Embracing change can help to reduce anxiety

2,500 years ago, an ancient Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, wisely said ‘There is nothing permanent except change.’

And he wasn’t wrong!

If you think about all the changes you’ve witnessed in your lifetime, you’ll quickly realise that nothing stays the same. I’m old enough to remember black and white TV and coal fires. No doubt there are things from your childhood that are now obsolete.

Often, we don’t notice the changes, they happen in an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary way. The local shop stops selling J-cloths, OMO washing powder or Caramac chocolate bars, so you switch to whatever alternative they have in stock. All those products are still available, by the way, you just don’t see them as much as other products that are promoted more aggressively and you’ll likely need to source them online.

Sometimes change is more radical and noticeable. Cassette tapes replaced vinyl records, CDs replaced cassette tapes, music streaming and downloads are replacing CDs. You can still access the old technologies, of course, but you have to go out of your way to do it.

Change is happening all the time.

And that’s fine, as long as it’s at a gradual pace so we can take time to adapt. We feel we can cope, in fact often we barely notice the change. Remember postage stamps that you had to lick to fix to the envelope?

Problems arise when the change is significant, sudden or forced upon you. Things like redundancy, divorce or injury. These are serious life events, and our daily routines are often disrupted. The income, people and mobility that we took for granted are no longer available. Naturally, we feel threatened and, if we’re not careful, this can lead to feelings of not being able to cope.

And it’s because our primitive brains do not like change. All our primitive brains want is for tomorrow to be like today.

Change implies something unknown. A known routine, even if it means staying in a job we hate or living with people who are abusive, is seen as preferable to stepping out into the unknown.

Change involves effort. Doing the same-old, same-old, day-in, day-out requires a lot less mental energy than learning to do things differently. So, our primitive brains encourage us to continue with redundant activities. They resist anything that might require additional effort.

That fear of the unknown, that discomfort in overcoming inertia, feels threatening. And one of the ways our primitive brains respond to threats is by raising our levels of anxiety. When we’re anxious, we’re hyper-vigilant, better able to spot potential hazards. Fine when the hazard is real, like a sabre-toothed tiger entering your cave, not so fine when you get stressed because the council has changed your bin day.

Now, the council has some responsibility for the way you respond. It’s all down to how they communicate the message. The worst kind of communication is when there’s minimal information. ‘We’re changing your bin day’ is likely to raise anyone’s hackles. ‘We’ve reviewed our services and we’re changing your bin day’ is only marginally better. ‘We’ve reviewed our services and we can see that we can cut our carbon emissions by 20% if we tweak the recycling lorry routes, so we’re changing your bin day’ is much more likely to be favourably received.

And this provides a clue to reducing anxiety in the face of enforced change. If the ‘reason why’ is not clear, we’re likely to be more anxious. And that’s because our primitive brains do not like uncertainty. If your partner leaves you for no reason, that’s somehow worse than if they left you for someone else. So, finding why a change is happening can go a long way to helping you cope better with that change. It isn’t always possible to find out, of course, but it’s worth pursuing if you can.

Now, given that the last 100 years or so have seen ever-accelerating technological advances, it’s a wonder that any of us are able to cope. But, of course, we do. We adapt to the new way of doing things, and after a while we’ve done them so often it feels totally natural.

So, what’s the secret for avoiding anxiety when change is thrust upon us?

The first step is to recognise that it’s something outside of your control. The council has changed bin day and that’s that.

The second step is to accept that the change has happened and is permanent. No amount of protest is likely to overturn their decision, it’s done.  Fretting about it isn’t going to help either.

The third step is to adapt. OK, so the new reality is bin day is now Thursday instead of Tuesday. What do you need to do to remind yourself to put the bins out on a different day? Take action to remind yourself.

The fourth step is to let it go. Sooner or later, putting the bins out on a Thursday will become the norm and you’ll get into the new habit soon enough. You’ll quickly forget that bin day was anything other than Thursday.

Now, obviously I’ve used a very trivial example here, but the same principle applies to any enforced change. The quicker you accept and adapt, the easier it will be and the less anxious you will feel.

As Heraclitus pointed out, change is guaranteed. We can either rile against the change or we can flow with it. How we respond determines the quality of our lives.