Why is Change so Hard? - Video Transcript

Hi everyone, I’m Kristen, the anxiety therapist and today I'm going to be talking about why it's so difficult to make changes. This is especially true for people who struggle with anxiety because of the uncertainty. So that alone is such a huge component of difficulty in making change. We've all tried to make a change at some point in our lives, right, whether it's implementing a new habit or behavior or maybe stopping something that we recognize as being unhealthy or unproductive and we get stuck.

And that's typically because we don't know what's on the other side of that change, we don't know how we're going to feel or what that situation is going to look like. And that alone can be enough to sort of impair us and keep us stuck and paralyzed because in our current state, whatever it is that looks like it's familiar, it's comfortable, we sort of know what to expect.

We know how we feel and even if we can recognize that as being unproductive or unhealthy. Um just the certainty that comes with that can trump this motivation for change. So another big component of making change is acceptance. So all behaviors are caused and instead of judging the behavior, it's a lot more effective to change the cause of the behavior.

But in order to change the cause we have to accept the cause and that is very hard for most people because we don't like to look at ourselves in that way. We don't like to look at at um vulnerable emotions that might be contributing. We don't look like to look at um unproductive or unhealthy things that we're doing.

Um you know, it causes a lot of self reflection and a lot of times when we do that, we inherently tend to judge ourselves. So a lot of times I work with my clients and just being curious about the causes of certain things that they do. We don't need to judge it, we don't need to judge how you feel or why you think you're acting in this way.

But let's just get curious about it. And when you have that curiosity, you can really explore the root causes of a lot of the things that you do um without that judgment and there's just a a much greater sense of acceptance and once you have that sense of acceptance for what is then at least, you know, what needs to be changed and can sort of move forward in making those changes.

So just to recap, um, acceptance is a huge component of making changes. And a lot of times we have a hard time reaching that on our own. And so therapy can really help kind of parse through those judgments and and establish more curiosity and acceptance so that you can make the changes that you want. Um so I hope this video is helpful.

Um I put out new content every Friday, so stay tuned for the next one and I hope you have a great weekend.