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Key points
- Change is hard, even when it's "good change."
- We're built with internal alarms that don't distinguish very well between dangerous and exciting.
- Being open to and acknowledging the emotional impact of change is better than covering up hard feelings with logic and denial.
I'm sitting here the night before my first kid starts kindergarten, and we are planning out routines, making sure folders are full of completed papers, and trying to get both kids to do mundane things adults take for granted, like shower and eat dinner in under two hours.
I'm working on a checklist to try to optimize this process, when, for the 50,000,000th time today, said kindergartener begins screeching at the top of her lungs for no apparent reason.
She has been fighting with her brother, having epic meltdowns, and falling to pieces over what appears to be nothing almost every other hour these past few days. In between, she has been her usual enthusiastic and kind self, so I know it’s not a permanent change.
As the adult, of course, I have it more together and am coping well with the start of a new school year—for us, the first real school year.
Except that is 100 percent a lie.
Stuck in my own cluster of transitions and emotions and spiritual gunk, I’ve been privately falling to pieces, too. Attributing it up until now to outside circumstances, like work and new projects, I've chosen my solution accordingly. For the past week, I've retreated almost fully into the soothing lull of productivity hacks and process outlines. All of which require staring at my phone for hours and ignoring all other spheres of my life.
Given my current state, when my daughter screams, it rattles me from my hyperfocus. And if you've ever been hyperfocused, you know interruption of any kind, but particularly the loud noise kind, kicks off a Level 1 Trauma-like response.
So, I drop my phone and screech her name in a pitch so high that even my husband, a veteran to both my and her emotional outbursts, winces.
I immediately feel terrible and slip onto the verge of crying. She is so wound up, and, I realize in that moment, so am I.
Why do transitions, even traditionally cheerful ones, like having a child, starting kindergarten, graduating from college, or getting a new job, give us such insidious, primal anxiety?
That Sneaking Sense of Uncertainty
At first, it doesn't feel like anxiety because it’s sneaky. It pretends to be daily stress. Nothing new to see here, nothing to get upset about. Just completely isolated tantrums over dropping the toothpaste that have zero to do with the rest of our emotional lives, we think, so that we can happily return to our daily tasks and worries.
But oh, how wrong we often are.
During times of transition, celebratory or tragic, mundane or major, we tend to delay acknowledging the emotional impact such changes might be wreaking until they explode. We intellectually acknowledge to others, "Yeah, it's definitely a stressful time!" while not wanting to admit to ourselves that such small course adjustments have the power to completely capsize us. We eventually realize how stressed we have been, but usually only after the tears are rolling or the house is in shambles.
If the transition is big enough, we might not realize how stressed we were until years, instead of days or weeks, later. When the fog of immediacy has lifted, hindsight becomes closer to 20/20 and correlations emerge among what previously appeared to be independent, isolated events.
When I was in high school, I developed what I’d know now as an eating disorder. It seemed completely disconnected from anything else going on at the time. Just a typical adolescent girl trying to figure out how to eat a lot and remain very, very skinny. Had any counselor suggested a psychological explanation to me at the time, I would have laughed in their face.
As an adult, the causal pathway seems so obvious. My family life was erupting during those same years, and my sense of what the world was like, and whether it could be trusted, was flipped on its head. It wasn’t an isolated case of adolescent vanity, or dying to fit in. It was a desperate reaction to my parents’ ongoing separation, to my sudden unstable footing in the world.
It hurts my heart as I sit with teenagers who are going through the same things, responding in the same destructive ways, and failing to make the same connections I did. I watch parents clinging to alternative explanations for their kids' sudden change in behavior or mood, mentioning only in passing that a new sibling was born several weeks ago, or biological dad started visiting this month.
And I see friends withdraw into depression or rocket into irritability on the most unexpected of days, like their birthday, or become unexpectedly overwhelmed as they graduate from school and start their dream job.
Why Does Change Make Us So Anxious?
Anxiety arises in any time of uncertainty, and it knows no valence. When change is afoot, regardless of how aware of it we are on a conscious level, our bodies know. Our physiological response systems don't distinguish much between threat and possibility, novelty and danger. It’s all excitement in the eyes of the central nervous system.
There's good reason for this, because we want to be geared up and ready for new changes and challenges. Evolution has made sure of that by installing automatic responses to novel stimuli. But often, it's impossible to interpret our own sense of edginess as readiness. We feel it as danger instead, and so we push it down. Instead of dealing with that sneaking feeling like something's gonna give, we take it out on everyone and everything in our path. We go all-out destructo mode until either we realize what’s going on and address it, or we wreck into a lamppost and are faced with unavoidable wreckage.
How Should We Respond?
Many of us flip into "figure it out" mode at the first sign of stress, and we jump to pin our fragile feelings on a more "reasonable" explanation to close the mental loop. Unfortunately, such surface-level explanations are often incomplete, and we're left with a false and tenuous sense of security that doesn't hold up when the hits keep coming. We use our logical reasoning to stuff the harder questions down, and they get buried beneath more socially acceptable explanations. When someone asks how we're doing, for example, it's much easier to say, "Fine" than to expound upon the more accurate complexities of our true emotional lives.
But as someone who’s lived it, studied it, and now spends her days watching others unravel it, believe me when I say that it’s more possible than you think that the sneaking sense of badness, that ominous shakiness you feel beneath your feet, is arising for a reason. It might be a gentle nudge or a red flag, but it begs to be acknowledged and addressed. And when you turn your attention toward it and try to become curious, instead of defensive, it probably won't be as scary as you think... or as scary as it will become if you continue to explain it away for weeks, months, or possibly years.
So if you find yourself roiling over increasingly minor triggers, or screaming at a cat’s pitch at a preschooler, or even something so subtle as dreading the drive into work every morning, or hesitating to pick up your spouse’s empty coffee cup for the umpteenth time, step back.
Your body is trying to tell you something; don’t ignore it.
Instead, pause for a minute or two. Check it out for yourself. Is this really just daily stress? Is it a false alarm? Or is it a wake-up call begging you to attend to certain unmet needs—of your own or of those around you—before they get louder and near-impossible to manage? If after some thought, you can at least entertain the possibility that this might be one of those latter situations, ask yourself what you (or your loved ones) need right now to feel safe and secure again.
You might need to take some action, but you might simply open up to possible connections between what you're feeling and what's going on in your life right now. What fundamental certainty in your life is being challenged by this impending change? What alternative explanations—though likely more complex than you'd like—might be hiding beneath the simpler ones?
Instead of restoring certainty by jumping to premature conclusions, or worse, ignoring your internal alarms in hopes that they'll go away on their own, consider a shift in perspective: Change is happening. Change is scary. This is a natural, normal human response, and it's OK to acknowledge it. Once acknowledged, your dis-ease may not evaporate into thin air, but you'll have a more nuanced and accurate understanding of what's behind it, and you'll be able to make more informed choices moving forward.
And should the ground actually crumble beneath you, there will be hands to hold and shoulders to cry on, because as I remind my daughter after the screams have subsided, "Everybody gets stressed sometimes."
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Back in my daughter's bedroom, I hold her until she falls asleep. We are both still nervous, but we've acknowledged why, and we're willing to walk through it together.
