How to Bounce Back from Life’s Curveballs (with Dr. Maya Shankar)

Summary

The Happiness Lab: Getting Unstuck Episode: How to Bounce Back from Life’s Curveballs (with Dr. Maya Shankar)
Host: Dr. Laurie Santos
Guest: Dr. Maya Shankar
Release Date: January 12, 2026
Podcast Network: Pushkin Industries

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Episode Overview

In this insightful episode, Dr. Laurie Santos welcomes cognitive scientist Dr. Maya Shankar to discuss how people can cope with and even grow from unexpected changes. Drawing on Maya’s new book The Other Side of Change and her own lived experience—including a career-ending injury as a teen violinist—the conversation explores how change, often feared and resisted, can actually reveal new facets of identity and lead to personal transformation. Together, Laurie and Maya break down the psychology of why change feels so destabilizing, offer practical tools for navigating difficult transitions, and share personal and scientific insights for getting “unstuck” after life’s curveballs.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Why We Fear Change: The Roots of Feeling Stuck

• Uncertainty and Loss:
  Change brings uncertainty, which the human brain is wired to dislike.
  • “People are more stressed when they're told they have a 50% chance of receiving an electric shock than when they're told they have a 100% chance.” — Dr. Maya Shankar (04:07)
• Threat to Identity:
  Change often means grieving the loss of an identity or role that once defined us.
  • “I was grieving not just the loss of the instrument, but also the loss of myself.” — Dr. Maya Shankar on losing her career as a violinist (07:17)

2. The Illusion of Control & Facing Life’s Anvils

• Many overestimate how much they can control, which is adaptive but fragile.
• When big, negative change happens, this illusion shatters, forcing us to confront life’s unpredictability.
  • “We overestimate our degree to influence outcomes in our lives...” — Dr. Maya Shankar (08:11)

3. The 'End of History Illusion' and Personal Evolution

• Most people underestimate how much they will continue to change in the future, despite seeing great change in the past.
  • “Researchers... say something like, people regard the present day moment as this watershed moment in which they become the person they will be for the rest of their lives.” — Dr. Maya Shankar (09:53)

4. Change as Transformation

• Significant disruptions catalyze internal transformation and can uncover hidden abilities, strengths, and perspectives.
  • “When a big change happens to us, it can also lead to profound change within us.” — Dr. Maya Shankar (10:44)
• Change is revelation, not just destruction; it reveals new parts of ourselves.

5. Practical Strategies for Navigating Change

a. Self-Affirmation Exercises (16:16)

• Focus on aspects of yourself not affected by the change to reduce threat and keep perspective.
  • “If I'm facing a really unexpected, really destabilizing change, reminding myself of all the other things that constitute my identity can be really grounding and affirming.” — Dr. Maya Shankar (17:07)
• Notable Example: After a devastating pregnancy loss, Maya’s husband led her to name things she was grateful for, which helped her regain perspective and emotional balance.
  • “I was able to zoom out on my life… there were so many other rich identities that I found meaning in…” (18:47)

b. Exploring 'Possible Selves' (19:58)

• Consciously imagine a broader array of futures for yourself—including hopes, fears, and expectations—to see beyond current limitations.
• Minds often constrain us unnecessarily, and it's important to challenge those constraints.

c. Techniques for Expanding 'Possible Selves'

• Moral Elevation: Witnessing others' extraordinary acts broadens our sense of what’s possible for ourselves.
• Surrounding Yourself with New Ideas:
  Open yourself to new information, skills, and people to discover unknown facets of identity.
  • “You've been wearing blinders for the last 10 years. Watch documentaries, read articles, have as many conversations as you can…” — advice from Maya’s father (25:10)
• Define Not Just What You Do, But Why:
  Focus on the motivations and values behind your passions, which can be expressed in many ways.
  • “When you anchor your identity to those things...then the exercise simply becomes, well, through what other outlets can I express these parts of myself?” (27:31)

d. Addressing Tough Emotions: Self-Compassion & Rumination (29:08 onwards)

• Self-Compassion:
  Recognize suffering as a shared human experience; write to yourself with kindness and objectively acknowledge your feelings.
  • “If you feel that you are unworthy of compassion, if you feel you are truly irredeemable, that is a permanent feeling of stuckness.” — Dr. Maya Shankar (29:54)
• Volunteering/Helping Others:
  Seeing your positive impact on others is a powerful way to combat shame and self-criticism.

