Why Change Feels So Destabilising: The Psychology Behind Difficulty Adjusting
Difficulty adjusting to change is often treated as something to push through, reframe, or manage better. But from a psychological and nervous system perspective, struggling with change is not only common, it’s also expected.
Change disrupts prediction, safety, identity, time perception, and emotional regulation all at once. This post explores why change feels so destabilising, drawing on brain science, nervous system theory, attachment, and identity psychology.
The Brain Prioritises Predictability Over Growth
The human brain is designed to reduce uncertainty. It does this by building models of the world — patterns that help it anticipate what comes next and conserve energy.
When life is predictable, the brain operates efficiently. Behaviour becomes automated. Decision-making requires less effort. Emotional regulation stabilises.
Change interrupts this system.
Even positive change removes established reference points. The brain loses its ability to predict outcomes accurately, which increases perceived threat. This doesn’t mean the change is dangerous. It means the brain no longer knows what to expect.
Common cognitive responses include:
Heightened worry and mental scanning
Difficulty concentrating
A pull toward old habits or familiar structures
These reactions reflect a brain attempting to restore certainty, not a lack of motivation or adaptability.
The Nervous System Equates Familiarity With Safety
Safety in the nervous system is not based on logic or intention. It is based on repetition and experience.
If your nervous system learned regulation through stable routines, predictable roles, or consistent environments, change removes the cues it relied on to stay settled.
As a result, the body may shift into a state of mobilisation or shutdown. This often shows up as:
Physical tension or restlessness
Emotional reactivity or numbness
Fatigue and low motivation
Changes in appetite, sleep, or digestion
These responses are regulatory, not irrational. The system is recalibrating in the absence of familiar anchors.
Change and Identity Disruption
Adjusting to change is rarely just about logistics. It is often about identity.
Roles, routines, and relationships help define who we are and how we are valued. When these shift, identity becomes unstable.
Examples include:
Career change disrupting self-worth and competence
Relationship changes altering attachment and belonging
Reducing people-pleasing, challenging long-held relational roles
Slowing down confronting productivity-based identity
Identity disruption activates grief, fear, and uncertainty simultaneously. Resistance often reflects an attempt to preserve coherence rather than stubbornness.
Past Experiences Shape How The Body Anticipates Change
The nervous system learns from history.
If earlier changes were associated with emotional chaos, loss of support, sudden responsibility, or unpredictable caregiving, the body may store change as a threat signal.
This learning is implicit. It lives in physiological response patterns rather than conscious belief. As a result, current change may trigger reactions that feel outsized or confusing, such as procrastination, avoidance, overcontrol, emotional shutdown, or harsh self-criticism.
These responses are protective strategies shaped by past conditions.
Ambiguity Places A Higher Load On The Nervous System Than Certainty
Uncertain change requires sustained alertness.
The brain fills gaps in information with prediction. Under stress, these predictions skew toward threat. This is why ambiguous transitions often feel harder than known discomfort.
It explains why people may remain in unsatisfying but predictable situations, delay decisions they logically want to make, or experience anxiety after achieving long-desired goals.
Ambiguity keeps the nervous system activated. Certainty, even when uncomfortable, allows regulation.
Change Distorts Time Perception
During periods of transition, people often experience time differently. Adjustment can feel both urgent and interminable.
Stress narrows attention toward the present moment. The brain prioritises monitoring and problem-solving over long-term orientation. As a result, people may feel behind, stalled, or as though they should be adapting faster than they are.
This distortion often leads to secondary distress — self-criticism layered on top of an already activated system. In reality, adjustment timelines are longer and less linear than cultural expectations allow.
Chosen Change And Non-Chosen Change Affect Adjustment Differently
Agency matters, but it does not eliminate difficulty.
Chosen changes still involve loss of identity, familiarity, or imagined futures. Non-chosen changes add additional layers of grief, anger, and injustice.
Both forms of change require adjustment. Framing difficulty as a failure to cope because a change was chosen misunderstands how nervous systems process disruption.
Hyper-Independence And Overfunctioning Can Mask Difficulty Adjusting
Some people respond to change by becoming more capable, organised, or productive.
This overfunctioning often serves as a regulatory strategy. Competence restores a sense of control when predictability is lost.
While this can delay visible distress, it does not prevent emotional load. Adjustment may show up later as exhaustion, irritability, or emotional collapse once the system slows.
Comparison Increases Shame And Slows Adjustment
People frequently compare their internal experience of change to others’ external functioning.
This comparison ignores differences in nervous system sensitivity, history, support, and context. It often generates shame and the belief that something is wrong with one’s response.
Shame increases threat activation, which in turn delays emotional integration.
Emotional Processing Is Required For Real Adjustment
Behavioural change alone is rarely sufficient.
Adjustment requires emotional integration, including grieving what is ending, acknowledging fear about uncertainty, naming anger when choice was limited, and tolerating mixed emotions without resolving them prematurely.
When emotional processing is bypassed, the body carries the unresolved load. Resistance, exhaustion, or emotional volatility often follow.
