Why is changing so hard

This is when we experience detrimental effects, or distress. Our hearts beat faster, and vascular resistance makes it harder to push blood through our circulatory system. In other words, our physiological resources are not efficiently mobilized. We also are likely to experience negative emotions like feeling anxious or frustrated.

During eustress, our bodies also respond efficiently. Our hearts still beat faster, but now with a decrease in vascular resistance, meaning blood can flow throughout the circulatory system with greater ease.

We either feel more positive or at the very least, less bad in the face of the change we are experiencing. The bottom line: Whether you perceive significant change moments in your life as a threat or as a challenge greatly alters your emotional, physical, and mental experiences.

In general, mindsets reflect how we see things, and they impact both our beliefs and our behaviors. Interestingly, our behaviors impact our mindsets, too, so by practicing specific actions we can help shift our mindsets to be more agile in the face of change.

Explicit exposure to the scientific knowledge increased acceptability of the innovation. Dinner, Isaac, Eric J. Johnson, Daniel G. Goldstein, and Kaiya Liu. Johnson, Eric J. De Wijk, and Hans C. Van Trijp. She received her Ph. She is interested in the fields of character and leadership development, medical decision making, education, and human-centered design.

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Society Environment. Download Icon arrow right white color. It also requires new energy levels for maintaining the process. For a change to happen we need to accept it. Not only by logical reasons, but also through the act of facing our fears that will surface on the way. We also need to give ourselves permission to make errors, choose suboptimal strategies and solve problems inefficiently.

This means we grant ourselves permission to learn even if these are baby steps. Such an emotional preparation will allow us to embrace the change together with the underlying process. We want a quick fix without hard work. We want to become fit, healthy or wealthy overnight or in to weeks, let it be a month but no more, ok? This is again related to our inborn difficulty to think and predict trends long term. We are good at short term perspectives choosing an immediate gain oversleeping, eating cakes, drinking coffee, buying stuff , etc over the delayed gratification.

And for these reasons, we will succumb to marketers who offer us shortcuts: one click to become a millionaire, a pill to a perfect body or a car for a perfect self-esteem. Yet, change is a process. And we need to understand this fact. Change is difficult because we focus on the negative aspects of the change.

We follow a wrong strategy. Effectively, we want to uncreate the very thing we have, but instead we usually add more features. As we know from experience, when we have a poor product or a computer program then adding more features or creating fixes will usually not lead to a better product as a result. We will only get a complex solution, overcomplicated for the tasks to be done, counterintuitive, having too many preferences and unclear choices to be made.

And perhaps even conflicts between the existing features. It is much easier to create a new product from the scratch with the essential features only. It is then well-thought and optimized for the task, hence simple, fast and working like a charm. The same applies to a change. If you focus on uncreating your unwanted habits by introducing fixes, you are likely opening yourself to pain and frustration. You need to replace one habit with another. But this is often difficult too.

The right approach is to focus on creating a new product — the New You. It is much easier to imagine the person you want to become and set up the conscious habits from the scratch that correspond to the You 2. This requires a cultivation of an ideal self-image, setting up right values and right beliefs, and starting small with right actions in order to built habits that serve us.

Not to our liking :. Speed of technology change will soon be vertical on the graph above. How can you cope with that? Therefore it makes sense to analyze why we resist new things and changes so much and cling to certainty at all costs and what you can do about it. Simplified, we like certainty, because it makes us feel safe and secure. Even though the change is the only real constant in life, besides taxes, we hate it.

This hate towards change is written in our genes for millions of years as a mechanism for survival in the dangerous world. Not that long ago, you could very easily have gotten killed in the jungle for example and to be frank, you still can in some parts of the world.

Even if you live in the 21st century and there is no tigers that can eat you, your brains and biological-emotional system still lives in a jungle or the most dangerous parts of the world.

An unknown and unstable environment most often brings threats to you and to your life. This is how you experience change on the emotional level. Certainty brings higher probability of safety and survival, simply because you know what you are dealing with.

In addition to that, every change demands effort to adjust. Think of how annoying it is for the first few times when Facebook implements a new change on their site.