e. Combating Rumination & Negative Thought Loops

• Experiencing Awe:
  Awe experiences shrink self-focus and put problems in perspective.
  • “When we experience awe...it allows us to step outside of ourselves, to step outside of our individual needs and wants and anxieties…” (34:08)
• Affect Labeling:
  Specifically naming your feelings creates distance from them, shifting from “I am anxious” to “I’m experiencing anxiety.”
• Mental Time Travel/Distancing:
  Imagine how you’ll feel about the issue in 5 hours, days, or years; coach yourself as you’d advise a friend.
• Building Tolerance for Uncertainty:
  Not every outcome can be understood or controlled; learning to accept ambiguity leads to less rumination and more peace.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “We would rather be certain that a bad thing is gonna happen than to have to grapple with any uncertainty.” — Dr. Maya Shankar (04:05)
• “I think sometimes we don't realize how much something defines us until we lose it, until it's taken away from us.” — Dr. Maya Shankar (07:25)
• “Change can involve a threat to our sense of identity. And I think that is the most destabilizing thing.” — Dr. Maya Shankar (04:37)
• “When a person's extraordinary actions challenge our understanding of the world...it actually cracks open our imagination of who we can be.” — Dr. Maya Shankar on 'moral elevation' (23:13)
• “Not everything happens for a reason. Some things happen just because. But it is so easy still to engage in a lot of self-blame.” — Dr. Maya Shankar (30:21)
• “When you name your emotions, it...shifts your perspective away from being the emotion to simply having the emotion.” — Dr. Maya Shankar (37:13)

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Important Timestamps

• 02:17 – Introduction to theme: why we associate happiness with chosen changes and overlook coping with unchosen ones
• 03:13 – Dr. Maya Shankar introduction; her backstory as violin prodigy and experience with sudden, identity-altering injury
• 08:00 – “Illusion of control” discussion: why setbacks feel so destabilizing
• 09:21 – The “end of history illusion” and how we misjudge our capacity for future change
• 16:16 – Self-affirmation as a strategy for resilience
• 19:58 – Imagining multiple “possible selves” for renewal post-change
• 23:13 – ‘Moral elevation’ as a catalyst for new self-concepts
• 29:08 – Self-compassion as a method to counter self-blame
• 33:19 – Awe: breaking the rumination cycle
• 36:37 – Labeling emotions (“affect labeling”) for psychological distancing
• 37:49 – Mental ‘time travel’ and self-distancing to release emotional grip
• 39:49 – Accepting uncertainty as a long-term route to peace and adaptability
• 41:36 – Laurie’s closing: “Unexpected changes can leave us feeling stuck, but there are also opportunities...change changes you.”

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Episode Takeaways

• Change is inherently unsettling—even positive change—because it disrupts identity and certainty.
• Growth from unexpected change is possible and often uncovers hidden strengths or dreams.
• Practical strategies such as self-affirmation, imagining new possible selves, and practicing self-compassion equip us to get “unstuck.”
• Cultivating awe and labelling emotions can break harmful rumination cycles and restore perspective.
• Learning to tolerate uncertainty, rather than resist it, is key to both happiness and resilience in the face of life's curveballs.

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Recommended Next Episode: Dr. Laurie Santos will discuss with David Brooks how character and social connection facilitate moving forward after setbacks.

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For anyone struggling with unanticipated life changes, this episode delivers actionable strategies, relatable stories, and scientific insights in a warm, optimistic tone. Dr. Maya Shankar’s vulnerability and expertise, paired with Dr. Laurie Santos’ thoughtful hosting, provide a compassionate guide to bouncing back when life doesn’t go to plan.

Transcript

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

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[Dr. Laurie Santos]

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[Ethan Cross]

Pushkin.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Especially in the new year, we tend to associate feeling happier with making changes. Sometimes little changes, moving a bit more or connecting more with friends. And sometimes big changes leaving a toxic job or starting a new creative project. But when we fantasize about the change we'll experience in 2026, we're usually thinking about the changes that we choose. But life can also hit us with changes that we don't see coming. Being dumped, getting laid off, or even receiving a frightening health diagnosis. When unexpected changes like these happen, they can often leave us feeling very stuck.

[Dr. Maya Shankar]

We feel like who we are and who we can become is no longer clear. We don't have a firm grip on ourselves anymore.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

So in the second episode in our season about getting unstuck in the new year, we're going to explore how we can work with change in 2026 rather than fighting it. And we have the perfect guest to guide us. Though I admit I might be a little biased.

[Dr. Maya Shankar]

I'm Dr. Maya Shankar, and I'm host of the podcast A Slight Change of Plans and the author of the Other side of who We Become When Life Makes Other Plans.

[Ethan Cross]

And you're also my former student.

[Dr. Maya Shankar]

I am 17, man. That's how long I've known you.

[Ethan Cross]

No, it wasn't when you were 17. You must have been, like, 3, because I can't possibly be that old.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Since her time as my student, Maya has become an expert on how to tackle unexpected changes. And one of her biggest insights is that unexpected change is terrifying.

[Dr. Maya Shankar]

We are afraid of change for at least two reasons. The first is that change is often accompanied by a lot of uncertainty, and our brains are not wired to enjoy uncertainty. So there's this fascinating research study which shows that people are more stressed when they're told they have a 50% chance of receiving an electric shock than when they're told they have a 100% chance of receiving an electric shock. So we would rather be certain that a bad thing is gonna happen than to have to grapple with any uncertainty. And I so resonate with this, Laurie. I'm like, bring on the shocks. I just wanna know how the story ends. I really feel so much anxiety when I don't have clarity on what comes next. And another reason why change is so scary is that it involves loss of some kind. So almost by definition, we are moving from one way of being, an old way of being, into a new way of being. And so even when the change is good, there's still some element of grief that accompanies that shift. Change can involve a threat to our sense of identity. And I think that is the most destabilizing thing. Right. So you have all these roles and labels that you assign yourself. I'm a teacher, I'm a violinist. I'm a volunteer, whatever it is. And then something happens in your life, and all of a sudden, that identity that you attached so much weight to that gave your life so much meaning and where you placed your self worth is now in jeopardy. And I think that's one reason, again, that we can think, oh, my God, I feel completely unmoored.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

But these days, Maya is a fan of embracing life's curveballs.

