A few days ago I co-led a training to a roomful of 20- and 30-something nuclear engineers from China, in the U.S. on a job-shadow program. They had been in the U.S. for about a week. The first thing we had them do, after brief introductions, was, in small groups, to list out on a flipchart the biggest challenges they had been facing since arriving in the U.S.

In all there were nine groups. The first challenge listed by six of them? Food.

I knew how they must be feeling, and my heart went out to them. In the course of our everyday adult lives, we may be challenged with food in many ways — What to cook for dinner? Where to eat out? Will I decline that second cookie? — but rarely do we fear that we might actually not get to eat food that we enjoy eating. That’s culture shock at its most bodily.

One of my favorite conceptual tools for thinking about culture shock is Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. While it’s been rightfully critiqued as oversimplified and to some extent culturally specific, the basic insight is brilliant, and applies beautifully to culture shock. The most common way of representing the hierarchy is as a pyramid:

As adults, as we navigate our various work and life circles, we mostly bounce around in Levels 3 and 4, and may even have glimpses of Level 5. That’s only, though, because we slogged through childhood and adolescence. It is one of the great privileges of adulthood, one which we take for granted.

Being thrown into an unfamiliar culture is like pulling the floor out from Level 3: suddenly we are again worried about survival — if not literal survival, then at least the question of exactly how we will meet our most basic bodily needs, and whether we will be able to do so in familiar ways. No matter how brilliant or accomplished a person is, brain activity shifts from the “higher” areas such as the pre-frontal cortex to the “lower” areas such as the amygdala. We become frightened and disoriented in ways we might not have felt since childhood. Looking around for the cause of our pain, we land on the only reasonable target: those people and their unsavory habits.

Intercultural training can lighten the load by identifying the issue and helping people realize it’s completely natural to respond this way, but in the end we all have to push through it.

The engineers I met the other day have just begun a journey. It is so moving when a group of human beings in need, like this group, open up their hearts and minds to other ways of thinking and doing. This softening, when treated with care and compassion, opens up vast territory for understanding and growth. For the engineers, when they have lifted themselves back up the pyramid, haltingly and falteringly, but steadily, they will have a vast new set of skills and tools which they can then pass on to others. This is our best hope as a species.

And the good news for humanity doesn’t stop there: the nuclear plants they run will be safer, and their companies will make more money for running safe plants. Kudos to the client company for seeing the big picture and making the training happen.