Why Change?

It depends

How are you feeling? Content and generally happy? Or maybe uncomfortable and dissatisfied? Your answer determines how likely you are to change.

I previously shared my health story for context. I felt a lot of pain and it motivated me to change my life. If something is obviously wrong, change seems justified. If you’re feeling good, why do anything different?

When things are good (or good enough), your brain creates psychological barriers to change which include things like uncertainty, loss aversion, and perceived risk. These all tend to manifest broadly as fear. Proposed changes illicit fear, which prevents us from taking action. This is why people stay in dead end jobs or failed relationships.

Usually things have to be bad* for us to change. Near the beginning of the archetypal Hero’s Journey, there is a “Call to Action/Adventure.” It’s what gets the protagonist off their ass and sets them on the path to become a hero. This ‘call’ is typically refused unless there is no other option. People with stable lives don’t want to put themselves at risk. Luke’s aunt and uncle need to get killed before he will leave home and save the galaxy.

We like feeling the safe predictability of the default. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. We’re born into a world of systems that we see as “normal.” Whether they’re good or bad, they’re familiar and we stick with them. See: old people (and conservatives). The illusion of stability is comforting. Things are okay now, if something changes, it might all go to hell.

The flip side is, when things are bad*, change might actually be worth the risk. The motivation to change (or resist change) comes from perspective. We have to notice (and more importantly feel) that something is broken in order to want to fix it. This is the problem with chronic illness.

When you fall off your bike and break your wrist, it’s obvious something has gone wrong. You feel it. This is acute trauma. In contrast, when your blood pressure is high, often there are no symptoms. You don’t feel anything. What’s the motivation to change? Maybe at some point, you see your doctor and she says that you’ve got high blood pressure. It’s not so bad right now, you should try and get your diet and lifestyle under control before resorting to medication. (Or maybe she’ll put you on meds immediately because she assumes you won’t change your behavior.) You know you should change, but you don’t feel the pressure to. Why not?

I have a vague anecdote floating around in my head about the old smoker, diagnosed with lung cancer, who still stubbornly refuses to quit smoking. When I was younger, this didn’t make sense to me. I thought that humans were supposed to behave rationally! Like traditional economists, I was wrong. The old smoker doesn’t feel like changing because he didn’t evolve to fear cancer. He evolved to fear more tangible things like snakes and pain.** Despite the fact that chronic illness is statistically far more likely to kill us than a spider - we just don’t get that same visceral response to cardiovascular disease. It’s too amorphous.

People vary in their capacity to make abstractions tangible. Some people don’t care about climate change. Some people couldn’t grasp the gravity of COVID. Pretty much everyone hated Hitler though. Being correctly concerned about climate change relies on an abstract understanding of a variety of complex systems and ideas. Hating Hitler relies on millions of years of evolution baked into your lizard brain. If climate change was a person, humans would have no problem banding together to fight him. “Remember when he flooded the whole town? I fuckin’ hate that guy.” Rising sea levels are heart disease. Terrorism is a shark attack. I think you get it.

So you’re going about your life, you feel fine. Then you have a heart attack and die. It may not be that dramatic. The point is, despite feeling like everything is fine - it might not be. In a modern environment, you fear the wrong things (another example of evolutionary mismatch). This is a problem because you won’t change until you feel like you need to. Things don’t seem so bad, until it’s too late. Prevention (delaying as long as possible) is the most effective way to fight chronic disease. It’s also something we’re not naturally inclined to do.

One of the many reasons to learn more about diet and nutrition is that the more you understand, the more tangible it becomes to your brain. You will always like the taste of sugar, that’s innate. But when you have a better understanding of what exactly it’s doing to you - you feel worse about eating it. That’s motivation to change.

Side note: if you’d rather remain ignorant and blissful, my work isn’t for you. Turn back now. “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.” If you do want to know what’s going on and want to live a longer, healthier life - please continue.

*like totally fucked

**or snakes on a plane