Pressure To “Handle Change Well” Increases Dysregulation
Internal and external pressure to be positive or capable often leads to emotional suppression.
Messages such as “you should be excited” or “you’ve handled worse” invalidate the nervous system’s experience. Suppressed emotion does not disappear. It intensifies or resurfaces elsewhere.
Effective adjustment requires permission for disruption.
What Actually Supports Adjustment To Change
From a psychological perspective, adaptation is supported by regulation rather than force.
Helpful conditions include:
Predictability in small, controllable routines
Explicit naming of loss alongside gain
Allowing adjustment to occur non-linearly
Reducing self-judgement around resistance
Supporting the nervous system through rest, movement, and sensory grounding
Adjustment occurs when the system learns that safety can exist in the new context.
The Role Of Therapy In Difficulty Adjusting To Change
Therapy helps with adjustment not by pushing change forward, but by slowing the internal experience enough for integration to occur.
When change is difficult, the problem is rarely insight alone. Most people already understand what has changed. The difficulty lies in how the nervous system, identity, and emotional memory are responding beneath conscious awareness.
Therapeutic work often focuses on several overlapping processes:
Making Implicit Responses Explicit
Many reactions to change are automatic and bodily rather than deliberate. Therapy helps identify patterns such as overcontrol, avoidance, people-pleasing, emotional shutdown, or self-criticism, and trace how these responses once served a protective function.
When reactions are understood as adaptive rather than defective, self-attack softens. This alone reduces nervous system activation.
Supporting Nervous System Regulation During Transition
Change activates threat responses that cannot be reasoned away. Therapy helps clients develop regulation strategies that increase tolerance for uncertainty, including grounding, pacing, and recognising early signs of overwhelm.
Regulation does not remove discomfort. It creates enough internal safety for discomfort to be processed rather than avoided.
Processing Grief, Fear, And Ambivalence
Adjustment often stalls when emotional responses are bypassed or minimised.
Therapy provides space to:
Grieve what has ended or been lost
Acknowledge fear about what is unknown
Name anger when change was non-consensual or limiting
Hold relief and guilt at the same time
This emotional integration allows the system to reorganise around the new reality.
Working With Identity Shifts
Change frequently destabilises self-concept. Therapy supports exploration of questions such as:
Who am I without this role, relationship, or structure?
How do I experience worth or belonging now?
What parts of me were adaptive but are no longer required?
Rather than forcing a new identity, therapy helps identity evolve gradually through lived experience.
Reducing Secondary Distress
Many people suffer more from their judgement about struggling than from the change itself.
Therapy addresses the layer of shame, urgency, and comparison that compounds distress. As secondary stress reduces, primary adjustment becomes more manageable.
Signs A System Is Still Adjusting — Not Failing
Adjustment is not a single emotional state. It unfolds across psychological, physical, and behavioural domains, often unevenly. Signs of ongoing adjustment are frequently misinterpreted as regression or inability to cope.
Psychological Signs
Psychological adjustment often includes fluctuations rather than steady improvement. Common signs include:
Increased emotional sensitivity or tearfulness
Rapid shifts between confidence and self-doubt
Heightened self-reflection or rumination
A stronger inner critic during moments of uncertainty
Feeling simultaneously clear about change and distressed by it
These patterns reflect the mind updating meaning, identity, and expectation rather than failing to adapt.
Physical And Nervous System Signs
The body often adjusts more slowly than cognition. Nervous system recalibration may show up as:
Fatigue disproportionate to activity levels
Muscle tension, headaches, or jaw clenching
Changes in sleep quality or sleep timing
Digestive changes or appetite fluctuation
Periods of restlessness followed by shutdown
These sensations indicate regulatory load, not pathology. They often lessen as predictability and safety increase.
Behavioural Signs
Behavioural changes during adjustment are often attempts to regain regulation. These may include:
Strong pulls toward familiarity, routine, or comfort behaviours
Alternating between withdrawal and engagement
Reduced capacity for novelty or decision-making
Increased productivity or control-seeking as compensation
Procrastination or avoidance around emotionally charged tasks
Rather than indicating avoidance or resistance, these behaviours often represent the system titrating exposure to change.
A Note On Uneven Adjustment
It is common for one domain to stabilise while others lag behind. For example, someone may understand a change intellectually while their body remains activated, or appear behaviourally functional while emotionally overwhelmed.
This unevenness is a hallmark of integration in progress.
Final Reflection
Difficulty adjusting to change sits at the intersection of prediction loss, identity disruption, and nervous system activation. When all three are present, resistance intensifies.
Struggling to adapt does not indicate weakness or lack of resilience. It reflects a system working to preserve safety and coherence in unfamiliar territory.
When this is understood, adjustment becomes something to work with rather than overcome.
Considering Support During Change
If you are navigating a period of change that feels destabilising, therapy can offer space to slow the process down rather than push it forward.
At Be Anchored Psychology, therapy focuses on understanding how your nervous system, identity, and emotional history are responding to change — not on forcing resolution or coping harder. This work supports regulation, emotional processing, and gradual integration so adjustment can occur with the aim of minimal self-judgement.
You can learn more about working together or book an appointment here.