Why Change Is So Difficult?
Our Mind Expect Certain Things to Stay the Same.
In theory, change should be simple. When walking down the street, say come to a construction site and need to change your path. By scanning around the area you should be able to find a detour and follow it to get where you want to go. Inherently, this situation shouldn’t cause any stress but our mind offer a number of special quirks that cause us to see things differently. Because we’ve taken the normal path before, we don’t worry that it’ll take us where we want to go. When we run into a roadblock, suddenly information we trusted has broken down. Where does the other road lead? How long will it take? Is it dangerous? What we don’t know tends to scare us, and change creates a lot of things we don’t know. As a result, we tend to act pretty irrationally to try and prevent change, often without realizing it, and make our lives unnecessarily problematic.
While we often fear change when pre-existing information fails us, but the amount of stress can vary greatly.
Both nature and nurture will influence how we form our core beliefs about how the world works and our roles in our respective worlds. When we experience the world or ourselves in a certain way for an extended period of time, we develop core beliefs that make up our paradigm for how life is supposed to be. The experiences we have as children tend to be the most long-lasting and influential because they represent prototypical experiences that future experiences will be compared to and will likely play a key role in the development of our worldview/paradigm for life.
The earlier you learned something, the harder it is to change. “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks” is a saying for a reason.
We Seek Out People Like Us to Avoid Change.
Because new information bothers our mind, we tend to find friends and form groups that reinforce our beliefs—whether they’re correct or not. When many people agree, it’s easy to discount the opinions of others in the face of undeniable logic. This occurs because of a phenomenon known as the illusion of asymmetric insight.
The illusion of asymmetric insight makes it seem as though you know everyone else far better than they know you, and not only that, but you know them better than they know themselves. You believe the same thing about groups of which you are a member. As a whole, your group understands outsiders better than outsiders understand your group, and you understand the group better than its members know the group to which they belong.
This lovely phenomenon gives you cause to discount conflicting information as bias and stick with what you know. Essentially, you attack the possibility of change because you think you know better than everyone else and have the friends to back you up.
