Are you slamming on the brakes?
Change is hard. Did you know we are hard-wired to resist it? Our wonderful amygdala, the part of our brain responsible for our survival instinct, perceives familiarity as safety and difference as danger. And it therefore activates the body’s fear responses when there’s something new.
So new things; different things can induce resistance. And that’s what I’ve been talking about this week with those who have been noticing this cropping up (sometimes in subtle ways).
You can feel excited, optimistic, and ready for a great new opportunity, but that less conscious part of you can be digging in its heels.
Perhaps making you very sensitive to your environment, your interactions, to everything you’re doing and saying.
Perhaps by making you tired, foggy, achy, ill, anxious.
Perhaps by causing you to hyper-focus on issues that feel insurmountable (interpreted as signs of danger).
And then your brain will try and make sense of what’s happening in your body and create “stories” – perhaps like “I can’t do this”, “this will never work”, “this isn’t good enough”, “I’m not good enough”, “I don’t fit here”, “I didn’t want this anyway”…
It’s your system’s way of trying to move you away from the “danger”, back to familiarity, hence the resistance to change. And why we end up slipping back to the old ways, the status quo, playing it small and safe.
So what to do? Well, there’s so much we can do to help stretch your comfort zone and enable you to make make the changes you long for. I covered some tips some time ago in this blog.
And remember, give yourself time to acclimatise. Just like climbers have to wait at base camp on their way up Everest to let their body acclimatise, give your system time adjust to the new normal. And during that time, be kind and supportive to yourself – self soothing, nourishing, and acknowledging that this isn’t easy. Soon it’ll be familiar and oh so possible.
