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READ TIME: 12m
DR JOHN DEMARTINI - Updated 10 hours ago

Have you ever wondered why some changes seem easy to navigate while others leave you feeling anxious, overwhelmed or resistant?

Life is constantly changing. Relationships evolve. Businesses transform. Circumstances shift. Some changes you welcome, while others challenge you. Yet what if the stress you experience isn't actually caused by change itself, but by the way you perceive it?

One definition of stress is the inability to adapt to a changing environment. So understanding why you resist change may also reveal how to become more resilient, adaptable, present and more powerful. In other words – the master of your destiny instead of the victim of your circumstances.

You tend to resist change when you become rigidly attached to a polarized perception.

There are two types of attachment. Anything that is highly polarized in your perceptions, anything that's extremely positive or extremely negative, you're likely to fear either its loss or its gain.

Your resistance to change, your inability to adapt, stems from these attachments. The two attachments you have are responses from your subcortical amygdala, your inner nuclei, your older survival brain. In that area of the brain, the amygdala assigns valency to stimuli. Anything that comes into your awareness is assigned a positive or negative valency, representing either pey or predator, creates an impulse to seek or an instinct to avoid.

The more emotionally charged that perception becomes, the more likely you are to fear its loss if it's positively charged, or its gain if it's negatively charged. So anytime there's a change, if you're judging it, you're likely to fear losing something you want or gaining something you don't want, and you'll tend to resist rather than adapt.

There are basically two forms of this. The positive form is prey. It activates the parasympathetic nervous system, your rest-and-digest response. It's anabolic and supports growth, so you fear its loss. The negative form is predator. It activates the sympathetic nervous system, your fight-or-flight response, so you fear its gain.

If you meet somebody who's highly polarized, whether a religious fundamentalist or an extreme political fundamentalist, they're often among those with the greatest resistance to change, and they tend to fight for their rigid causes. Many of the conflicts you see are the result of these extremes.

If you're relatively neutral and have a balanced perspective, seeing both the positive and negative simultaneously in an event, you don't fear its loss or its gain. But the second you add valency and positive or negative charge to it, it becomes something you fear losing or fear gaining.

Let's say you meet somebody and become infatuated with them. You're likely to fear losing them. If you resent somebody, you're likely to fear them coming into your life. If you have things you like and dislike about people, which most people do, you're likely to fear losing the parts you like and fear gaining the parts you dislike. So anytime there's a change, somebody moving into your life or out of it, if there's emotional charge attached to your perception of them, you're likely to experience resistance.

You'll tend to procrastinate, hesitate and frustrate yourself because you're afraid of losing something you want or gaining something you don't want. These are normal biological responses to your perceptions. Your amygdala tends to assign subjective bias to what you perceive. Anything that supports your highest values tends to create an in-group bias, and you fear its loss. People who remind you of yourself, your culture, your age group or your community tend to evoke that response, while people who are quite different from you, you're likely to fear the gain of – outgroup bias.

But what also tends to happen is that you have a natural resilience and adaptability when you're living congruently with what you value most, where you tend to have the greatest objectivity and the most balanced perspective on life.

But when you're living according to lower values in survival and functioning predominantly from the amygdala, you assign valency to your perceptions. The more polarized those perceptions become, the more subjectively biased you become. You may have false positives on the positives and false negatives on the negatives and become infatuated, or false positives on the negatives and false negatives on the positives and become resentful. When that occurs, you're likely to experience greater resistance and stress when subject to change.

Stress is actually also a friend.

Most people say they want to get rid of stress, but stress is actually a valuable feedback system. It lets you know what you have highly valent charges about, another name for judgments.

Empedocles, the Greek philosopher, spoke of love and strife: the unconditional love of the soul and the strife of the body and the senses. Anytime you judge something as absolutely black or white, bad or good, negative or positive, you're likely to have greater difficulty adapting to a changing environment. In other words, you'll tend to resist change.

Your resistance to change is feedback letting you know you're making strong judgments and becoming subjectively biased. Whenever you try to seek one-sided outcomes and avoid the other side, you're unlikely to achieve and be fulfilled.

Just try to be kind all the time and never cruel, or positive and never negative. Anytime you try to be one side without the other, or expect other people to be that way, you're likely to experience challenges. You're unlikely to be adaptable.

But when you understand that people live congruently with their highest values, that they make decisions according to those highest values, and that they have both sides (they're neither positive without negative nor negative without positive. They're not heroes or villains. They're human beings with both sides. Individuals, which means undivided.  When you embrace THAT perspective, you're much more able to adapt and become resilient in your relationships with them.

The same applies to yourself.

If I came up to you and said, "You're always positive, never negative; always kind, never cruel," and you believed me, you'd probably have difficulty adapting when the positive appears to disappear and the negative appears to emerge.

But if you embrace the fact that you're two-sided, that you're positive and negative, kind and cruel, nice and mean, peaceful and wrathful, supportive and challenging, you no longer need to get rid of half of yourself in order to love yourself.

You can love both sides simultaneously.

As a result, you’re more likely to be resilient and adaptable.

That's one of the reasons I talk about values so often. When you live congruently with your highest values, blood, glucose and oxygen go into your forebrain, the medial prefrontal cortex. That area of your brain is where you're generally more reasonable, objective and logical. Daniel Kahneman referred to this as System 2 thinking.

In that state, you're more likely to remain neutral. You're less likely to polarize your perceptions and more likely to be resilient, adaptable and functional. You're generally more disciplined, reliable and focused.

