How Change Affects Our Brains And Identities

0:07What do you do in a life changing event? Well, you make the best of the situation. You go into it with a clear mind and you plan the work and then work the plan. 20 years ago, my husband was indicted. I was not aware of these things that were happening. And I decided that I needed to support myself. I had just quit my full time job to be a stay at home mom. I decided to open up a business. The business 20 years later is successful. I adapted. I worked hard. I had my focus. And more than anything, my children were my drive. They inspired me to be better. And everything happens for a reason. That's what it is.

0:51Dani, thanks for that message. Major life changes are inevitable. Even our best-lead plans can be upended, whether it's through illness, an injury or accident, or a sudden loss. and it's in those moments that our brains undergo massive changes. Cognitive scientist Maya Shankar has spent years exploring these changes and discussing the way life transitions affect us. She hosts the podcast A Slight Change of Plans where she talks through strategies to deal with upheaval. Her latest book is called The Other Side of Change, Who We Become When Life Makes Other Plans and it's out now. She joins us after the break to talk about her book and the neuroscience science behind how we deal with change.

1:31I'm Jen White. You're listening to the 1A Podcast. Stay with us. We've got a lot to get to.

1:41Maya, welcome to 1A. Thanks so much for having me, Jen. I really appreciate it. Maya, your book is comprised of stories where people experience major life changes and come out on the other side of it a new person. And you include your own story in this book. What inspired you to start this process of exploring change and what it does to us? I think it's because I am really afraid of change. And I get scared of all of the uncertainty that often accompanies a change. I mean, the research shows that our brains are not wired to enjoy uncertainty. So one of my favorite research studies shows that we are more stressed when we are told that we have a 50 % chance of receiving an electric shock than when we're told we have a 100 % chance of receiving an electric shock.

2:31And it's kind of wild, right, Jen, that we would rather be certain that a bad, negative thing is going to happen to us than to have to grapple with any ambiguity. But I resonate so much with this. I am the type of person who likes having a firm grip of the steering wheel, and I want to know how the story ends. And naturally, change often introduces a whole lot of uncertainty into our lives. And so I went on this quest to try to figure out, well, how can I, quote, do change better, right? Can I collect the wisdom of people from all over the world who have navigated extraordinary changes and pair that with the latest science of the human mind to come up with a guide for people, including myself, to navigate the hardest moments of their lives?

3:19And that is what led to the other side of change. We got this text message from one of you. If you told me pre-pandemic that I would move to Texas to be closer to family, I would tell you you were crazy. But the pandemic happened and my industry disappeared out from under me and my mom almost died from COVID. So here I am. What got me through it was my husband. The relationship became stronger and we're closer than ever. Maya, I'm curious how you approach this work, not just from an emotional standpoint, but also through your experience as a cognitive scientist. How did that guide you as you were conducting these interviews and creating these strategies to deal with change?

3:57Yeah, I think I'm mostly interested in people's interior lives, right? So we can hear about the external beats of a person's change story, but we rarely have access to what is shifting within a person as they go about their change. and as a cognitive scientist, naturally, I'm very interested in the person's inner life, right? Their psychology. Where are they stumbling the most? Where are they experiencing moments of growth? What is actually the hardest thing for them, which often surprised me, right? I would have a guess as to what my subjects were finding the most difficult and then be surprised at what it is that they shared with me.

4:38I think the other thing is that I had a thesis, which was that maybe we could come to see the hardest moments in our lives, not simply as something to endure, but as a rare moment in life to reimagine who we could be. So not just moving through the change, but also really spending time focusing what's on the other side of it. Yeah. The unique stresses and demands of the new environment that we're thrust into can serve as a moment of revelation. It can give us insight into who we are and who we can become. And if we can actually take advantage of that rare vantage point, we can shape the person we become in ways that make us better.