[Dr. Maya Shankar]

So I should clarify. I am a fan of exploring change, and I am recovering when it comes to my relationship with change.

[Ethan Cross]

So you're a recovering change hater.

[Dr. Maya Shankar]

Change hater. Exactly. Exactly. So I've been terrified of change my whole life. I am a creature of habit. I love routines. As I mentioned earlier, I like knowing how the story ends and how everything's going to unfold. And not just by the way, Laurie, how the story's going to unfold, but how I'm going to feel about how the story unfolds. And. And so I'm the type of person that just loves having her hands firmly on the steering wheel, dictating every single move. And I think one reason why I've been scared of change is that I had this really formative experience with change as a kid that I was not prepared for. And I didn't have any of the cognitive science strategies I have today to even know how to navigate it. So right before I met you, Laurie, and and entered your undergrad class, I was an aspiring concert violinist. So I started playing the violin when I was six. It quickly became the center of my life. When I was nine, I started studying at the Juilliard School of Music. When I was a teenager, the renowned violinist Itzhak Perlman invited me to be his private violin student. I was traveling, I was soloing with orchestras, like all my big dreams were coming true. And I finally thought to myself, maybe I have what it takes to go pro one day. And that was so exhilarating. Everything was going according to plan until one morning when I was 15, I overstretched my finger on a single note. I heard a popping sound. And it turns out that I had damaged tendons in my hand. And doctors later told me that this was a career ending injury. And as you can imagine, I was absolutely devastated. And probably not a lot of fun for my parents and siblings to be around during that period of time. But there was something so interesting about my grief. And this harkens back to our conversation about identity. I was grieving not just the loss of the instrument, but also the loss of myself. I think sometimes we don't realize how much something defines us until we lose it, until it's taken away from us. It turns out that the violin at that point had become an extension of my Body. If someone had asked me who I was, I would have said, I'm a violinist before I even told people I was Maya. Right. It was at the core of my being. And so I found myself so destabilized because the thing that I felt made me me was taken away. And I imagine so many people can relate to changes happening like this. And you get really stuck in those moments.

[Ethan Cross]

But it also seems you lost something else. You lost this thing that psychologists call the illusion of control. What does this illusion mean and what happens when it falls apart in our lives?

[Dr. Maya Shankar]

Yeah. In everyday life, most of us fall prey to the illusion of control, which basically means that we overestimate our degree to influence outcomes in our lives, to basically dictate how our lives turn out. And this is obviously very psychologically adaptive. Right, Laurie? Because it would be quite dispiriting, I think, for our morale if we just moved about the world being like, yep, we're not in control at all.

[Ethan Cross]

Can't control anything. Circumstances are affecting me terribly.

[Dr. Maya Shankar]

Yeah, yeah. Like nothing we do matters. It doesn't matter if I work hard at this or not. And obviously we are in control of many things. But when a big and unexpected negative change happens, when that proverbial anvil falls from the sky, it can shatter that illusion. And in those moments, we are forced to confront the true limits of our control.

[Ethan Cross]

And so dealing with these big changes, these big moments of trying to get unstuck, they involve giving up this illusion of control, often at least a little bit. But you've argued that we can deal with these moments a little bit better if we get over other misconceptions we have about change, that maybe we can chill out about change, as it were, to get. So let's dive into some of these misconceptions. One of these is the end of history illusion. What's that illusion and how can we overcome it?

[Dr. Maya Shankar]

I love the end of history illusion. And I feel like understanding it has changed the way that I see my whole future. Research shows that we greatly underestimate how much we'll change in the future, even though we fully acknowledge that we've changed considerably in the past. And again, I so resonate with this because, Laurie, if you showed me footage from my years as an undergrad, from 17 year old Maya, which as your professor, I can. Yes. And you have.

[Ethan Cross]

I have the receipts, I have all.

[Dr. Maya Shankar]

Of that blackmail on me. I will have a total cringe moment. I'll be like, who is that person? Oh, my God, I'm so embarrassed that she was Ever like that. But if you ask me today, how much are you going to change in the future? Maya, I'm going to say to you, finished product over here, Done changing. And I love it because the researchers who coined this term, Dan Gilbert and his colleagues, they say something like, people regard the present day moment as this watershed moment in which they become the person they will be for the rest of their lives. And so what happens in the face of a change is that we falsely believe that who we are right now in this moment is going to be the person navigating that full experience, when actually we will become different people on the other side of change.

[Ethan Cross]

And this is the idea that you've pushed, that change changes us. What are some of the ways in which change changes us?

