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Hello and welcome back to the psychology of your 20s, the podcast where we talk through some of the big changes and transitions about 20s and what they mean for our psychology.
Welcome back to the podcast for another episode, another week.
This week we're talking about big life changes.
It's kind of in the intro of the podcast.
It's kind of in the name.
It's something that I wanted to discuss for a while.
I think one of the quintessential aspects of our 20s is the big life changes and moves and decisions that we all kind of have to make or the world's going to make them for us.
Our 20s is when we decide what we want our life to be, often a time when we move away from home to new cities.
Like I said, we change jobs, lose friends, and make new ones who might end and start relationships as well.
In our 20s, I think we tend to transition through many, can you hear the talk?
Yeah, we tend to transition through many different lives and lifestyles, choosing ones which kind of fit us best.
The things that are kind of typical in our 20s like uni and jobs and travel and starting relationships, ending relationship, gap years are all massive events in our lives.
And what accompanies it is also indicative of big life changes, like those moves, like new friends and new hobbies and surroundings.
And that can kind of take a toll, I think, also as COVID has taught us, sometimes big life changes and transitions aren't always in our control.
It's not something that we choose to do willingly and have some optimism about.
So how do we stay resilient when things can shift so quickly in life, especially when we're young and we don't really have the same security that our older years perhaps might bring if we're lucky?
I think also it's okay to be scared.
It's okay to be kind of terrified.
Like you don't always know where you'll land and whether what you had before may be better.
I think it's worth remembering.
It always kind of works out in the end really.
But let's discuss the psychology behind these big life changes and shifts in our lives, the emotions that accompany that and why we have this drive for change and novelty in our younger years.
So this is what we're going to talk about, discovering our own values and lives beyond what our parents have kind of decided for us, pushing back, but also wanting to pursue massive changes.
I want to talk about loneliness and temporariness.
Temporariness? People who are temporary, things that are temporary in our 20s and that constant shedding of old skin, old habits and old versions of yourself and the kind of trial and error that we go through in our 20s to find out who we are, but probably more importantly who we want to be.
And that means making mistakes, it means huge changes to our internal conceptions of ourselves and also our external worlds as well.
And obviously I'm in my early 20s, so I haven't really experienced the full kind of effect of those life transitions.
This is kind of my first big one as a young adult all by myself.
So yeah, kind of looking forward to diving into it and learning some more about how we can kind of close through these big life changes and what it means for our psychology, how we can do our best to adjust to the cards that life kind of deals us in our young years.
So psychologists call the state of being in transition liminality.
Liminality. So it basically means being between social roles and identities.
So in other words, it means that you're kind of neither in the state or the life that you've left and nor are you completely in your new life or your new state, at least not mentally.
And this can provoke something of an identity crisis that raises the question of who am I, who am I, who do I want to be, what am I going to be, what's my life going to be like, which can be quite emotionally destabilizing.
And there's heaps of literature on this obviously, because big life changes are a huge, huge source of stress and stress is obviously something that psychologists are quite concerned about and want to look into.
So like I mentioned, I'm in a state of liminality at the moment.
I'm just about to move cities.
I've kind of like packed up my old life in Canberra where I was living.
I graduated. I've kind of, you know, I'm preparing to move jobs and move to Sydney, but I'm not quite there yet.
So I'm in this like weird halfway point, staying with my family over Christmas and over the holidays with like one foot in my old life and one foot like tentatively in my new one as well, which is like quite exciting, but also that liminality state is very emotionally stabilizing.
And there's a reason that major life shifts like moving cities or leaving relationships or jobs can impact our mental health and why it is such a big area of research and interest.
And it comes down to how the brain functions.
So when you change, when you force your life to change, when you disrupt your daily or patterned routines, it actually activates the conflict senses in the brain and this causes brain chaos.
And that's what we call cognitive dissonance.
And all this kind of research was done by this doctor called Dr.
Pele, who was an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, the dog again in the background.
But it's this activation of the conflict sensor or the conflict area of the brain that creates that stress in people that creates that dissonance or that chaos that we might often associate with the stress of changing our lives.
And with most things in the world of like psychology or just like life in general, not everyone is really affected equally.
So this doctor, he suggests that personality firstly kind of determines how change impacts our mental health.
So for those who have or who rate high and openness to experience, they'll often seek out novelty.
And change is usually easier for them to manage because it's something that they can adjust to.
Perhaps their threshold for stress is a lot higher or their brain and the way that they're made, the temperament just means that they do seek out opportunity more than others.
But it's those who feel most comfortable with the status quo or how life has usually been that will find those big changes or transitions to be more challenging just because who they are and the way that their brain is isn't necessarily adapted or equipped to deal as easily with big changes and big
disruptions to how they tend to live their lives.
