Gemma Spake

How am I going to adapt to this?

Am I ready for this?

Do I have the space?

It's something that, like my mum always said to me, which is that even good stress is still stress.

There's an element of cognitive overload going on.

We're balancing so much involuntarily that sometimes it's hard to get excited or motivated by the change we choose because we just don't have the energy.

That's the 20s explanation.

That's why we specifically often fall away from change during this decade and under these circumstances.

Here is the more human explanation.

Simply put, we as humans are wired from our amygdala to our frontal lobe to prefer coherence, to prefer harmony.

A sense that our life story makes sense, that we know kind of roughly where we are going, roughly where we've been, roughly where we are now.

This, you know, very rudimentary sense of stability is really important for maintaining homeostasis.

The natural equilibrium of our systems that allows us to function because we feel safe enough.

Something that I heard recently is like your brain doesn't care if you're growing.

Your brain doesn't care if you're fulfilled.

It literally only cares that you are safe.

I'm not going to bore you guys with the evolutionary perspective because I think we all know it by now.

But anything unknown, anything unknown that change brings signals danger, triggering a whole set of stress-based reactions that are meant to shock your body into action.

These reactions also exhaust your body and so our very smart systems learn to anticipate things that are going to cause this much of a shake-up and to be fearful of them, to be fearful of change.

In contrast, the known obviously signals safety and therefore the peaceful and calm conditions our body needs to function properly.