There’s nothing more comfortable and rewarding than building something, say, life, family, business, work, finances, name it! And keep it there, watch it and hope for that not to disturb you or nothing to disturb its course, have it the same way for a long while as we may focus our attention to a different matter.
It’s easy, comfortable, effortless, and it requires no concerns, free of the hustle of preoccupation, why would anyone bother to change that sort of comfort? why would anyone dare to disturb something that has worked before? Why would anyone want to have something different from what has been in place for long and has proven to be of use?
Human nature states that we are not built to stay put, to do the same, to have the same, to avoid growth, change, transformation, ever since we exist we have done everything in our power to make everything different, from the way we consume our food to the way we move from one place to another, change, modifications, transformations is in our essence in our DNA.
But why is it so difficult to cope with changes? Why is it so hard to move through them? To navigate them? Even to embrace them?
It is an irony that changes being part of our lives and having them so deep in our core become something so uncomfortable, something difficult to deal with. Let us try to break down some information that may be of help to learn and understand if not the reality about changes, at least useful tips that may bring some light upon the topic.
As we all know, or as we all have heard once, our body seems to be perfect, it works to protect us, the system is built to provide us with the perfect responses for every single aspect during our lifelong physical transformation, of course the brain does not escape this concept, so here is more or less and in very simple words how our wise brain works whenever it faces changes, remember we are talking about the most sophisticated weapon in our arsenal.
There are four parts of the brain involved in the understanding of how changes affect us, the first one is called the basal ganglia ,which allows the automatization of tasks saving precious energy in the brain and the body, so when you learn to conduct activities that require coordination and motor skills like driving these ganglia works as a storage for this learning and makes it possible for you to later use it without any conscious process. Secondly, there is the prefrontal cortex which is in charge of dealing with the learning of the new tasks, among other things, the important element in the use of the prefrontal cortex is the use of energy is quite elevated making us feel tired for the use of such amount of energy, then in third place we can call the orbitofrontal cortex responsible for the detection of possible threats to us, so if a stressful situation surrounds us there will a painful response in our body, this cortex is the one that causes pain as part of the human response or defense, and last but not least there is the amygdala, the one related for the flight, fight, freeze response.
So whenever the body faces a change, a new task we have never done, something that is perceived as a threat, these brain parts are triggered and of course they do an excellent job, that’s why we experience discomfort, or even pain, the brain is trying to save energy and protect us, and changes are new, unexpected, unknown things we go through.
The body knows it, and it would be only fair for us know why organically speaking we reject changes. But the exercise is not only to understand that it is to create awareness of such process so that we can learn to navigate or manage changes.
Creating awareness on things that we don´t conscious or unconsciously know helps us see them and approach differently and adequately. This also involves our emotions, but it is something we can discuss in another chapter.