Another thing that really impacts whether you see change or something that's exciting or something that's a bit stressful is the type of quo or how life has usually been that will find those big changes or transitions to be more challenging.
And because of that kind of perception, for them the best course of action is to kind of stick to what is safe and stick to what is known.
And often parents who have experienced trauma or severe poverty or abusive upbringings that implicitly teach their own children that life is a dangerous and unpredictable thing to just stick to what is known.
Don't follow or don't kind of pursue too much change.
This might be why we see you know friends in our lives or people in our lives who are young and who have actively have a lot of exciting opportunities in front of them remain kind of paralyzed by that fear of changing anything because the change might lead to something unsafe, you know, career change
could lead to job loss and homelessness or breaking up with a significant other would lead to dying alone.
Or you know if you've been doing something a certain way pursuing a particular project too much change.
And this might be why we see you know friends in our lives or people in our lives who are young and who objectively have a lot of exciting opportunities in front of them remain kind of paralyzed by that fear of changing anything because the change might lead to something unsafe, you know, career change
could lead to job loss and homelessness or breaking up with a significant other would lead to dying alone.
Or you know if you've been doing something a certain way pursuing a particular project or a business or an idea, you know, getting a job for you might actually just be incredibly disruptive.
So for people also who have adjustment disorders which is a real thing, it's in the DSM, change can also be particularly hard as the name kind of makes it fairly obvious like adjustment disorder.
But basically what this disorder is is it's an emotional or behavioral reaction to a stressful event or change in a person's life.
And this reaction is considered an unhealthy or major life changes are a massive, massive source of stress.
Not just the good, not just the bad ones like a death, but like also the good ones.
And if you have an adjustment disorder it's probably likely that those changes are not going to be as easy or as fun as they might be for other people.
So an adjustment disorder it occurs when an individual stresses kind of exceed their resources for coping.
And this is there's this woman called Nikki Nance and she's a professor of psychology at this college in Florida.
And she does a lot of work into this and she says that your reaction with this disorder kind of becomes disproportionate to the event you're reacting to.
It's also called situational depression.
So the symptoms are similar to that of other depressive disorders like feelings of sadness, waves of anger and crying spells.
However unlike a depressive disorder or a depressive episode the symptoms are exclusively triggered by an outside stressor.
And they kind of also luckily for this person or these people they tend to resolve once the person is kind of adjusted to the situation but that three -month period obviously is gonna kind of suck a lot.
And I'm sure we've I'm sure there's heaps of people listening who've probably had this type of like disorder even temporarily in their lives or for a moment in time when they've had a big life change and it's just been too much to cope with.
It's just too much all at once.
And in general one of the major reasons we struggle with change even for those who don't have this disorder and why it can kind of result in cognitive dissonance is the element of uncertainty.
And uncertainty it's been said is kind of the enemy of our biological impulses.
Like going back to evolutionary psychology if we're unsure whether an animal is you know a house cat or some like awful beast or tiger we're kind of in trouble if we can't tell the difference if we are uncertain about which it is.
So our brain doesn't like the odds of equations with unknown variables basically.
So it defaults to a negative bias for safety.
So if you're uncertain about something your brain and your body obviously wants to survive.
So if one of the options is obviously it's going to be terrible or dangerous and the other option oh it's going to be safe and it's going to be amazing.
Obviously if it's safe and amazing there's nothing to worry about but there's also the 50 % chance that it's not.
And that's the thing that our brain wants us to kind of cope with so it's going to respond as if it's responding to that negative outcome.
And there was a study done and it showed that in people who are uncertain 75 % of people mispredict when bad things are going to happen.
So this uncertainty bias it kind of trains our brain to expect the worst and that doesn't mean that change is great and you should expect the best.
It's like an amazing thing always but you should recognize that your brain it kind of will go into an automatic negativity bias.
And think about this next time you kind of get an amazing job offer and you think about the security of your current job or you know you've decided you want to move cities but your brain is going to tell you it's going to speak to you as if this is going to be a negative thing because it's protecting
you which kind of makes sense.
And that doesn't mean that change is great and you should expect the best.
It's like an amazing thing always but you should recognize that your brain it kind of will go into an automatic negativity bias.
And think about this next time you kind of get an amazing job offer and you think about the security of your current job or you know you've decided you want to move cities but your brain is going to tell you it's going to speak to you as if this is going to be a negative thing because it's protecting
you which kind of makes sense.
And obviously our thoughts and our impulses aren't entirely out of our control and to kind of help soothe the uncertainty that's causing the brain to fire its stress.
My therapist she always says to me when I'm worried about change and big moves um like the one I'm making now which obviously we've talked about um and what she tells me is to kind of turn fear into something that is exciting.
So in excitement and anxiety they activate the same areas of our brains that being the amygdala and the hippocampus they use the same kind of neural and synaptic pathways.
