Why change knocks us off balance, even when it is good change

You’ve got the promotion you wanted for years. Or you and your partner have finally bought a flat, got married, are expecting a baby. Everything is exactly as it should be — and yet you lie awake at night, you’re irritable, and over lunch your chest tightens for no reason at all. “What’s wrong with me? This is what I wanted!”

There is nothing wrong with you. To the nervous system, change is change — regardless of whether we mark it in the calendar with a star or a cross. Even the changes we chose ourselves and are looking forward to demand an adjustment from us, and that adjustment has a price. And because almost nobody talks about that price, we’re left alone with it, confused and with the uneasy sense that we’re being ungrateful.

In this post I’ll explain why change — including good change — throws every one of us off course: what happens in the brain, why identity has to reassemble itself at every major transition, and why the hardest part of a transition is often the middle stretch, when the old is gone and the new hasn’t arrived. At the end I’ll add some things that genuinely help along the way.

Weddings count too: what the stress scale showed

In 1967 the psychiatrists Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe went through the medical records of several thousand people looking for a link between life events and illness. Out of that came the famous Social Readjustment Rating Scale, on which every event was given points according to how much adjustment it demanded.

At the top are the hardest events, as you’d expect: the death of a spouse, divorce, serious illness. But look at what else is on the scale: marriage is in seventh place — higher than being dismissed from work. Among the significant sources of stress are also retirement, a new family member, an outstanding personal achievement, a change of job, moving house, even holidays and Christmas. Events most people would unhesitatingly call good, or at least neutral.

What Holmes and Rahe were measuring, of course, was not pleasantness: they were measuring the amount of adjustment an event demands. And adjustment is work for the body, whatever the sign in front of the event. Their research showed that when major changes pile up (good ones included!), the likelihood of illness in the following year or two rises. Later research refined the picture — how we experience an event and how much support we have matter too — but the basic message holds: change is a burden, even when it’s a gift.

So remember this: if you feel tightness after a wedding, a promotion or a move into your dream flat, you aren’t being ungrateful. Your body is honestly paying the bill for the adjustment you’re asking of it.

The brain is a prediction machine — and change ruins its predictions

Why is adjustment so expensive? Modern neuroscience increasingly understands the brain as a prediction machine. Rather than receiving the world passively, the brain constantly predicts it: from experience it builds a model of the world and then checks only for deviations from its predictions. Karl Friston, one of the most influential neuroscientists working today, calls this the free energy principle; the philosopher Andy Clark put the same idea more simply — the brain is a “prediction machine” for which the most unpleasant thing in the world is surprise.

It’s a brilliantly economical system: as long as life is predictable, the brain runs on autopilot and uses little energy. You know the route to work, you know how your boss will react, where the bread is in the shop, what your home sounds like at night. Thousands of micro-predictions a day are quietly confirmed and you don’t even notice they exist.

But a major change brings the model of the world down. A new job, a new city, a new role — suddenly every other prediction is wrong. The brain has to come off autopilot and go manual: everything has to be perceived, weighed up, decided. That’s why an ordinary day in a new environment leaves you as exhausted as if you’d run a marathon — neurologically speaking, you have. And that’s why the nervous system so often responds to change with anxiety, irritability or insomnia: uncertainty is a form of alarm for it, even when your reason knows everything is fine.

Every change is also a loss

The second layer is less technical and more painful: every change, even the best, takes something away. A new job takes your old colleagues and the feeling that you’re good at what you do. Moving house takes the bakery on the corner and the neighbours who knew you. Marriage takes part of the freedom of being single, a child takes the lazy mornings for two. You wouldn’t necessarily want any of it back — but what is lost is lost all the same.

And we grieve losses. That is exactly why “illogical” feelings turn up in the middle of lovely changes: sadness, nostalgia, anger, emptiness. It isn’t a sign that you decided wrongly — it’s a sign that you’ve left something behind. I wrote in more detail about how sadness does its work and why it’s worth letting it close in the post on sadness as a process of change — here let’s keep just the essential: the feelings that come with a transition aren’t a fault in the system, they are part of the transition.

The three steps of every transition: Bridges’s map

The most useful map of transitions I know was drawn by the American consultant William Bridges in his book Transitions (1980). His key idea: change and transition are not the same thing. Change is an external event — a new address, a new contract, a ring on your finger. A transition is the inner process by which we actually adapt to the change. A change happens in a single day; a transition takes months.

And now the most surprising part: for Bridges, every transition begins with an ending, not a beginning. Before you can truly enter the new, you have to put something old down — a role, an environment, an image of yourself, a way of living. Then comes the in-between space (Bridges calls it the neutral zone): the old has dissolved, the new hasn’t grown yet. Only after that comes a new beginning — the moment when the new role really takes, when a new city becomes home, when you recognise yourself in the mirror.

Most of us turn this order on its head: we expect a new chapter to start on the day of the change, and we’re bewildered when what turns up first is grief for the old. Bridges’s model puts this in its place — grief isn’t a delay, it’s the first step.