[Dr. Maya Shankar]

We are constantly evolving, and importantly, a major disruption in our lives can accelerate that internal transformation. So in other words, when a big change happens to us, it can also lead to profound change within us. And that's because the unique stresses and demands of being thrust into this new reality can uncover unexpected and sometimes astonishing insights to us about who we are that were previously hidden from view. Like, I think one illusion we have is that we have a really good grasp of who we are. But the truth is that you and I have a self concept that is based on the random set of data points that we've happened to collect over our lives based on the arbitrary set of experiences that we've had. It's not a comprehensive view of who we are. And when we get thrust into change, all of these things now come to the fore that we didn't previously see. Certain beliefs that we are laboring under abilities that we had never tapped before, new perspectives. Oh my gosh, I never thought I could even see the world this way. Right. It's just being thrown into the deep end where everything gets unearthed and we now have to contend with all those things we see.

[Ethan Cross]

It sounds like you're talking about this as like a positive, like, oh my gosh, change changes us and we have all these new perspectives, but we're also getting thrown into the deep end, as you say. Like, it seems really scary, but your book I love because it argues that we should see this as a moment of feeling empowered. The fact that change will change us winds up being ultimately a good thing. Explain to me why that is. Because I'm seeing the deep end part more than I'm seeing the empowerment.

[Dr. Maya Shankar]

Absolutely. And again, for most of my life, I was a deep ender, so I never saw what the positive was. When we think about a terrible thing that happens in our lives. It can feel like we are going through an apocalypse. And when you look at the origin of the word apocalypse, it actually comes from the Greek word apokalypsis, and that means revelation. While change can upend things, it can also reveal things to us about who we are. And so what I've realized in having hundreds of conversations over the years with people on a slight change of plans and then interviewing them for my book is that by and large, while people might not have been necessarily grateful for the change itself, they were deeply grateful for the person they became as a result of their change. And that's because when we are in these pressured moments, when we realize, for example, that we have a new set of skills that we're going to need to build to meet this moment, we can actually shape the person that we become. I think it's really empowering to remember that we can become different people on the other side of change. Because when we feel so overwhelmed at the outset of a change, like there is no chance that I, Maya, will be able to navigate this with any kind of ease, it will probably destroy me. There is some comfort in knowing that the person who will undergo that full experience will be different from the person I am right now. And so the relevant question to ask in the face of change isn't how the hell am I going to navigate this change? But rather, how will I, with potentially new capabilities and perspectives and values, navigate this change?

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

So if unexpected change can reshape who we become, is there a way to help guide that process? After the break, Maya will walk us through specific tools that can help us navigate these shifts in healthier ways so that unexpected changes become opportunities for growth rather than leaving us stuck. The Happiness Lab will be back in a moment. Hey everyone.

[Podcast Announcer]

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[Dr. Maya Shankar]

Ravi is back in the Pit for another shift.

[Dr. Alok Patel]

The prodigal son returns and we're going with him. I'm Dr. Alok Patel, a physician, journalist, and a fan of medical storytelling.

[Dr. Maya Shankar]

And I'm Hunter Harris, a screenwriter and cultural critic. And we are the hosts of the official companion podcast from HBO Max. We'll be here every week to talk.

[Dr. Alok Patel]

About each episode with the actors, writers, everyone who helps bring the Pit.

[Dr. Maya Shankar]

Find us on HBO Max or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Cognitive scientist Maya Shankar has dedicated her life to helping people get unstuck by embracing change. But when you're dealing with a not so great major life change, the idea of embracing it can feel overwhelming. So I asked Maya to walk us through some practical techniques, strategies that she's used herself to move through life's big moments. And one of Maya's favorite tips is what's known as a self affirmation exercise.

[Dr. Maya Shankar]

A self affirmation exercise involves actively shifting your mental spotlight towards aspects of yourself that you really value, but that importantly, are not threatened by the change you're going through. So, for example, if you are struggling with a challenging moment in your relationship, you might use the affirmation exercise to remind yourself that you really value the community you have at work, or your spiritual life, or your ability to play pickleball or whatever it is, the things that really make you whole. And an added bonus of doing self affirmation, in addition to helping you zoom out and see your life through a bigger picture lens, is that it can also make you less susceptible to denial because it reminds you that your identity does not hinge entirely on what has been threatened by the change, and in doing so, it reduces the intensity of the threat. And so if I'm facing a really unexpected, really destabilizing change, reminding myself of all the other things that constitute my identity can be really grounding and affirming.

[Ethan Cross]

And knowing you well, I know that this is something you've used recently in your own life, but can you share the last story of when you had to use self affirmation to get through a big time of feeling stuck?