So by turning your anxiety into excitement you can ease any accompanying worry.
I like give an example so instead of thinking like kind of using my example of moving to a new city so instead of thinking you know like will I make any friends what if I don't make friends what if I'm not financially stable will I even like my new life will I be lonely.
It's better to think of it in terms of kind of a positive excitement anticipatory way of thinking about it so like thinking that thought of like oh am I going to make new friends instead of being like oh what if I don't thinking you know who are the new people I'm going to get the opportunity to meet
what exciting things will being alone allow me to do what opportunities or experiences will I get to have that I can't even fathom yet like imagine all the people I'm going to meet who are going to have a huge impact on my life and I don't even know their names yet like I have no idea who these people
are and that's like the thing you can have fear but that kind of that thought of who these people are is really exciting instead and it activates the same areas of your brain so it kind of tricks your brain into yes having that fear response that it wants to have but your perception of it is so much
different and I know that like positive mind frame philosophy is kind of bullshit for some people has some doubts surrounding it you know like if you just change your thoughts you can change how you perceive the world like obviously if a parent has just died um me I don't really see many positives from that so this is kind
of exclusively for things you kind of voluntarily get to choose but it is a pretty powerful tactic for changing fear into excitement and it works here's a quote I saw the other day and yes it was on instagram but it really did something for me here it is so once we understand that crossing the river
of change is the biological neurological chemical and even genetic death of the old self we have power over change and we can set our sights on the other side of the river changing our lives and diving into life changes shifts something really inherent to who we are in the moment by changing our surroundings
and our environment and everything that we come into contact with so it's kind of like the death of our old selves and sometimes there is that period between your past life and your new life that can be incredibly uncomfortable that luminality that we were talking about and often life transitions involve
losses like death the loss of a job or a relationship ending and even positive transitions like a graduation or a job offer can make you feel a little bit sad and you know sad because the person we were before in our old selves our old lives they aren't bad and they're incredibly comfortable because we
have adjusted to the change that we made beforehand to be that person but difficult and painful transitions they can actually yield great understanding of our life's which increases happiness and decreases stress so it's kind of better in the long run like eating a really gross vegetable so there's
heaps of research on this and research on how people derive a sense of purpose and what it's found is that while periods of pain and struggle and change and transitions can make us temporarily unhappy or lonely or worried they also make us feel as if our lives have more meaning in the long run so going
through that challenging time of moving cities or right after you've graduated or there's just so many you know so many kind of ways that our life changes but whilst it may be hard in the moment it actually is a really good exercise to um for our minds and an exercise for like our souls as well to kind
of put things into perspective and realize what we really want from life and the most resilient people will see change as an opportunity rather than kind of a monster to fear because they allow you to consider where your priorities lie you know which friends you stay in touch with what you want from your
new life what you want from your new job who is this new version of you going to be and what's really important to you and what it brings is a clear sense of your goals and values and you find that your body and your mind can be much more resilient when it comes to the stresses of change because all
of it is put into kind of a larger scale and I think above all prioritizing your health in life transitions kind of means not being afraid to ask for help when you need it especially if you're making a change whereby you're just naturally going to be disconnected from people you may have previously
had a lot of contact with it can be really really lonely and humans like I hear this said all the time I can't believe I'm gonna say it on my podcast but it's so true humans are social creatures by nature so you weren't built to withstand every sudden event in life without the support of others you're
not meant to just like try and force yourself to be lonely because you think it's going to create independence it's important to kind of reach out and I think something that we need to remind ourselves and that we kind of know is that it's all worth it in the end we know that otherwise we wouldn't make
the leap there's something that is pushing you we would always kind of stay the same until the world forces us to change it's kind of like what I was talking about there's people who have that great openness to experience you know I have so many friends who have just like completely changed their lives
around so many times and it's not a big deal for them they travel whenever they want they change jobs whenever they want but for others it's not that simple but I think sometimes staying the same is even more stressful and time consuming and takes more concentration and effort because things aren't
always in our control like losing a job or getting dumped or surviving an accident the world will push us if we don't do it for ourselves so you may as well just take the leap when you have the chance to be in control like I think COVID was a really good example of this so many people who I think were like
working jobs they didn't like or in cities where they didn't feel connected to their family or trying out these new identities or you know pursuing careers or degrees they didn't like when you go through something like COVID it kind of forces you to change it forces you to kind of put things into perspective
and make a decision and that's kind of what life does like you cannot just stay the same like it's the world won't let you um but here's the good news I think even difficult unwanted transitions are usually seen differently in retrospect than in real time and there's a psychologist called feeler who studies
liminality and life changes and transitions quite extensively actually he has a lot of really interesting papers if you're into that but he found that 90 % of the time the people he spoke with about their life changes they ultimately judged their transition to have been a success insofar that the transition ended
