Change freaks us out—probably even more than public speaking, but it's the sort of amorphous issue that we don't think about because it manifests itself subtly in so many ways. Whether a relationship starts or ends, you're moving, you've got a new job, or you've lost someone you love, change—whether it's good or bad—causes stress. Here's how it works and how to handle it without losing your mind.


"Change" is a broad term, and it can apply to many things. Perhaps you're just moving to a new home or starting a new job, or something awful happens like a death in the family. These events may seem black and white, and not necessarily similar, but they all require adjustment in the way you conduct your day-to-day life. These adjustments cause stress, even when they're positive. Conversely, negative changes can yield positive results. You never know exactly what you're going to get, which often frightens us. Coping with change well, rather than losing your mind, only requires an adjustment on your outlook and a little evidence of surviving various circumstances. In this post, we'll take a look at why your brain resists change and how you can actually change that.

What Is Change, Exactly?

I've been through some pretty big changes in my life, but I'm no professional. To help define the issue of change, and find out the best methods of coping, I consulted relationship and family therapist Roger S. Gil:


For our purposes, let's define change as "a modification to a person's environment, situation, or physical/mental condition that results in circumstances that challenge their existing paradigms." What our definition implies is that humans have a tendency to define how their world is supposed to work. Whenever something happens in our personal world or to our own being that is inconsistent with the way we feel the world should be, we encounter change.

Change comes in many forms in our daily lives. Everyone experiences the pains of being young through puberty and later the pains of being old through inevitable medical issues. We get married, graduate from school, switch careers several times, move across the country, get in terrible accidents, lose our parents, discover hobbies we love that we never knew about, and sometimes even achieve our dreams. Even though we can attribute a default emotion (e.g. happy, sad) to many of these broad examples, Roger notes that the event isn't the only thing that affects how we handle both "good" and "bad" change:

The important thing to keep in mind is that there is a continuum between "positive" and "negative" so not all changes are easily codified as good or bad. In fact, other psychological factors (such as one's temperament, mood, and global IQ) can affect how a person codifies a change along the positive-negative continuum.

On top of that, the event itself often doesn't affect whether or not we feel stress. If anything changes, good or bad, stress will probably result:


Any time we are confronted by an event that is inconsistent with our core beliefs, we will likely feel some level of stress. In fact, a long-used psychometric for measuring stress is the Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale. Most of the items on this scale represent a change in a person's life that is known to lead to some amount of stress. The interesting thing is that many of the items also represent "good" things like dating, marriage, or vacations. In other words, even good change is stressful.

When trying to understand how change affects us, we mostly need to look at three things: 1) the situation itself, 2) our mood/temperament, and 3) how others may affect us. Keep these key factors in mind as we discuss how our brains deal with change and, later, what we can do to override the problems.

Why Change Is So Difficult

Our Brains Expect Certain Things to Stay the Same

In theory, change should be simple. When walking down the street, say come to a construction site and need to change your path. By scanning around the area you should be able to find a detour and follow it to get where you want to go. Inherently, this situation shouldn't cause any stress but our brains offer a number of special quirks that cause us to see things differently. Because we've taken the normal path before, we don't worry that it'll take us where we want to go. When we run into a roadblock, suddenly information we trusted has broken down. Where does the other road lead? How long will it take? Is it dangerous? What we don't know tends to scare us, and change creates a lot of things we don't know. As a result, we tend to act pretty irrationally to try and prevent change, often without realizing it, and make our lives unnecessarily problematic.


While we often fear change when pre-existing information fails us, but the amount of stress can vary greatly. Roger explains:


The earlier you learned something, the harder it is to change. "You can't teach an old dog new tricks" is a saying for a reason.

We Seek Out People Like Us to Avoid Change

Because new information bothers our brains, we tend to find friends and form groups that reinforce our beliefs—whether they're correct or not. When many people agree, it's easy to discount the opinions of others in the face of undeniable logic. This occurs because of a phenomenon known as the illusion of asymmetric insight. David McRaney, writer of the blog and book about self-delusion You Are Not So Smart, explains:




We Hate to Feel Like We Wasted Our Time and Effort




A study (PDF) by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky found that our brain's desire for loss aversion almost always altered our choices even when our other choice was identical. David McRaney explains the study:

Imagine the apocalypse is upon you. Some terrible disease was unleashed in an attempt to cure male pattern baldness. The human population has been reduced to 600 people. Everyone is likely to die without help. As one of the last survivors you meet a scientist who believes he has found a cure, but he isn't sure. He has two versions and can't bear to choose between them. His scientific estimates are exact, but he leaves the choice up to you. Cure A is guaranteed to save exactly 200 people. Cure B has a 1/3 probability of saving 600, but a 2/3 probability of saving no one. The fate of hairlines and future generations is in your hands. Which do you pick? Ok, mark your answer and let's reimagine the scenario. Same setup, everyone is going to die without a cure, but this time if you use Cure C it is certain exactly 400 people will die. Cure D has a 1/3 probability of killing no one, but a 2/3 probability killing 600. Which one?

Most people chose Cure A in the first scenario and Cure D in the second, but both situations presented were actually the same with different framing. The results showed how quickly we flock to the option that minimizes loss—the one with the least perceived change. Because we're so opposed to inciting change, logic can go right out the window.

How to Better Cope With Change

Coping with change isn't that hard. You can't change how your brain works, but you can use its quirks to your advantage. Basically, your brain likes information it knows and understands and doesn't like what it doesn't know. If your brain experiences enough change in a variety of ways, it'll allow you to operate with the understanding that change is something you can survive and even benefit from. You won't fear it so much because the information stored in your head provides evidence that fear is unnecessary. Of course, getting to this point is easier said than done.

Accept the Inevitability of Change and Its Resulting Stress



Rewriting your own "source code" is supposed to be hard. It'll get harder to rewrite over time but if you don't do it, you'll eventually be left with a bunch of useless code that can't run on current platforms. Give yourself permission to feel the change-related distress and all of the associated emotions that come along with it. It sucks but not allowing yourself to process those emotions will prevent you from moving forward. If you don't process them you'll have to isolate yourself from all things that represent the "distressing" change just to be able to function.

Think of Change Like a Software Upgrade


Allow Yourself to Freak Out, But Always Consider the Upside





After enough regular practice, managing change won't feel like such a fearful burden. Shifting gears is rarely easy, but it isn't supposed to be. With practice you'll get better and it won't feel like you're hit with a stress bomb every time your life takes a different turn. The only way the fear and stress will disappear is if you calm down an embrace the unknown.