[Dr. Maya Shankar]

Yeah, there was a really big moment a couple years ago. At that point, my husband and I had been trying to start a family for years. It had been a really arduous journey filled with many heartbreaks and disappointments. And I remember on the night of the second pregnancy loss with our surrogate, my husband Jimmy came into our bedroom and said he actually unknowingly engaged me in this self affirmation exercise. Laurie, he's a software engineer, so he didn't even know that this is what was happening. But he said, let's just name a couple things that we're really grateful for. And in that moment, I was like, oh, hell nah. You take your Instagram BS and go over to the corner and you do your positive thing. I'm staying under the sheets where I'm going to be miserable and feel self pity and just like bad for myself. But with some time, Jimmy kind of wore me down and I started to kind of rattle off a couple things. Oh, I'm really grateful that, you know, I've had the same colleagues for like 10 plus years and we're make each other laugh all the time. Or how lucky am I that I get to be an aunt to my six nieces and nephews? Or I just love my zoom workouts with my trainer and we get to gossip about the Bachelor and Love is blind. And it was incredible because I felt, Laurie, like magic happened at that moment. All of a sudden, I was able to zoom out on my life as a whole and see that there were so many other rich identities that I found meaning in and that I valued and that made me me. And I think sometimes what can happen when we're chasing after a goal is that we develop tunnel vision. We become so singularly focused on achieving that goal that I had lost perspective on my life as a whole. And in engaging in the self affirmation exercise, I felt so much more grounded by the end. And I remember thinking, oh, wait, Even though it feels like in this moment I've lost everything because I lost this identity I'd been aspiring for since I was a little kid. Right. One day becoming a mom, I actually haven't lost everything. So much of me still remains.

[Ethan Cross]

This is such an important technique, and it fits with other techniques that really allow us to get unstuck by thinking about different possibilities for ourselves. Another one that you talk about in the book is this technique of really thinking explicitly about our possible selves and questioning the beliefs we have about them. Explain how this works.

[Dr. Maya Shankar]

Yeah. So as we go about our lives, we conjure up these possible selves all the time. They come in different forms. So there's the hope for selves, which reflect all of our dreams and our goals. And, you know, I hope one day I can be this. And I imagine Maya in the future doing X, Y, Z. There's also feared selves. So feared selves Reflect our worries and our anxieties. And expected selves represent our predictions of what we think is most likely to happen. So, yes, I may have dreams of becoming Taylor Swift. Never going to happen. And so expected selves are what is actually likely to happen, which is, I will be a cognitive scientist in five to 10 years and hopefully hosting my podcast. Right. So what's interesting about change is that when we navigate a change, our possible selves can shift dramatically in response to our new circumstances. So let's say we are facing an illness or the end of a relationship or the loss of a job. We now feel all these doors closing, and our life feels so constrained and small. But what I learned from writing the other side of change is that sometimes our minds constrain us beyond what is necessary, beyond what's reasonable. And that's because we bring all of the stereotypes we have and all of our prior experiences and influences from society into those possible cells we generate. And those assumptions make us think that certain selves are no longer available to us when actually they might be.

[Ethan Cross]

Which seems so interesting because it seems like the possible selves we could have is just limited by our current circumstances. But if we can kind of think a little bit more broadly, we might be able to come up with ideas. And of course, that's a really helpful way to get unstuck, because if you have a belief that, like, well, my possible self could be like this, then you might be able to. To get a little bit motivated to change these things around to fix it.

[Dr. Maya Shankar]

Yes, this was actually my favorite chapter to write, because I think cracking open our imagination to conjure up new possible selves is one of the most exciting, invigorating exercises that we can do.

[Ethan Cross]

Okay, but then how do we do that? What are some techniques for finding more possible selves?

[Dr. Maya Shankar]

Yes. Okay, so the first is to experience what psychologists call moral elevation. So moral elevation is that warm, fuzzy feeling that we often experience in our chests when we witness someone else's extraordinary actions. And those can be any wonderful things we witness. So it can be their kindness, their resilience, their self sacrifice, their courage, their ability to forgive. You name it if you're impressed by it, and it fills you with a feeling of awe and wonder that humans are capable of that thing that counts as moral elevation. But what's really important to note is that when we experience moral elevation, we are not simply feeling good. It's not just a bump in our joy or happiness in that moment. It actually changes our brains. And that's because when a person's extraordinary actions challenge our understanding of the world and what humans are capable of. And we have to assimilate that new information into our brains. It actually cracks open our imagination of who we can be. So in my book, I write about a young man who was sentenced to nine years in adult prison as a 16 year old for committing a carjacking. And as you can imagine, the vast majority of his positive possible selves disappeared from view. And this guy Dwayne talks about how he was so fearful of who he might become within the confines of prison. And then one day, about a year into his sentence, he has and experience a moral elevation with another prisoner. So this other prisoner, he holds himself in a certain way. He cares for the younger prisoners. He teaches them how to box and how to protect themselves against violence. He would do 250 push ups before the guards even came in the morning just to like show people like, no, this is my identity. And it was through that experience of moral elevation that when Dwayne later encountered a book of poetry that spoke to the experience of young boys in prison, he thought, oh my gosh, maybe I can be a poet. Maybe that sort of future self is available to me. And fast forward. Today, Duane is a MacArthur Genius Prize winning poet, He's a Yale Law School graduate and he writes the most beautiful, poignant poetry about his experiences in prison. And in the same way that that man he met in prison cared for the younger prisoners, he now uses his voice to represent the stories of people in prison who might not otherwise have a voice.

[Ethan Cross]

His story also shows a second technique we can use to figure out more possible selves, which is just to surround ourselves with new ideas. It strikes me that what Duane was doing was also surrounding himself with ideas of what people could do. I love that you included this story in your book because it reminds me of what you did after your violin incident. You know, you were this 15 year old who found out you couldn't be a violinist and you were searching for your next step. You were trying to figure out your new possible self.

[Dr. Maya Shankar]

It's really interesting too, Laurie, because I think when I had the experience of losing the violin and it was sort of cemented that I was not going to be a violinist the summer before college. So I was really disoriented. And I also felt massive imposter syndrome. Like, oh my God, I feel like I only got accepted to Yale because of the violin and now I don't even have that. I'm not going to fit in and I'm not going to Survive. My dad gave me some really helpful advice, which was to one, look around and absorb as much new information as I could. He was like, you've been wearing blinders for the last 10 years. Watch documentaries, read articles, have as many conversations as you can, and just open up your mind to the world of possibility out there. And it was during that exploratory period that I came across my first book about the mind. It was the Language Instinct by Stephen Pinker. And as soon as I read that book, I went to my college course catalog and, and I looked up what options existed. And that's when I first saw, oh my God, there's a cognitive science major. And so that's how cognitive scientist Maya came to be. And another thing that was helpful for me in that moment was to remember just because I lost the violin didn't mean that I lost all of the skills that I built as a result of being a violinist. So being able to play chords, not useful in other domains, but I had actually built a lot of grit, as you can imagine. I had built a very high tolerance for failure and for critical feedback. I had also cultivated a love of learning and really enjoying seeing myself get better at something. And all those skills were still going to be super relevant in whatever I chose to do moving forward. So the right question to ask yourself at these moments of transition is who else can this person be? This person that's had all of these experiences and, and who's built all of these skills and has all of these abilities? And I think that was helpful in kind of calming me down during this transition. And then thankfully, this very lovely professor, Laurie Santos, took me under her wing my freshman year and then allowed me to actually become a cognitive scientist.

[Ethan Cross]

I love this story because basically what your dad was doing was he was giving you an opportunity to challenge the beliefs that you had about yourself. Like you were just thinking of yourself as violinist and that's it. But he was saying, Maya, if you watch some documentaries and you read some books, you're going to learn that you have lots of these different parts. There's lots of parts of you that you're not paying attention to.

[Dr. Maya Shankar]

Exactly. So another strategy you can use is to define yourself not just by what you do, but by why you do it. That can be a more robust and stable kind of self identity. So in the context of the violin, I asked myself, well, what do I love about the violin? Just because I lost the ability to play it didn't mean that I lost what made me love it in the first place. And those traits were really enjoying emotionally connecting with people and getting better at a craft. And when you anchor your identity to those things. So in other words, I'm a person who loves emotional connection and loves self improvement. Then the exercise simply becomes, well, through what other outlets can I express these parts of myself? And it turns out that I found other ways to express them. So for example, in my role as a podcaster and in writing this book, I've been able to build deep emotional connections with the people that I've interviewed. I always am improving when it comes to being a cognitive scientist. And so I would urge people listening to ask themselves what is their why? What lights them up about the things that they love? And that can be a soft landing for them and a compass as they try to figure out their next steps in the face of a change.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

So far we've heard some great strategies for getting unstuck by embracing new possible selves. But what about the tough emotions that come up when we embrace those selves? After the break, we'll chat about how to navigate all the hard feelings that stem from big changes without the usual beating the crap out of ourselves. The Happiness Lab will be right back.

[Ethan Cross]

So we've been talking about how we can change our beliefs, but I want to switch gears to another thing that often happens when we are feeling really stuck, which is that we tend to beat ourselves up a lot. And I know that you're.

[Dr. Maya Shankar]

What are you talking about, Laurie? I've never done that.

[Ethan Cross]

I was going to say, I know you're now a fan of change, but I seem to remember that you used.

[Dr. Maya Shankar]

To beat yourself up a lot. I used to. Oh my God. Like so self compassion is something I'm very much still working on. I am so self critical. Oh my goodness.

[Ethan Cross]

And so let's talk about the strategies you use, because I think this is a big one. People find themselves feeling stuck. And it's not just the pain of feeling stuck. It's also this sense that, like, I suck because I am stuck. So how can we stop beating ourselves up so much?

[Dr. Maya Shankar]

It's the perfect topic to address when it comes to feeling stuck. Because if you feel that you are unworthy of compassion, if you feel you are truly irredeemable, that is a permanent feeling of stuckness. One reason that change can lead us to blame ourselves is because of what we talked about earlier, which is we have a strong illusion of control. And so when we think that we are the ones dictating events and something goes really wrong, who do we look to to Blame ourselves. What can happen though is that we unfairly blame ourselves for things that were truly out of our control. Not everything happens for a reason. Some things happen just because. But it is so easy still to engage in a lot of self ben and self blame. And so one thing that we can do in these moments is to engage in a compassion exercise. So this is phenomenal research by the psychologist Krista Neff. And basically she talks about self compassion as recognizing your suffering, mindfully engaging with your emotions and understanding. And this is the most important part. I think that what you're feeling is part of a shared human experience. So when a big change happens and we're blaming ourselves, we can often feel exceptional in that moment. Like, oh, this sort of thing only happens to me and it's because I am bad and I just like will bad things to happen because whatever, I made a bad decision or I don't trust my instincts or people don't like me enough. You know, we can come up with all sorts of ideas about ourselves in these moments of stress. But when you engage in a self compassion exercise in which you remind yourself that the thing that's happened to you is likely something that's happened to a lot of other people, then you can interpret the event as something that has happened to you as opposed to something that's happened because of you. And there is really compelling research where people were instructed to write to themselves with kindness and concern, to try to write about their feelings in a really objective way, and to importantly brainstorm all the ways in which other people may have endured a very similar thing to the thing you're enduring right now. And that led to a significant reduction in shame. And then kind of paradoxically, another way to boost our self compassion is actually to look outwards and help other people. And I just love this insight because it's just like speaking to the better angels of our nature. Right? Which is, oh, I'm feeling a lot of shame, I'm feeling a lot of self hatred. But guess what? When I volunteer, I can see up close that I am capable of being valuable to other people. Right. I'm able to see my mark on others. And that's gonna have this virtuous cycle when it comes to my self concept.

[Ethan Cross]

It also makes you feel connected to other people too. Right. Which is a huge thing for making us feel like we are not alone, that we have the kind of skills that we need to do better. It's just like a superpower for making us feel better in these tough moments.

[Dr. Maya Shankar]

Absolutely.

[Ethan Cross]

One of the Things that happens when we feel stuck is that we often get stuck in our thoughts. We get stuck in this rumination cycle both about our fears of change and about the uncertainty. Like, what's Maya's take on rumination? What does it feel like?

[Dr. Maya Shankar]

Well, first of all, I should make very clear. I feel like you think I have a PhD in cognitive science. I feel like I have a PhD in ruminating because I am the absolute worst culprit when it comes to getting into these ruminative loops and just driving myself crazy. And so I use techniques to help break me from these mental spirals literally every single day.

[Ethan Cross]

So what are some of the techniques that you use?

[Dr. Maya Shankar]

The first one is awe inspiring experiences. So when do we feel awe? We feel awe when we are in the presence of something that is vast and that transcends our current understanding of the world. That vastness can be physical or it can be conceptual, right? It can be this like incredible skyscraper or the expanse of the night sky, or it can be the complexity of a math theorem or a piece of music. When we experience awe, it creates these little earthquakes in our minds. It prompts us to revise our existing assumptions about the world. And there is neuroscience research showing that when we experience awe, the regions in our brains that are associated with self focus, self immersion, actually decrease. And so what that does is it allows us to step outside of ourselves, to step outside of our individual needs and wants and anxieties, and to internalize that we are part of a larger whole, that we are part of this big community of human beings, and that we are not alone and that our thoughts are not exceptional in any way. And it gives us some much needed perspective.

[Ethan Cross]

So how have you used awe to break out of rumination in your own life? I'm curious, what's your go to awe experiences?

[Dr. Maya Shankar]

I had a terrible experience with rumination in 2020. I mean, if we can go back to that period of time, let's not. Pretty brutal, exactly. But I developed insomnia for the first time in my life. And it was something I was not familiar with. But I very quickly, after a few sleep, truly sleepless nights, right, like zero minutes of sleep, became obsessed with the problem of sleep. I was wondering why I couldn't sleep. I was wondering if I was ever going to sleep again. It was the only thing that I thought or cared about in my life. You know, the whole world was shut down and I was out of my regular rhythms and whatnot. And I walked to our downtown area. And as I walked downtown, I just put in my AirPods and I listened to one of my favorite violin pieces. And I just remember being captivated by how beautiful the instrument was and how beautiful the melodies were. And I felt so swept up in that moment by the music and by the way I experienced the same feeling with pop music and you know, hip hop is. I'm not just like a classical music nerd. I love all sorts of music. In that moment when I felt this profound awe, it was like there had been this high pressure balloon blowing up in my head and someone just punctured it with a needle. It just instantly deflated. And obviously it was not a panacea for my insomnia. But what it did was it gave me hope when I was feeling totally helpless, like there was going to be no light at the end of the tunnel. And that's what a small moment of awe can do for you. And so I felt something other than immense fury at my brain for the first time in weeks. And so, yeah, that's one of my favorite strategies because awe is all around us, right? It just requires a keen observer.

[Ethan Cross]

So that's using awe to break out of rumination cycles. Another strategy that you talk a lot about is getting some distance from our emotions, even just through the simple act of labeling them. What is affect labeling and why is it so effective?