5:25When I think about life changes, they can be negative. They can also be really positive. They can be things that bring us joy. How does our brain tell the difference between a life change and a traumatic event? Well, it's all in how we code it, but it's a really excellent question. And actually, from the years that I spent hosting my podcast, A Slight Change of Plans, and then in writing The Other Side of Change, I have learned one very important lesson, which is that we should have profound humility at the outset of a change. because even changes that our brains code as good might surprise us in the end.

6:05We know from research that we are bad affective forecasters. What does that mean? We are very bad at predicting how we will feel and think about future events. And this is for a number of reasons, but one of the biggest reasons is that we forget that we too are changing. When a big change happens to us, it also leads to lasting change within us. We become different people on the other side of change in ways that are hard to predict. And so in the beginning of a, quote, good change, right? Oh, my God, I'm getting promoted. Oh, my God, I've just gotten a new house. We might fail to anticipate all of the varied ways in which that change might affect our psychology.

6:46Here's another text we got from one of you. I got laid off from a faculty position quite abruptly in May 2024. Two kids in college, no health insurance, and loss of a pretty good salary. I would say the thing that helped the most was literally to take things day by day and hour by hour. I now have a very good faculty job. I also was fortunate and started going to therapy for nothing else than to at least vent and get my stress and anger out. But it's also led to some fundamental insights that are going to help me moving forward. I think the key thing is to get rid of a model or paradigm you have in your head, which might be something like, I'm going to be in this city forever, or I'm going to retire in this job and just be open for change.

7:25Are there ways, Maya, to train our brains to be more receptive to change? Yeah. First of all, I love all of these listener testimonials. They are inspiring me to have a more positive relationship with change. So I just want to thank everyone who has called in and left these really wonderful messages. Yes, we absolutely can. So by nature, we love what's called cognitive closure. And that is having clear, definitive answers in life. And often we search for black and white answers. And the problem is that when we climb out of the rubble of a change, often all we see around us is gray, right? There's a lot of ambiguity around us and we don't quite know how to make sense of things.

8:12And from what I can tell from the research that I've done from this book, having more of an openness to the unbidden, having more, loosening your grip on whatever certainty you need in a challenging moment, not needing as much clarity, right? A lot of people, for example, if they're exiting a breakup might desperately want answers, right? But that is elusive. That's full gold. You're never going to get the clarity that is fully satisfying. And so learning to live comfortably and peacefully alongside grace face is one of the best ways to unlock freedom in the face of change. Okay, but how? Because in theory, that sounds great.

8:52And I'm one of those people who really struggles with that gray space. And people say, well, Jen, just enjoy the process. Just enjoy the feeling of uncertainty. And I don't know what that means. I'm not able to enjoy the feeling of uncertainty. So Jen, girl, I am with you, okay? Let me tell you one concrete strategy that we know works. And of course, I outlined a number of them in the other side of change. Invite awe-inspiring experiences into your life. So what is awe? It is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your understanding of the world. So this could be in the form of music or art or nature.

9:30It can also be in the form of other people's behaviors or extraordinary actions. This is called moral beauty. When you witness someone's upstanding character or kindness or self-sacrifice or courage or resilience. What awe does to the brain is that it quiets the parts of our brain that are occupied with all of our internal thoughts about ourself. It quiets the areas that are associated with self-immersion. And in doing that, it allows us to gain distance from our current preoccupations and to see that we are part of a larger whole, that we are part of a collective, and that we can appreciate that whatever challenges we're facing are part of a shared human experience.

10:08What that does is it actually makes us more comfortable with that kind of uncertainty because we recognize that that is a part of the shared human experience, the membership of being on planet Earth. We're talking to Maya Shunker. She's the author of The Other Side of Change. It's out next week. Maya, this is reminding me of a conversation we had with Mark Berman. He's the director of the Environmental Neuroscience Laboratory at the University of Chicago, and he's the author of Nature and the Mind, the Science of How Nature Improves Cognitive, Physical, and Social Well-Being. And he shared how just spending, I think it was 20 minutes, looking at trees or even pictures of trees rewires our brains in really, really helpful ways.

