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This is an I heart podcast. Guaranteed human. I'm Jemma Spa, the host of the psychology of your 20s. Have you ever been at the pharmacy counter and your mind goes blank when the pharmacist asks any questions? That is why you need to listen to beyond the script from CVS Pharmacy and iHeartMedia. Hosted by Dr. Jake Goodman, this podcast answers the questions you'd wished you'd asked, like which meds may not work well together, what. What vaccines you might need before a holiday, and even some of the questions you're too embarrassed to say out loud. Listen to beyond the script on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Hey, everybody, it's Tony Robbins. Look, the time is here. It's 2026, and everybody talks about having a new year and a new life. But what do most people do? They create a few resolutions and in the end, they don't really do anything. If you want this to be the best year you've ever had in your life, it's going to take a new tool, a new strategy, a new momentum, and maybe a new community of people to hang out with. So come join me for the Time to Rise Summit. I do it only once a year. It's coming up January 29th through the 31st. There's absolutely no charge for it, but it'll be an experience I promise you you will not forget. It'll give you a momentum, a plan, and a strategy to make 2026 the best ever. If you're up for that and you're hungry for more, come join me. There's no cost for it whatsoever. Just go to timetorise summit.com time to riseummit.com I'll see you then.

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Hello, everybody. I'm Gemma Spake, and welcome back to the psychology of your 20s, the podcast where we talk through the biggest changes, moments and transitions of our 20s and what they mean for our psychology. Foreign. Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the podcast. It is so great to have you here back for another episode as we, of course, break down the psychology of your 20s today. Let's talk about change. Let's talk about transitional periods. Let's talk about growth, progress, like the huge shifts that we experience in our 20s. These moments that are on like the precipice of something new feel very exciting. They feel very romantic. They feel very thrilling. But let's be honest, change is one of those things that I think sounds super fun in theory but is sometimes absolutely horrible and painful in practice. In fact, at Times, I think it really sucks, and it has us really wishing that we'd stayed the same. We all have ambitions for kind of, like the ways we like to change our lives or like to live our lives. We want a new job. We want to move to a new city. We want better friendships, whatever it is that's currently on your goal list. It's funny that often the second, like, a real opportunity to enact that occurs or to make change happen appears. We shrink and we find a lot of reasons not to do it. We don't feel prepared. We suddenly find ourselves sabotaging our habits and our momentum. We convince ourselves we can't write when we're actually about to. I was actually speaking to a friend about this the other day who has, like, this terrible, horrible job, like, downright workplace bullying situation. She's ready to get out, she's ready to leave. But she's been working on her resume, and I'm saying this with love, she knows I'm sharing this, but she'd been working on her resume for three months now and hasn't applied for a single job yet. And I said to her, you know, I was. I asked her, I was like, liv, like, you've just got to apply, even if it's just for practice. Why aren't you just applying, even if you know you're going to get rejected? And she was like, well, what if I actually get the job? What if I get the job and I'm not ready and my whole life changes and I'm not prepared yet? This is what we're talking about. This inertia, this fear. Why does this happen? Why do we resist change? And especially in our 20s, when we should, supposedly, according to what everyone around us and older than us is saying, when we should have all the nerve and all the goals in the world? In this episode, I want to unpack the very deep psychology behind this paradox, the paradox of wanting to grow but equally clinging to what is the same. Does this say something about our character? Is it a personal flaw? Is it a human instinct? Is it anxiety? Is it something else entirely? I'm going to give you some. The answers. We'll look at why this specifically feels so scary in our 20s, why we're so afraid of losing what we already have and what we might actually be quietly losing, and how we might actually be losing more scientifically, mathematically, psychologically, by choosing the same old, by staying the same. I've Learned in my 20s so far that some of the very best decisions are also the ones that terrify us the most. So I want to interrogate that a little bit further and hope, hopefully convince you as well. Without further ado, let's get into it. So to kind of start us off, let's look at what it is about change that feels so scary, especially in our 20s. Firstly, I think change feels particularly stressful during this decade because we're just surrounded by so much of it, right? We're kind of drowning in it. We never get a break from it. So it's hard to not fear more of it, especially the kind that could be randomly thrust on you at any given moment. A really relevant theory