The in-between space: the hardest and most valuable part

If you ask me where people most often get lost in transitions, the answer is clear: in the in-between space. The papers are signed, the boxes unpacked, the congratulation cards put away — the world thinks the change is done. Inside, though, you’re somewhere out on the open sea: the old identity is gone, the new one hasn’t grown. You aren’t quite sure who you are, the days have no familiar rhythm, motivation wavers, and questions come up that you never had to ask before.

In the therapy room I recognise this space by sentences like: “Everything should be fine now, and it isn’t”, “I don’t recognise myself”, “It’s as if I’m hanging in mid-air”. And there is almost always shame alongside, because the person thinks the transition ought to be faster and tidier.

But the in-between space has another side too: it is the most fertile period adult life has to offer. When the old structures fall apart, a rare opportunity opens up to put some things together differently — not to carry everything into the new chapter out of inertia, but to choose. In the in-between space people often think properly for the first time in years about what matters to them, which relationships nourish them, what pace they can sustain. So it isn’t worth skipping or drowning out with activity — it’s worth walking through with your eyes open.

Anchors, rituals, pace: what really helps in a transition

A transition can’t be hurried by willpower, but it can be made more passable. A few things I see working in my work with people:

• Anchors. When a lot changes, let something stay the same. Morning coffee by the window, a run on Wednesdays, a call to a friend on Sundays — small constants give the nervous system at least a few confirmed predictions a day, and with them a sense of ground underfoot. So during a period of major change, deliberately don’t introduce further ones (a new diet or a new exercise regime can wait).
• Rituals of ending. An ending needs a form. A farewell dinner with colleagues, a last walk through the old neighbourhood, a letter you never send, a box of mementoes. Rituals aren’t sentimentality — they are the way the psyche closes a chapter so as not to carry it onward still open.
• A realistic pace. Adjusting to a major change takes months, not weeks. Knowing that in advance saves you the extra suffering of thinking things “ought to be better by now”.
• Words for what’s happening. Simply naming it — “I’m in the in-between space, this is a normal part of a transition” — noticeably lowers the distress. What has a name no longer has to be feared as a sign that something is wrong with us.
• People. Transitions are the times when social support counts most — and when it’s hardest to reach for, because it feels like “it’s nothing really”. It is something. Say it out loud to someone who knows how to listen.

Staying yourself when everything is moving

One more thing tends to wobble in a transition: the line between what you want and what others expect of you. Around a wedding, a baby, a move or a change of career, everyone has something to say — parents with their ideas, the people around you with their standards, social expectations with their timetables. When you’re uncertain yourself, other people’s voices are especially hard to tell apart from your own.

Psychology calls the ability to stay connected to others while remaining true to yourself differentiation — and transitions are its greatest test. You’ll find more about how to make decisions from yourself rather than from fear or a wish to please in the post on differentiation. Here let me say only this: if you feel pulled in every direction during a transition, it doesn’t mean you’re weak — it means important things are being decided.

What transitions wake up from the past

One more thing it’s fair to know in advance: big transitions tend to open old stories as well. A present loss calls up earlier ones — a wedding can wake grief for a parent who didn’t live to see it; a move can open the memory of a childhood move that was too much at the time; a new job can revive the old feeling that you have to prove everything before you’re allowed to stay. The psyche files losses and uncertainties by kinship, not by date — which is why a new transition tends to bring up everything that was ever similar and never fully worked through.

In the therapy room this is actually the most common reason a transition “doesn’t go to plan”: a person is struggling not only with the present change but, unknowingly, carrying two or three old ones as well. The good news is that this is also an opportunity — a transition is a natural window in which old stories are accessible and can finally be closed. So when your reaction to a change seems disproportionately strong, don’t only ask “what’s wrong with me”, but also “what does this remind me of”. The answer to the second question often explains the first.

A similar mechanism applies to the body: a nervous system that has experienced unpredictability as danger in the past responds more strongly to every new uncertainty. If your body reacts to a change more fiercely than seems reasonable — with insomnia, anxiety, tension — that isn’t an overreaction but an old alarm on a new event. That too can be calmed, gradually and kindly.

When a transition needs a companion

We walk through most transitions on our own, with time and good people around us. So when does it make sense to look for support? When you get stuck in the in-between space: when anxiety, emptiness or irritability don’t ease after several months, when old endings refuse to close, when a change opens older, deeper stories — or when you simply feel that you don’t want to carry this alone.

My support through life transitions is intended for exactly such periods: a space where a transition gets words, an ending gets its farewell and a new beginning gets its foundation — at your pace, not the calendar’s. I went through one of the biggest transitions myself when I changed profession, so I know very well that a map is not the same as the road. If you feel a companion would help, you can write to me.

And until then: if you’re in the middle of a change and it’s harder than it “should” be — you don’t have to fix anything. The transition is doing its work. Your task isn’t to be all right straight away; your task is to go through it, step by step.