10:53Do you know what mechanisms are at work that can help us adjust? Like, what's the connection between, you know, going for a walk in a park or just looking at trees and our brains thinking differently or experiencing change differently? So what we're trying to do when we experience awe is to breed a lot of psychological distance between the thoughts that are happening in our head and a bigger zoomed out worldview, right? And that is exactly what nature does. So yes, it is a really interesting finding about even just looking at pictures of trees. In fact, in one study, they found that patients who were recovering from a surgery had far better outcomes, were deemed more psychologically resilient when the small little window from their hospital room looked out onto a set of trees versus a set of brick walls.

11:45And again, we're not talking Napa Valley, right? We can get that effect even from a screensaver of nature. but why it's what's called the default mode network which is really associated with self-immersion and our internal anxieties and the rumination and all of the current preoccupations that we have and it allows us to again zoom out right it's it's taking that camera lens and it's shifting away the focus from whatever our anxieties and worries are towards a bigger landscape of what it means to be alive and what it means to be human and as i was saying earlier part of a collective whole, a shared experience of humanity.

12:24We got this email from Josie who writes, my family experienced a horrific accident this past summer and my daughter suffered extreme bodily injury. She made a full recovery, but I haven't been able to tell my brain that we are okay. How do I get my brain to catch up with the reality of our mostly unchanged life when it's still stuck in the tragedy of what we went through? So one of the concepts that I think can be so helpful to her is the idea of possible selves. So what are possible selves? These are the versions of us in the future that we construct each and every day as we go about our lives.

12:59These selves come in three categories. There are hoped for selves, which reflect our dreams and our aspirations for the future. There are feared selves, which reflect our worries and anxieties. And then there are our expected selves. So these are the versions of us that we just think are most likely to happen, good or bad. Now, what can happen in the face of tragedy is that it can foreclose so many of these positive possible selves that we once envisioned for us, right? All these doors suddenly shut closed and all of these feared selves, those doors swing wide open, right? And our brains start to race and start to catastrophize all of these futures, or we simply feel despair because we can't imagine anything positive happening on the other side.

13:43I would recommend a couple of things in these moments. The first is to experience what's called moral elevation. This is that warm, fuzzy feeling that we get in our chest when we witness someone else's moral beauty. And by that, I mean their incredible behaviors and actions. This is a form of awe, like we've just discussed, Jen. Now, what's so interesting about witnessing acts of human beauty is that it doesn't just feel good, right? It doesn't just boost our mood. It actually changes our brains. And that's because when we witness people defy our understanding of what humans are capable of in the best way possible, right?

14:21They're showcasing the best of what humans are capable of, right? It actually changes our sense of what is possible for us. It cracks open our imagination about all of the future selves that we can actually embody. And so one of the people I actually profile in The Other side of change. He was sentenced to nine years in prison as a 16-year-old for a carjacking he committed. And like we just heard, it was so hard for him to imagine any possible positive future selves because he was so wrapped up in the regret of the past, right? He was so consumed with self hatred and anger and loathing. And yet it was an encounter that he had with a fellow prisoner who showed such care for the younger prisoners, teaching them how to box to protect themselves from the threat of violence that opened up Dwayne's mind and allowed him to see that he wasn't destined to be a certain kind of person just because he was a prisoner.

15:17And with that more empowered mindset, when he encountered a book of poetry a couple weeks later, for the first time ever, he imagined that he too could be a poet. Fast forward a few decades, he's now a Yale Law School graduate, he's a MacArthur Genius Prize winner, and he writes some of the most stirring poetry about the experience of young Black men and boys who are incarcerated. And I think this showcases the power of these small moments of moral elevation, which can unstick us, which can help us to crack open this sense of possibility around what our future can entail. Anita sent this text.

