19/05/2026
Why can change feel difficult?
‘If you always do what you’ve always done then you always get what you’ve always got’.
So, if you don’t like what you’re getting, change – simples – job done. Except if it were that simple I’d be 9 stone, running marathons and putting pictures of my perfect productive life on insta. The reality is that I’m muddling through doing the best I can because change can be hard.
We’re humans – we might have Wi-Fi now, but we’re still operating with a prehistoric brain. Our control centre likes routine, likes to know the ending and to build new ways of thinking has to expend more energy making new pathways. Brain doesn’t always like that. Sometimes brain even cloaks things so we don’t see that the things we are doing, the habits we have established are harming us. It often takes a while for us to begin to see that we do need to change for our health, wellbeing and happiness.
Evidence builds up until we can no longer ignore and we enter a phase of researching solutions, trying ideas out, seeking others’ opinions before jumping into the new ways of being. Sometimes this works great - getting a new dream job perhaps, but often bigger ‘projects’ like leaving a relationship, coping with an unwelcome diagnosis, the loss of a loved one or getting out of the blackness of depression cause us to stumble and retreat in old patterns. Even when what we’re trying to change makes us feel uncomfortable, makes us miserable – it’s still what I know and bizarrely there’s comfort in that. Being different, doing things differently can be scary, clunky and feel exhausting.
In counselling, I think about stages too. Collaborative exploration with the counsellor can open up new ways of looking at things, deepen our understanding of ourselves and how we currently are in the world as well as how we might like to be. This new awareness offers us the possibility of accepting ourselves and this acceptance is the magical invitation that allows change to happen.
The message about change is that sometimes to move forwards we need to stand still. By standing still and having a good look around, by fully inhabiting who we are, change becomes much more possible.
