Dr. Maya Shankar

Oh my God.

Right?

It's kind of wild and funny, but...

If you're like me, I so resonate with this, right?

As a type A hyper planner who wants to know how the story ends, part of me is like, yes, bring on the shocks.

Just the anticipatory pain of not knowing if they're coming is way worse than the actual shock itself.

So...

I think that that is one of the biggest reasons why change is so disorienting and why we often feel so unmoored, right?

We like having plans and stability and certainty.

And what change does is it rips away our sense that things are actually going to be a certain way.

And another thing it does is

it shatters what's called the illusion of control.

So what research shows is that most of us, as we operate in our everyday life, we fall prey to the illusion that we have far more control over how things turn out in our lives, how much

we will actually dictate how our lives turn out than we actually do.

And it makes sense why our brains would be wired like this, right?

We want to feel like we have control over our lives.

Otherwise, we'd probably all descend into nihilism, feeling like, well, what does it even matter what I do?

The world's just going to decide my fate.

And so, of course, from an evolutionary perspective, that feeling of control was really a big asset to us.

But the downside of it is that when a change happens that's unexpected and negative, it can in fact shatter this illusion and we are forced to contend with the limits of that control.