15:53We moved to the U.S. in 1990 with two daughters, six suitcases, and a lot of enthusiasm. My husband started looking for a job as a medical doctor, and I started working at Roy Rogers. We had some money saved up, so we had a little bit of cushion, but we did not give up. It wasn't easy adjusting to a New York lifestyle. We left a very comfortable life behind in Nepal, but it was our choice. We thought it was best to leave the corruption and unrestful time politically. Our philosophy is keep on going and do your job honestly, and good things will happen in the end. Kids are doing well now, and we are retired.

16:25Thanks for that message. Let's head to a quick break. We'll be back with more of the conversation in just a moment. Stay with us.

16:36Maya, I want to return to Josie's message. And just as a reminder, Josie's daughter was seriously injured in an accident. And Josie says she's trying to get her brain to catch up with the reality of their mostly unchanged life. Now that her daughter's recovered, she still feels stuck in the tragedy. And you were talking about this idea of different selves. So is this a place where Josie may need to imagine other versions of her life with her daughter, where spending time thinking about the things they get to do now that her daughter is recovered? Is that what you were describing? thing? Yes, that's exactly right.

17:19And I actually think that there's a bigger lesson in all of this, which is that one of the reasons why change can be so destabilizing is that it can threaten our identity in a more fundamental way. So Josie and her daughter had a very clear understanding of what their mother-daughter dynamic looked like, right? They had an identity as a mom and a daughter living on this earth together. And now they have to redefine what that looks like in some big ways, but then also a lot of mini small ways. And one of the things that I recommend to people who are struggling with change is to expand their self-identity.

18:01So let me give a concrete example of what I mean by this. When I was a little kid, I was an aspiring concert violinist. I was studying at Juilliard under Itzhak Perlman. And I had big dreams of becoming a professional one day. And then overnight, a hand injury ended my career. And I remember there was something so curious about my grief, which was that I wasn't just grieving the loss of the violin. I was also grieving the loss of myself in this more foundational way, right? The violin had come to define me. And so when I lost it, I felt like so much of who I was was taken away from me in that moment.

18:38And so what I've learned since then is that it can be more sustainable to define ourselves, not simply by what we do, by the roles or labels that we carry, but also by why we do those things. So you can ask yourself, what is it that draws you towards the things you love? Why do you love the things you love? And when I asked myself that question, when it came to the violin, I realized that emotional connection was at the heart of my passion for the instrument. and music gave me a vehicle for emotionally connecting with other people, right? Whether it was my fellow musicians or members of the audience.

19:13And just because I lost the violin didn't mean that I lost what led me to love it in the first place. There were still other ways that I could express that why, that desire for human connection elsewhere. And it turns out that I've naturally gravitated towards pursuits that feed this underlying desire, right? In hosting a slight change of plans and writing the other side of change, I am every day feeding this deep need to feel camaraderie with my fellow human beings. And so I would urge Josie and I would urge all other listeners to ask themselves, what is their why? What is the thing that makes them tick?

19:47And are there other ways to express this in their life? And when it comes to Josie in particular, right, what were their favorite activities that they love doing together? What were the ways that they enjoyed showing care and love and kindness? And are there other are ways that they can do that given the new constraints they face? Well, let's go back to some of the messages we are hearing from you. Here's Victoria. In 2018, I had just turned 62. And as a result of three back-to-back detached retinas in my left eye, I became legally blind in that eye. That meant no work. I've been working full-time since forever.

20:28No driving, no tennis. And with all of that, the biggest change was not adjusting to having vision in one eye only. It was that I had to learn to ask for help. Consider myself a strong, independent woman with a lot of daughters and a son and now granddaughters. And I think through this experience, I hope they learn sooner than I did. Thanks for that message, Victoria. We also got this text from one of you. I was rear-ended and ended up having surgery with lots of inpatient rehab after the surgery. I had no family in the area, so I had to depend on friends. I was not allowed to drive for over six weeks, so I had to rely on friends for everything I needed.

21:14This all taught me that I can't always do it by myself, and it's okay to ask others for help. You know, when we're going through major life changes, that can be a time of deep isolation. How important is it for us to reach out to others and ask for help, especially if we struggle with that? Oh my gosh, it's of paramount importance. And I too have felt this way during some of the hardest moments in my life. I remember the isolation I felt after my husband and I, after years of trying to start a family, we're unsuccessful and we're dealing with heartbreaks and the aftermath of pregnancy losses with our surrogate.

21:58And the whole thing was so overwhelming. And I remember in that moment that the last thing I wanted to do was to reach out to people because I just felt so raw and exposed and vulnerable. And it was just unimaginable for me to have to pull people into my sadness. But I remember being so deliberate about making that first phone call. I remember it was to my brother. And what you realize in those moments is that the people who love you, they have few chances in life to show you just how much they care for you and to demonstrate their care in these concrete actions. And so if we can reframe asking for help as giving the people in our lives an opportunity to show us their devotion to us and their care for us, I think that can be really helpful.

22:45And we also should remember that people feel great meaning and purpose in their lives when they are able to help other people. So you are giving people this chance to feel valuable, like they matter in this world, that they matter to you. And we can't understate how important it is to their psychological well-being that they feel that they matter. One of the challenges of adjusting to change is this feeling of loss of control, whether it's a job loss, injury, illness, loss of a loved one. These are things that happen and it feels completely out of our hands. And I find that sometimes in search for an explanation, that can turn into blame.

23:28Sometimes blame we internalize, but sometimes it's blame we direct at others. What can we do to shift away from that blame paradigm and shift more towards acceptance. Yeah, it's a great, great point. And I do find that often in the aftermath of change, the first person I blame is myself. I look inwards and I'm like, well, how was I responsible for this? I think in part, it's that when we believe that the world is just, when we believe that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people, in the short term, when things are going well in everyday life, it can be a boon to our well-being, right?

24:10Because it can mean that our inputs really matter. And when we're kind to others, we're going to get good things in return. The downside of having too firm a grip on the belief in a just world and in this fundamental sense of fairness is that when a bad thing happens, in order to try to explain it, we sometimes believe that we are bad. It's the only way to justify why this terrible thing has happened. And in fact, in one of the chapters of The Other Side of Change, I talk about a woman named Marianne who spent her whole life trying to be good. And then she causes an unimaginable accident and causes suffering to another person and their family.

24:50And she has to reckon with the fact that she believes the world is fair. And so what could be the explanation for this? The only explanation could be that she is bad inside, that she has a dangerous essence, and so she has to close herself off to the rest of the world in order to protect them from this bad side of her. And as you go through the experience with Marianne, what you realize is that unlocking compassion in herself, unlocking self-acceptance comes in the form of loosening her grip on a just world, on believing that actually in life, some things just happen. There's no reason. There's no redemption.

25:28There's no silver lining. They're just things that happen. And it's not because you had a lesson that you needed to learn. It's not because you erred in some way. The universe was just indiscriminately cruel. And so learning to detach yourself from those outcomes is a critical first step. But why is it, Maya, that our brains, it feels at least, our brains are wired to try to find meaning in tragedy? The number of times I've been told after something terrible has happened, you know, everything happens for a reason. And I think it's one of the worst things you can say to someone who is suffering on the side of a negative change.

26:10But why do our brains seek that meaning? Yeah, it's so interesting that you mentioned this because I don't believe things happen for a reason. And yet I have found myself in the aftermath of a negative change, desperately trying to weave together a narrative to extract some sort of silver lining, to extract some sort of meaning and purpose from it. It makes so much sense why our brains have evolved to be this way. We want to live in an orderly world in which the things that we do dictate how our lives turn out. Otherwise, we might descend into a state of nihilism or despair where we feel like, what's the point of anything, right?