Gemma Spake

we are of course going to lean more towards that second state, more towards known peace, stability, safety, even if that means not really pushing ourselves.

The thing is, our body's dedication to this homeostasis often works against us because it asks us to automatically resist new things, even if those things are good for us.

Your mind is in many ways hardwired to want you to stay the same.

It doesn't want to expend energy for no good reason.

It's really happy how it is because it knows what's going on.

They have done study after study on this.

Your body, as soon as you ask it to change, is going to dig its heels in.

That is why weight loss is so hard.

That is why quitting substances is so hard.

That is why undoing relationship patterns is so hard.

Your brain is like a bike with broken handlebars that keeps steering you back in the direction you don't want to go.

You have to keep forcibly moving it back onto the path that you've chosen.

It does this, yes, through literal biological resistance, but mainly by influencing our appraisal of any and all new situations so that we expect the worst.

In behavioral economics, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Traversky developed something called the prospect theory.

They developed this back in the 1970s, and they essentially showed that humans do not evaluate things

gains and losses in a balanced way we typically want to avoid loss as much as possible so our focus is disproportionately on what kind of losses change is going to bring us there is a larger assessment of those things that are scary and that we could lose versus what we have to gain even if the losses and gains are equal even if we actually have more to gain

irrationally, our brain still keeps going back to what we have to lose.

For example, I'll give you some research that backs this up.

Research has shown that in an experimental condition where people are given 50 tokens to begin and they either gain 10 additional tokens or have 10 tokens randomly taken away,

Later on, when they're asked to estimate, you know, what proportion, what percentage do you think you lost or gained in this situation?