Why More Nomads Are Choosing to Move Less

There's a quiet shift happening in how digital nomads actually live — and it doesn't quite fit the story we usually tell about them.

The image is familiar: laptop on a new desk every few weeks, a different city skyline outside the window, life organized around the thrill of motion. But the data from MBO Partners' 2025 Digital Nomad Report tells a different story. The average nomad now stays at each location for 6.4 weeks — up from 5.7 weeks in 2024 and 5.4 in 2023. They're also visiting fewer places overall: 6.2 destinations per year, down from 7.2 in 2023. The report notes, almost in passing, that longer stays correlate with better work productivity. It doesn't explain why.

That "why" is worth sitting with.

The Hidden Cost of Starting Over

Picture someone — call her Maya — who's been nomadic for two years. She arrives in a new city on a Sunday, finds a flat, figures out the neighborhood. Monday morning, she opens her laptop at a café she's never been to. The wifi is fine. The coffee is good. She intends to work.

But first: Is this seat too close to the speaker? Will it get louder at noon? Is that couple next to her about to leave, or staying all day? Where's the bathroom? Is there a better spot near the window?

None of these are significant questions. But they all get processed — and that processing has a cost.

Cognitive load theory, developed by psychologist John Sweller, offers a useful frame here. When we're in familiar environments, the brain draws on existing mental schemas — compressed, efficient representations built from repeated experience. A regular café, a known desk, a predictable morning routine: these require almost no active processing. The environment runs in the background.

In an unfamiliar environment, that shortcut doesn't exist. Every detail that hasn't been catalogued yet demands a small piece of working memory — the brain's limited, moment-to-moment processing space. The environment moves to the foreground. And working memory, once occupied, is less available for actual work.

Research published in Experimental Psychology (Cotton, Sandry & Ricker, 2024) found that remote participants reported significantly more mind-wandering and worse secondary task performance than in-person participants — and that task engagement, rather than effort, was the stronger predictor of performance. In other words: it's not that people in unfamiliar or unstructured environments aren't trying. It's that a larger portion of their cognitive resources is quietly going elsewhere.

The Familiarity Dividend

This is the part nomads don't often talk about: settling in isn't just rest. It's investment.

Every week spent in the same place is a week of schema-building. The café becomes a known quantity. The walk there becomes automatic. The afternoon light, the noise level, the wifi dead zones — all of it gets filed away. What once required active processing starts running quietly in the background, freeing up working memory for the work itself.

A study on working memory and environmental familiarity found that subjects in unfamiliar testing environments showed significantly reduced working memory capacity compared to familiar ones — not because the environment was worse, but simply because it was new. Familiarity, in cognitive terms, is a resource.

This is what the MBO Partners data is likely picking up on. Nomads who stay longer aren't just more relaxed. They're operating with a cognitive advantage that shorter-stay nomads repeatedly give up and have to rebuild.

Slowing Down as Strategy

"Slomading" — the practice of staying longer at fewer destinations — is sometimes framed as a more mature, settled phase of nomadic life. The implication being that you've outgrown the need for constant movement.

That framing undersells what's actually happening. The shift toward longer stays isn't about losing appetite for travel. Nomad satisfaction scores remain high; most say they plan to continue. What's changing is something more practical: a growing awareness that mobility has a cognitive tax, and that tax compounds.

Every new city means a new round of environmental processing. Every unfamiliar workspace means less working memory available from the start. Do it often enough, and it's not the travel that wears you down — it's the constant state of cognitive setup. The brain, without any grand declaration, starts voting for stability with behavior.

Slomading is the result. Not a compromise, but a recalibration.

What This Actually Means for How We Work

The nomad lifestyle was built on a premise: with the right tools and enough discipline, you can work from anywhere. That's largely true. But "can work" and "work well" aren't the same thing, and the gap between them often lives in the setup cost that doesn't show up on any productivity tracker.

The question worth asking isn't how to push through that cost — it's how to reduce it. Not through more willpower, but through better structure: routines that travel with you, environments that become familiar faster, working systems that don't require rebuilding from scratch every time you move.

At Mukiya, this is how we think about mobile work — not as a portability problem, but as a stability problem. The goal isn't to work from everywhere equally. It's to carry enough consistency with you that the cognitive setup cost stays low, and the work can start from something resembling a known state.

Fewer cities, longer stays, slower pace: the data suggests nomads are figuring this out on their own. The instinct is sound. The brain knows what it needs, even when the culture says otherwise.

References

MBO Partners. (2025). 2025 Digital Nomads Trends Report: A Niche Workforce Becomes Mainstream.

Cotton, K., Sandry, J., & Ricker, T. J. (2024). "The effects of mind-wandering, cognitive load, and task engagement on working memory performance in remote online experiments." Experimental Psychology.

Sweller, J. (1988). "Cognitive load during problem solving: Effects on learning." Cognitive Science, 12(2).

Wöstmann, M., Waschke, L., & Obleser, J. (2020). "Prestimulus neural excitability and the vulnerability of working memory to distraction." Neuropsychologia.

Bonfanti, A. et al. (2025). "Place Matters at Work: A Systematic Review of Workplace Attachment and Environmental Factors." Business Ethics, the Environment & Responsibility.