that comes up time and time again on the podcast is Arnott's concept of emerging adulthood, which spans basically the late teens through to the end of our 20s. Typically, if I was to ask you, what are the developmental life stages of being a human, you would probably say childhood, teen years, adulthood, late adulthood. But emerging adulthood points to this distinct life stage of, like almost adulthood, where everything is kind of in between. You know, you're no longer a teenager, but you also don't feel like a settled version of yourself, especially not the kind that you kind of imagined as a child. You know, when I was a kid, I genuinely thought that I'd be married with my own kids by now. And what was I thinking? I don't even know who I am as a person yet. This period of emerging adulthood has a few key battles in store for us. Identity, exploration, instability, feeling in between loneliness and loss. It feels like because of all these battles we're facing, because of all these milestones we're going through, every six months of my 20s, at least, I'm like an entirely new person every six months. I feel like I'm just completely reborn, like gemma in early 2025 versus now. I honestly think that me and her would struggle to even have a conversation. Just for example for you, Think back over the last year of your life. There are parts of yourself from only 12 months ago that you probably can't relate to anymore because of how rapidly our lives change during this distinct period of life. The emotional and the psychological environment this creates means that when another big change comes along, even a positive one, you don't necessarily experience it as a fun thing or a fun little upgrade. The first thing I know my mind goes to when change is happening in my life, even good change, is like, how the hell am I going to fit this in? How am I going to adapt to this? Am I ready for this? Do I have the space? It's something that like my mom always said to me, which is that even good stress is still stress. There's an element of cognitive overload going on. We're balancing so much involuntarily that sometimes it's hard to get excited or motivated by the change we choose because we just don't have the energy. That's the 20s explanation. That's why we specifically often, you know, fall away from change during this decade and under these circumstances. Here is the more human explanation. Simply put, we as humans are wired from our amygdala to our frontal lobe to prefer coherence, to prefer a sense that our life story makes sense, that we know kind of roughly where we are going, roughly where we've been, roughly where we are now. This, you know, very rudimentary sense of stability is really important for maintaining homeostasis, the natural equilibrium of our systems that allows us to function because we feel safe enough. Something that I heard recently is like, your brain doesn't care if you're growing. Your brain doesn't care if you're fulfilled. It literally only cares that you are safe. I'm not going to bore you guys with the evolutionary perspective because I think we all know it by now. But anything unknown, anything unknown that change brings signals, danger, triggering a whole set of stress based reactions that are meant to shock your body into action. These reactions also exhaust your body. And so our very smart systems learn to anticipate things that are gonna cause this much of a shakeup and to be fearful of them, to be fearful of change. In contrast, the known obviously signals safety and therefore the peaceful and calm conditions our body needs to function properly. We are of course going to lean more towards that second state, more towards known peace, stability, safety, even if that means not really pushing ourselves. The thing is, our body's dedication to this homeostasis often works against us because it asks us to automatically resist new things, even if those things are good for us. Your mind is in many ways hardwired to want you to stay the same. It doesn't want to expend energy for no good reason. It's really happy how it is because it knows what's going on. They have done study after study on this. Your body, as soon as you ask it to change, is going to dig its heels in. That is why weight loss is so hard. That is why quitting substances is so hard. That is why undoing relationship patterns is so hard. Your brain is like a bike with broken handlebars that like keeps steering you back in the direction you don't want to go, you have to keep forcibly moving it back onto the path that you've chosen. It does this, yes, through literal biological resistance, but mainly by influencing our appraisal of any and all new situations so that we expect the worst. In behavioral economics, Daniel Kahman and Amos Tversky developed something called the prospect theory. They developed this back in the 1970s, and they essentially showed that humans do not evaluate gains and losses in a balanced way. We typically want to avoid loss as much as possible. So our focus is disproportionately on what kind of losses change is going to bring us. There is a larger assessment of those things that are scary and that we could lose versus what we have to gain. Even if the losses and gains are equal, even if we actually have more to gain irrationally, our brain still keeps going back to what we have to lose. For example, I'll give you some research that backs this up. Research has shown that in an