and it ended and it ended with a lot of people who were interested in their life and they found themselves once again on solid ground even better research also tends to show that we psychologist called feeler who studies liminality and life changes and transitions quite extensively actually he has a lot
of really interesting papers if you're into that but he found that 90 % of the time the people he spoke with about their life changes they ultimately judged their transition to have been a success insofar that the transition ended and they found themselves once again on solid ground even better research
also tends to show that we see past events even unwanted ones as net positives over time like getting fired and it sounds like a cognitive error but it isn't it's not like our brain trying to like trick us almost every transition even the most challenging ones does bear some positive fruit it just may take
some time to see it and feel its effects because in the moment our brain is so worried about that uncertainty element and about what might go wrong and why we need to have that fear but in hindsight when you're no longer in that situation where your body is in like a flight or fight kind of mode you're
kind of able to appreciate it for what it is and in his book meanings of life the psychologist Roy Bumister Bumister can't remember his name it's called the meanings of life I'm sure that's definitely not a very generic book title but this psychologist he argues that the sense of meaning gained through
change makes the rest of life seem more stable and this is one of the great constellations of like aging and seeing a lot of change is that transitions likely don't cause as much distress and you might actually be happier because if you've gone through so many periods of ups and downs and roller coasters
and transitions you probably have a pretty stable sense of identity throughout that all and some pretty good priorities about what you want from your life and the one final thing about big life changes I feel like this whole episode has just been me trying to convince myself that moving straight constellations
of like aging and seeing a lot of change is that transitions likely don't cause as much distress and you might actually be happier because if you've gone through so many periods of ups and downs and roller coasters and transitions you probably have a pretty stable sense of identity throughout that all
and some pretty good priorities about what you want from your life and the resilience and deeper spirituality and I think the richer relationships is is a big one because when people move or when something changes in your life if you decide to do something completely different you kind of realize who's
really there for you in a way and who it's not just convenient to be around but who you actually kind of like and really get along with and another manifestation of this growth is heightened creativity this is one of the big reasons why I'm really excited for the next few years of my life because I
think struggle and change really push or move or when something changes in your life if you decide to do something completely different you kind of realize who's really there for you in a way and who it's not just convenient to be around but who you actually kind of like and really get along with and another
manifestation of this growth is heightened creativity this is one of the big reasons why I'm really excited for the next few years of my life because I think struggle and change really pushes the kind of limits of how your brain sees the world and I've seen this already like breakups are probably the best
exist like that that's often where it's going to go in times of change and transition and stress what a ramble that has kind of been like I said I feel like this episode is just me trying to convince myself that this is a good idea I don't know maybe I should do like a follow -up episode in a year's
time and I like if you guys have seen those like Billie Eilish videos where they like record her every year asking her the same questions it'd be interesting to listen back to this episode in a year's time after I've made the move and see if my predictions about adjustment and cognitive dissonance and new
priorities and creativity are right or whether I'm just like full of crap or the literature is just like full of crap um but yeah thank you so much for listening also you guys have been really hyping the podcast up recently thanks so much for that I really appreciate it and like I always say if you
want to support us or I don't know why I say us it's just me but if you want to support me and the podcast more um a really great way to do that is to leave a review on apple podcast if you have an iPhone um kind of allows more people to find this content and to hear my voice it's kind of weird to say
that but if you do feel cool to leave a review I really appreciate it really does help us grow once again helps me grow um and brings kind of more listeners to this space in the world space in the metaverse if you're going through a big life transition as well as I'm sure many of you are I know it's
the end of the year so graduations just happen everyone's moving I can feel it all around then hopefully this kind of brought some insights into what you might be experiencing and why it's maybe normal or what to expect and why at the end of the day it's really just kind of worth it so thanks for tuning
in and listening wherever you're listening hope you're having an amazing afternoon morning evening just an amazing day and thanks for listening to the very end you're my very special listener and you'll be hearing from me very soon that's a bit weird but anyhow thanks guys and have a lovely lovely day
this year I've been really rethinking my relationship with alcohol and so I decided to commit to dry January to really kickstart 2025 and just for tuning in and listening wherever you're listening hope you're having an amazing afternoon morning evening just an amazing day and thanks for listening to
the very end you're my very special listener and uh you'll be hearing from me very soon that's a bit weird but anyhow thanks guys and have a lovely lovely day this year I've been really rethinking my relationship with alcohol and so I decided to you must be 21 plus to purchase enjoy Heineken responsibly
and good luck with dry January do you want to see into the future do you want to understand an invisible force that's shaping your life do you want to experience the frontiers of what makes us human on tech stuff we travel from the minds of congo to the surface of mars from conversations with nobel
prize winners to the depths of tiktok to ask burning questions about technology from high tech to low culture and everywhere in between join us listen to tech stuff on the iHeartRadio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts
