How Dare You Change?

The reason I ask is because oftentimes in relationships, in marriages, people change and change.

I was just thinking, we're all so afraid of change.

When someone changes, it's like, oh my gosh, you're different.

And it's not necessarily viewed as a positive thing.

So it kind of got me thinking, like I wanted to know, like, why are we so afraid of change? And actually, I don't know if you'll be surprised because you do have a science background, so you probably won't be surprised when I tell you this.

But the reason we're afraid of change is because, and like I said, you might already know this, but our brain's an energy-saving machine.

So it uses predictive coding, meaning it relies on past experiences to guess what will happen next so it doesn't have to process new information.

Right.

So it gets very comfortable with the routine, with knowing what to expect.

It's not using as much fuel, I guess, when everything stays the same.

But then once you start to change, you end up burning a lot more energy than you typically would if you're just going about your daily routine or whatnot.

So it just physically is actually very exhausting because you're just using more glucose.

You're burning through more energy just to try to process this new information.

You know, there's new pathways being developed.

All that takes energy.

So physically you end up getting tired.

But then also the other thing is your brain's primary job isn't actually to make you happy.

It's to keep you alive.

So the familiar equals safe, even if that familiar is actually something that's making you miserable or unhealthy, because to the brain, the unknown is treated as an active threat.

Oh, I guess that goes back to evolution too, right? Like how humans, like we used to rely on our instincts and flight or fight and all that.

We use a lot of our information from our past ancestors and we don't realize it.

Like that's all been like embedded in our DNA and gets passed down.

That's why they say like a lot of things in children are innate.

And then actually one of the biggest things, I think the only fear is, that a child is born with is of height nothing else oh really yeah everything else is just it's kind of learned environmentally so that's why you'll see some kids that will naturally just go into the waters learn to swim all that or if they're just nature bound

yeah