experimental condition where People are given 50 tokens to begin, and they either gain 10 additional tokens or have 10 tokens randomly taken away later on, when they're asked to estimate, you know, what proportion, what percentage do you think you lost or gained? In this situation, the people who had 10 tokens taken away suggested they had lost almost 15% more than they actually had, whereas those who had gained extras usually estimated it more accurately. They usually were like, yeah, around 10, around, around 5%, around 10%, whatever it was, these people weren't just bad at math, right? What it's really showing is that our brains focus, expand, skew our perception of what we have to lose. This means that when we encounter situations of uncertainty and change, even good change, our anticipation for what may go wrong will often be so much greater than our excitement for the possibility of what will go right. This contributes to what we know as the status quo bias. Basically, we'd rather stick with how things are, even if they're not amazing, because change feels too risky and too much of a burden. There's actually quite a famous paper from the 80s that explores this. It was published in the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty. And essentially, in a series of these decision making experiments where participants were given a default option, they disproportionately stuck with that option, even when the alternatives were objectively better. They would. They could win $20, they could win prizes, they could also lose $10, but they actually went for neither of those things. They didn't want to win 20, they didn't want to lose 10, they just did nothing. They stuck with what they had. Now if we apply this pattern of behavior to our actual lives, think about it. You might be in a job that's all right, it's okay. You know, it pays the rent, it pays for your car payment. You know, you sort of know what you're doing, you have colleagues you chat to, but deep down you know you're not growing. You know, a part of you feel stuck and then another opportunity appears. It's a different role. Maybe it's in a different city, maybe a different field. On paper it's better. But your brain doesn't see stable job versus better job. Instead it interprets this as loss of security, loss of familiarity, loss of routine, loss of competence and interesting job. It doesn't assess those two what there is to lose and what there is to gain accurately. You know, those potential gains, more fulfillment, more alignment, more money, a more aligned path to our brain, to our present day brain. They're kind of abstract, they're in the future, they're difficult to imagine because you're not, they're not in front of you. The way that the potential losses are, the way that they're very vivid because the thing you have to lose is right there. That again is also why change feels so unstable. Because the losses are always going to be more visual and apparent versus the gains that haven't happened yet. I think it's the same dynamic in relationships as well. Leaving a relationship that isn't working or isn't quite fulfilling means potentially losing a companionship that you already understand and a history that you understand because you were there. And the in laws that you've grown to like because you see them all the time. The idea that, you know, leaving that person might mean you gain self respect, might mean you gain inner peace, might mean that you gain a compatible partner, a more compatible partner later on. That's really intangible because you haven't met them yet, you can't feel it. So it's not as emotionally weighted in the same way. Even if you know in your heart of hearts that this is probably, if not absolutely 100%, the right decision. We can understand this a little bit further through something called terror management theory. Sounds very extreme, but it's basically a social psychology framework that suggests, that suggests that a lot of our need for security, for routine, for self esteem is connected to the fact that we're aware that on some level life is very fragile and life is finite. Change, especially the big irreversible kind of brushes up a lot of existential fears, brushes up against this idea that we might not be in control, that things can go wrong, that we can make mistakes, that we only have limited time here, so we better make the right decisions. Our desire to keep returning to what we know is partly about managing our anxiety, about our own fragility. So when you're clinging to a situation that is fine, that is okay, not, great job. All right, partner city. That feels kind of restrictive. You might be like, why do I keep doing this? Why can't I move on? And it's because your brain is trying to protect you from a very real sense of loss and of uncertainty. And on a deeper level, this sense that actually nothing is guaranteed. Maybe I can't make it work in this new location, this new relationship, this new life. Your resistance to change is therefore very natural. It's being influenced by a lot of, I would say, very powerful, very complex processes. To be honest, when I look at all these things lined up, I'm surprised anybody ever takes a risk, ever. Like, if that's what we're battling against, like, existential fears, a hardwired fear of the unknown, and, like, neurological patterns that don't want to break. I kind of. I. It's pretty courageous that people ever do anything. But