Maya Shankar

Our brains are not wired to like uncertainty, and change is often accompanied by a lot of uncertainty.

And that can be a very destabilizing thing.

One of my favorite research studies shows that people are...

more stressed when they're told they have a 50% chance of getting an electric shock than when they're told they have a 100% chance of getting an electric shock.

So we would rather be certain sometimes that a bad thing is going to happen than to have to grapple with any of that uncertainty.

And yet, like you said, the human mind is incredibly resilient and adaptable.

And we, by virtue of having a ticket to planet Earth, have been doing this change rodeo for as long as we've been alive by brute force.

Exactly like you said, we have no choice.

And so our psychologies have adapted to find really excellent coping mechanisms and ways to process this new landscape that we're operating in

in ways that ultimately can be very beneficial, right?

All the people that I interviewed, despite having been through really harrowing experiences, are deeply grateful for the person they became on the other side of their experience.

They're not necessarily grateful for what they had to go through, which of course makes a lot of sense, right?

Why would you ever invite illness or loss into your life?

But they do feel that they ended up better and more enlightened on the other side.

And there's something so inspiring in that message.

First of all, I'm one of these people, right?

So one of the reasons that as a cognitive scientist, I'm so interested in studying change is that I myself am afraid of change.

I'm going through something right now and I found myself doing some of that catastrophizing.

And I have to bring myself back to a couple of basic principles.

The first is that