Below, Maya Shankar shares five key insights from her new book, The Other Side of Change: Who We Become When Life Makes Other Plans.
Shankar is a cognitive scientist and podcast host. A slight change of plans. She served as a senior policy advisor in the Obama White House, where she founded and chaired the Social and Behavioral Sciences Team. She was also named the first behavioral science advisor to the United Nations.
What’s the big idea?
What if the life upheavals that shake you the most could also be your greatest opportunities? Change may seem like a loss, but it can also be the beginning of a stronger, reinvented self.
Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite, read by Shankar herself, below or on the Next Big Idea app.
1. Our brains are not programmed to like uncertainty.
We tend to dislike uncertainty and a big change can inject a lot of uncertainty into our lives. There is a fascinating scientific study that shows that people become more stressed when they believe they have a 50% chance of receiving an electric shock than when they believe they have a 100% chance. We would rather know that something bad is going to happen than struggle with any ambiguity.
Another reason change is scary is because it involves loss of some kind. By definition, change means that we are moving from an old way of being to a new one. We may discover that, in addition to feeling fear, we also feel deep pain for what we are losing. And when a big change occurs, we can experience the loss of our own identity. We might think, Who am I now that change has taken from me what I once was?
2. A strong and expansive self-identity can make you more resilient to unexpected changes.
As a child, he was a budding concert violinist who studied at Juilliard with Itzhak Perlman. A sudden hand injury ended my dreams of turning pro overnight. I clearly remember the pain, not only the loss of the instrument, but also who I fundamentally was.
Several decades passed and I once again found myself dealing with an unexpected and unwanted change in my personal life. After years of navigating numerous obstacles and disappointments, my husband and I were finally on the verge of starting a family together. But life made other plans. I found myself not only grieving the loss of pregnancies, but also the loss of my identity as a would-be mother.
During these times, I wish someone had given me this guide: Try to define yourself not simply by what you do (roles or labels), but by why you do those things. For example, I discovered that a love of human connection was at the root of my musical and parenting aspirations. I am a person who thrives on emotional connections with others. And just because I lost the violin doesn’t mean I lost what led me to love it in the first place. Now I see that it’s just a matter of finding new outlets to express these parts of me.
For example, I have been able to fulfill my desire for emotional connection through my role as an interviewer for my podcast and by writing this book. It has been liberating and empowering to reimagine myself this way. Anchoring my identity to because specific activities enlighten me, I will give myself a softer landing the next time my that is put at risk. My because It will still be there and can serve as a compass to guide me towards my next chapter.
Ask yourself: What is your why? And can you anchor your identity to it? Research shows it’s possible, and doing a self-affirmation exercise might help. This only takes five or ten minutes. Write down all the identities you value about yourself that are not threatened by change. Doing so can bring you closer to a perspective that reminds you that your identity and self-esteem do not depend solely on what life has taken from you.
3. Distraction can be a healthy and productive coping mechanism.
A narrative that has become ubiquitous, particularly in Western conversations about wellness, is that the only healthy way to get over a bad experience is to confront it completely and immerse yourself in your negative feelings. Otherwise, you run the risk of those emotions resurfacing with greater force in the future. But recent research on resilience reveals a much more complex story.
Individual differences play an important role in determining what constitutes a healthy response. If directly and persistently confronting your negative emotions works for you, stay the course. But if you’re not gravitating toward that method and you’re doing well, or if some combination of addressing and avoiding your negative emotions is your sweet spot, there’s no need to feel guilty or fear that you’ll pay for it later. If something doesn’t keep resurfacing, it’s unlikely that it will suddenly haunt you more intensely years later.
On a related note, if, in the wake of a change, you or your loved ones enter a state of denial, this reaction may be better in the short term. There is a grace in denial, as grief researchers Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and David Kessler say. It’s nature’s way of letting in only what we can handle. Denial can give us a powerful sense of control, motivation, and hope, which is sometimes the lifeline we need to stay resilient during our most difficult times. A research study explored the recovery trajectories of patients with heart problems. Those with high levels of short-term denial spent less time in intensive care and had fewer heart-related symptoms during their hospital stay.
4. Change can serve as a critical moment of revelation.
When something bad happens, we can feel like the world we know has been destroyed and that we are experiencing a personal apocalypse. But apocalypse comes from the Greek word. apocalypsewhich means “revelation.” This etymology is instructive. Change can upset us, but it can also reveal things to us. The unique demands and stresses of change can reveal surprising things about who we are. Ideas that, once revealed, we can use to challenge our self-limiting beliefs or guide our path forward.
Two stories come to mind from people I interviewed for my book. In one, the lingering impact of a bicycle accident revealed to a woman named Ingrid how much shame she had been carrying regarding her family’s heritage and indigenous practices. Once he understood this, he was able to rework his relationship with his belief system and challenge his own negative attitudes. In another, a woman named Tara had a deeply insecure attachment style and was forced to confront this aspect of herself when facing a major change in midlife. Dealing with this change gave him the drive to take slow, deliberate steps to open up to others and let them in. Over time, you have built a life that is overflowing with love and filled with deep, secure relationships.
Many aspects of our own identity are much more malleable than we realize. Tara’s experience has been corroborated by recent research showing that early childhood experiences are much less predictive of adult attachment styles than researchers previously thought. We can take active steps to reshape our attachment styles in adulthood.
5. We are bad at predicting how we will respond to big changes.
When we anticipate how we will respond to change, we falsely assume that in the future we will be the same person we are today. This psychological bias is known as illusion of the end of historyand captures the idea that our brains reliably underestimate how much will change in the future, even though we fully recognize that we have changed considerably in the past.
We are always changing and a major alteration in our lives can accelerate these internal changes. Simply put, when a big change happens to us, it can lead to a profound change from within. We become different people on the other side of change.
We become different people because of the experiences we endure. For this reason, you may be able to withstand a negative change much better than you first think, and that is because you are underestimating your own ability to evolve as a result of that change. The relevant question to ask yourself is not: How will I face this change? Rather, how will I approach this change, with potentially new capabilities, values, and perspectives?
Overall, the people I have interviewed over the years have felt deep gratitude and awe at the person they became after what they went through. Personally, I was skeptical about it at first. I like to say that I have two allergies: soy and topicals. But surprisingly, as I was writing this book and going through my own personal change, I witnessed this evolution within myself on the other side of the change.
What if we started to see major disruptions as an opportunity to reinvent ourselves? Change holds many opportunities and my hope is that you will come to feel the same.
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This article originally appeared in Next big ideas club magazine and is reprinted with permission.