the thing is, and this is the point, I think we all realize eventually, we don't only lose things when we change. We also lose things when we stay the same. Staying the same also has a cost. When you don't apply for the role you're really drawn to, someone else gets it. Someone else gets the mentoring and the skills and the money. Someone else who may have less skills than you gets that opportunity just because they have the bravado. When you don't move to the new city that you're. That you're daydreaming about, there's a person in that new city who would have been your best friend. You never get to meet them. That relationship never happens. There's memories that are never made. Fond memories, memories that you would have had till the day you die. You weren't there to make them. You know, when you don't leave, the relationship you know is wrong for you, you're also blocking the space for a more compatible partner or maybe just simply a more peaceful relationship with yourself. This. All these examples are what is known as opportunity cost. It's a term from economics that's actually super applicable here. You guys know I never miss a moment to tell you guys, I actually also have an economics degree. I have to do my humble brag every time it comes up. But opportunity cost is one of the concepts you learn like on day of microeconomics. And it's basically the value of the next best alternative. You give up when you choose something and it's something that it costs you. And it costs you in a way, in the ways of disappointment, regret, but also in the ways that you could have taken all that energy and spent it on something that may have turned out better. And that's, that's a cost that you have to bear by choosing. Every choice you make is also a set of choices you don't make. And not making a choice is the most costly of all of those choices. Choices. Every year you put off going back to university is a year you're not getting any closer to graduating. Every month you put off starting that new exercise routine is another month that you just don't feel good about yourself. You don't feel 100% in your body. And those missed opportunities, they compound the way investments, you know, compound and get more expensive as well. You know how I always think about it? I always think about it when I'm doubting or thinking, do I do this thing or not. I always think about the people who bought a house like back in the 90s, and like that running joke of like, if only I had $20,000 back in the 90s, I could be able to afford a house. And every year houses just get more and more expensive. Investing in skills, investing in change right now is like buying a house in the 90s because in 30 years time, 40 years time, you're going to have this whole life that's been built upon an investment you made back then that is compounded and compounded and compounded. Otherwise if you don't do it, yeah, you don't have the house. You also live with the knowledge that you could have, you could have been the proud owner of the home, you could have been the proud owner of a highly valued life if you've just taken the risk and embrace change. And this right here is the final cost of not pursuing change. It's the discomfort of self betrayal, of knowing on some level that you know, you abandoned your own needs and values and a future version of you who now doesn't get to exist because of your resistance to things being different. The thing is as well, we resist change now because we think the opportunity might linger and might come up later. But over time, I think it does become harder to imagine future changes going any differently. Because right now, you resisting change is building a track record of staying, of just accepting this, that this is how your Life is like that narrative of like, this is just what it is. This is just what it is. It gets stronger and stronger every day. You allow it to continue to exist and not challenge it. And I'm not saying you can't eventually change or that you won't or that there aren't choices out there that you will eventually take. But the thing is, some of the best decisions that we make in our lives are the ones that we don't feel prepared for. Because you can never be 100% certain that what you're going to do, the risk you're going to take is going to work out. How do we get over that mental barrier, the not knowing, the uncertainty we're going to dive into exactly how. Some steps to embrace change after this short break. So stay with us. I'm Jemma Speg, the host of the psychology of your 20s. Have you ever been at the pharmacy counter and the pharmacist asks you do you have any questions? And suddenly your mind goes blank? That is exactly why you need to listen to beyond the script from CVS Pharmacy and iHeartMedia. Hosted by Dr. Jay Goodman, a board certified psychiatrist and and health educator, this show takes you behind the counter to answer the questions you'd wish you'd asked, like what medications might not mix well, what vaccines should you consider before a big trip? And even those questions you're a little bit too embarrassed to say out loud. Each episode bust myths, decodes health trends, and gives you real trustworthy advice from the experts you, you see the most. Your neighborhood CVS pharmacist. No white coats, no lectures. Just real talk, real answers and maybe a few laughs. Listen to beyond the script on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.