How you doing everybody? Are you good? I got a bit rattled recently and it inspired a podcast

episode on Patreon. Look me up on there if you want to hear the full episode, but I'll go into it a bit

for you here today because it was something very minor. So my phone updated itself overnight.

I opened the photos app in the morning and suddenly everything looked

different. It was the same app, but the layout had changed and I'm stood there, squinting at the

screen, irritated, thinking, who asked for this? Now, of course, within a few times of using it,

I totally adjusted, but in that first moment, I genuinely felt rattled, all over just an app.

And that's my point.

If even tiny changes can throw us off, imagine how much more unsettling the big ones are.

New jobs, moving house, starting or ending a relationship, even changes we want,

like having children or retiring can stir up anxiety, because change is uncomfortable, even when

it's exciting. Our brains are wired that way. Back in our caveman days, change meant danger usually. If the landscape

was different, it might mean predators. If the food source changed, it might mean uncertainty and

hunger. So our nervous system learned that same equals safe and different equals risk.

Hundreds of thousands of years later, our amygdala still reacts the same way.

It doesn't know the difference between a new phone layout and a saber-tooth cat.

It just registers unfamiliar and sounds the alarm.

That's why we resist change. There's even a term for it, we call it

the status quo bias. And I so wish, for those of you watching the video version of this,

that I owned a status quo t-shirt, but I don't, because that had been hilarious.

But the status quo bias means we'd rather stick with the uncomfortable thing we know than face the uncertainty of something new.

That's why people stay in jobs they don't like or relationships that aren't working.

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