[Dr. Maya Shankar]

Yeah, so affect labeling simply involves taking a step back and trying to identify what specific negative emotions you're experiencing as a result of your rumination. So for example, in my head I'm thinking, right, all these like negative emotions are like pinballs in your head, right? You can't make sense of any of them. What you're doing when you affect label is giving your negative feelings specific labels. It's like, oh, that one, that's frustration. Oh, oh, that other one, that's despair. Oh, that's envy, that's jealousy, whatever it is. And research shows that when you name your emotions, it fosters psychological distance and it shifts your perspective away from being the emotion to simply having the emotion. And that is a seismic change I feel in the way that we experience rumination. Because when I am, you know, mired in anxiety, I feel like I am anxious versus, oh, I'm having anxiety. Anxiety is an emotion simply that I'm feeling. And so that's been very, very effective.

[Ethan Cross]

You've also talked about ways that we can distance ourselves not just from our emotions, but from our thoughts. Share some strategies that we can use for thought self distancing.

[Dr. Maya Shankar]

My favorite and go to recently has been mental time travel. So Our brains have a remarkable ability to travel both backwards and forwards in time. And we can use this capability to our advantage in the context of rumination. So you can travel back in time to contextualize present day challenges within the larger story of humanity or within your own life story. Right. You might remind yourself of a moment where you showed a lot of resolve in the face of adversity and that can encourage you in the present. You can also travel to the future and imagine how you're going to feel about your current problem in five hours from now, five days from now, five years from now. And I find that to be very useful. So for example, if you've had a negative experience with your coworker or your boss and you just can't get it out of your head, right. You are, as Ethan Cross says on the hamster wheel, right, just like running and running and running. You can just take a step back and say, am I going to care about this as much in five years from now? And suddenly you think, oh my God, this situation is transient. So it just like takes a lot of the emotional energy out of the space you're occupying and you can see it with a little bit more perspective. Another thing that I do is just more basic psychological distancing. So as I mentioned to you, I'm extremely self critical. So when I have messed up and I may be ruminating because I have a lot of regret, I'm not the kindest to myself. And so one way you can be a little bit kinder to yourself is to coach yourself like you would a friend. You're going to give a lot more compassion to a friend when you're advising them. You're also going to have a lot more emotional distance when you're coaching someone and you have more of a third party, objective observer point of view. And so I try to remind myself, okay, you're talking to someone else. Try to see your problem through that lens.

[Ethan Cross]

And so these are ways that we can separate ourselves from our thoughts. You've also argued that we can fight rumination by lessening our need for cognitive closure. How does that work?

[Dr. Maya Shankar]

Yeah, so this isn't a short term solution because I think this is sort of, at least for me anyway, it's my contending with a lifelong struggle that I will never have clear, definitive answers for every challenge in my life or every question I have in my life. But I think a lot of us as humans, we do crave black and white clarity. And the challenge is that when we climb out of the rubble of an unexpected negative change. All we see around us is gray. It's all gray. There's no black, there's no white. And I do think that one of the long term ways for us to tame our rumination is to start becoming more comfortable with uncertainty. Because rumination often arises in our effort to resist the uncertainty that a change brings. We rehash why that breakup happened in the way it did, and we oh, if only I'd done this, we would still be together. If only I'd said that. If only. You just keep going over the same negative thoughts over and over again when you might not actually know for sure why a breakup happened. And it's actually okay to not know all the answers. And so I think building slowly but surely our tolerance of uncertainty, our desperate need to find answers when there are none to be found, is honestly not even in the context of ruination, but it's just a healthier way to embrace change in our lives.

[Ethan Cross]

Overall, Maya, this was amazing. I feel like you just gave our listeners so many strategies for getting unstuck. I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but I'm so glad you had that little pop in your hand and that you get to be my cognitive science student that you get to help so many of my listeners become unstuck.

[Dr. Maya Shankar]

That's so sweet. Thank you.

[Ethan Cross]

I'm glad you had a career ending injury. It's really worked out for me in a wonderful way.

[Dr. Maya Shankar]

Well, I'm grateful for you, Laurie, so thanks.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Unexpected changes can leave us feeling stuck, but there are also opportunities. So the next time life throws you a curveball, remember that change changes you. You might not feel ready to be changed, but the person you become probably has the strength and wisdom to navigate your new situation with confidence. And if you need help on the way to becoming that new person, try some of the strategies Maya talked about today. Take a moment to journal, to engage in self affirmation, and to explore possible selves. Do something new that cultivates awe. Take a deep breath and speak to yourself with self compassion. And if all else fails, remind yourself that you're doing the great work of building comfort with uncertainty. If you want even more tips for getting unstuck from unexpected change, I highly recommend Maya's new book, the Other side of Change. It's out in stores this week. Next week on the Happiness Lab, we'll continue exploring strategies for getting unstuck. I'll chat with author and political commentator David Brooks about how focusing on character and connection can be an unexpected path to moving forward in the new year.

[David Brooks]

A lot of people have not been taught basic social skills, like how do you sit with someone who's depressed? How do you break up with someone without crushing their heart? How do you ask for an offer forgiveness? And that's a skill. Just the way learning tennis is a skill, the way learning carpentry is a skill.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

That's coming up next week on the Happiness lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos.

[Ethan Cross]

This is an I heart podcast. Guaranteed human.