That's why, in the Beakthrough Experience, one of my signature programs, which I've now presented 1,270 times, I take individuals who have a major resentment and identify what the individual did that they falsely assumed was the cause of their discomfort. Then I ask them to identify where they have demonstrated that same behavior to the same degree, and how that behavior has actually served them, until their perception becomes neutral rather than positive or negative.

I also ask them to discover what the drawbacks would have been had the individual done what they had hoped, and what the benefits would have been had they behaved in the opposite way they least wanted them to behave.

As they bring those perceptions back into balance, they become more neutral. They're no longer judging. They move closer to unconditional love. Individuals can come into and leave their lives without creating attachment, just as Buddhist philosophy teaches: the desire for that which is unobtainable and the desire to avoid that which is unavoidable is the source of human suffering.

The Stoics understood this. Almost every perennial philosophy and enduring religious tradition has understood this. Being able to develop equanimity within your mind and equity between yourself and others, and to walk the middle path, the Daoist path or the unattached state described by the Stoics, is profoundly liberating. Because the moment you're liberated from attachment, you're liberated from the things that once controlled you.

Anything you're highly polarized about occupies space and time in your mind and runs your life.

You've probably had times when you couldn't sleep because you were highly infatuated with somebody or deeply resentful of somebody. The more polarized those perceptions become, the greater the fear of losing something you seek or gaining something you wish to avoid. Your body remains alert, you don't rest, you don't sleep, and eventually your health begins to be affected.

But if you balance the equation by living by priority and asking quality questions, and you ask questions that equilibrate the mind, you gradually liberate yourself from attachment, polarized perceptions, your amygdala's biased interpretation, in-group and out-group biases, and false positive and false negative biased interpretations of your reality.

You begin to see what's actually there.

The individual standing in front of you isn't a nice individual or a mean individual. They're an individual living according to a unique set of values. If you support those values, they can be as gentle as a pussycat. If you challenge those values, they can be as fierce as a tiger.

They're a human being. And you are a human being. You deserve to be loved for both sides. They deserve to be loved for both sides.

When you balance the equation, you're much more adaptable and resilient. You're less preoccupied by the occupation of space and time in your mind, less distracted by intrusive thoughts arising from highly charged perceptions, and less judgmental. So you're more present.

Life is changing nonstop. You're being perturbed every single day of your life. The question is: how quickly can you return to homeostasis? This reflects your level of EQ.

Walter Cannon wrote The Wisdom of the Body, and Claude Bernard spoke about homeostasis. Your brain, body, psychology and physiology are doing everything they can to stabilize you in a constantly changing environment. You're continually being stressed, or distressed, by your perceptions. But if you can balance your perceptions and see both sides of events, you're more resilient, more adaptable and less resistant to change.

The quality of your life is based on the quality of the questions you ask.

If you have a highly valent and polarized perception, ask yourself, Where's the opposite side? It's there.

No event is one-sided. Every event has two sides. Every individual has two sides. Every goal has two sides. Every experience has two sides.

If you ask the right questions, see the other side and balance the equation, the world around you no longer runs you. You run you.

You're a victim of your history when you don't see both sides. You're a master of your destiny when you do.

You can remain polarized, or you can become synthesized, as I call it. If you're polarized, you're living in the past or the future, never fully present. When you're synthesized, you're living in the present. That's where the power is. That's where you become empowered.

Remember, whenever you're infatuated with somebody and place them on a pedestal, you're likely to inject their values and attempt to live according to them. That's futile and unsustainable. When you resent somebody, you're likely to want them to live according to your values. That's equally futile and unsustainable.

So you tend to live with futility when you're highly polarized and live with maximum utility when you're synthesized, when you have a balanced perspective.

That's why I often say I'm not a positive thinker or a negative thinker. I'm a balanced thinker. I strive to see both sides of events so they don't run me. I run them.

So if you're experiencing resistance to change, remember that it's your perception of what's happening that determines your resistance. Balance your perceptions and you liberate yourself. You become more adaptable, much less stressed, and you're free to love your life again.

To Sum Up

• One definition of stress is the inability to adapt to a changing environment.
   
• Stress is actually also a friend. It provides valuable feedback about what you have highly valent charges about.
   
• The more emotionally charged your perceptions become, the more likely you are to resist change rather than adapt.
   
• Living congruently with your highest values helps you become more objective, resilient and adaptable.
   
• You don't need to get rid of half of yourself in order to love yourself. You can love both sides simultaneously.
   
• Every event has two sides. Every individual has two sides. Every experience has two sides.
   
• The quality of your life is based on the quality of the questions you ask.
   
• When you balance your perceptions, you liberate yourself from attachment and become more present.
   
• You're a victim of your history when you don't see both sides. You're a master of your destiny when you do.
   
• Balance your perceptions and you become more adaptable, much less stressed, and free to love your life again.

If you'd love to become more resilient, adaptable and empowered, and learn the quality questions that can help you dissolve emotional charges, balance your perceptions and master the art of adapting to change, I'd love you to join me at my next online Breakthrough Experience program. It's an opportunity to explore these principles in greater depth and learn practical tools that can help transform the way you perceive your life, your relationships and your future.

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In 2 days you’ll learn how to solve any issue you are facing and reset the course of your life for greater achievement and fulfillment.

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Important Notice:
The content shared in this blog is for education and personal development. It is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any psychological or medical conditions. The information and processes shared are for general educational purposes only and should not be considered a substitute for professional mental-health or medical advice. If you are experiencing acute distress or ongoing clinical concerns, please consult a licensed health-care provider.

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