants don't hurry you, buses arrive "when they arrive," and conversations don't get cut off mid sentence.

I can't say Montenegro "cured" my anxiety, that would be too simple. But it gave me something important: a space in which I could finally hear myself. Without the constant hum of hurry in the background, I began noticing things that used to slip past me in Moscow, how the light changes in the evening, how a city sounds when it isn't running anywhere.

I think this is what many anxious people need, not the advice to "just relax," which never helps, but an environment that makes it physically impossible to stay in constant tension. Montenegro didn't teach me to slow down. It simply showed me that life can be lived this way too, and that there is far more of me in this way of living than there ever was in the endless race.

Sometimes the strongest thing a place can do for a person is simply give them back to themselves.

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