Here’s why your brain hates change

The science behind transition anxiety—and why all your suspicions about it were right in the first place

She walked into my ER with what should have been the easiest diagnosis ever.

It wasn’t.

She was in her mid-thirties, a retired ballet dancer, and she’d just flown from New York to Boston for a gig. She’d been sick the week before, so that hour-long flight had her writhing from ear pain. Thankfully, the pain subsided enough after she landed that she could dance.

Her visit to the ER was just to make sure she wouldn’t feel the same pain on her way back home. 

My colleague wanted to discharge her on nasal steroids and a healthy dose of “you’ll be fine.” 

But something didn’t sit right.

I couldn’t put my finger on it. It was a subtle unease, a whisper of intuition. Something about the way she looked, the way she described her symptoms—something I couldn’t quite articulate made me think, no. This isn’t just a run-of-the-mill airplane barotrauma. There was something else going on.

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This post isn’t about airplane ear (though we’ll get back to my patient in a second). 

It’s about career transitions and big decisions.

Because here’s the thing. Big decisions look remarkably similar to that ER encounter. On paper, everything looks stable, normal, a chip shot. Your job, for example: it’s secure, your skills are sharp, your reputation solid. Your temptation is just the same as my colleague’s—stick to the script.

But you know you’re on the verge of a big decision when there’s a disquiet, a dull sensation that it might be time for a change.

The problem with big decisions (unlike my patient’s story, where I knew in a matter of weeks that my intuition was right) is that they live in a murky future, a miasma of uncertainty whose outcome will take years to unfold.

And that makes them so, so much harder.

How in the heck are you supposed to make a decision about a career, for example, when you won’t know if you made the “right” choice for years, for decades, or maybe even ever? 

You’re not. 

If you’re feeling that gnawing disquiet, rest assured that not a single one of the tools you’ve been given to make decisions is going to work for you.

Not because you’re a problem, but because the tools are. 

Let me say that again. Your suspicions about big decisions have always been right: nothing you’ve been taught about making them works to settle that gnawing disquiet.

And that’s because these decisions aren’t just about “being decisive” or “doing the thing.” They’re not about “following your heart.”

That disquiet is all about how our brains process the future.

Construal level theory

Back in 2010, Yaacov Trope and Nira Liberman wrote a fascinating review of something called the “construal-level theory of psychological distance.”

They proposed that, while people are obviously “capable of thinking about the future, the past, remote locations, another person’s perspective, and counterfactual alternatives,” doing so constitutes “travers[ing] a psychological distance.” 

For every decision, our reference point is always “the self in the here and now.” To think about a remote location, another person’s perspective, or—crucially for career decisions—hypotheticals and future events, entails a mental lift. And, to quote the authors again, “the farther removed an object is from direct experience, the higher (more abstract) the level of construal of that object.” 

Construal level theory (PS, if anyone knows how to get AI to create a gradual morph instead of an abrupt transition, I’m all ears!)

In other words, the more distant or distinct from us the thing we’re thinking about is, the harder it is to think about it—no matter whether that distinctness is because of physical distance or because it’s far in the future.

On the plus side, the authors note that the higher the level of construal (that is, the more abstract the construal), the stabler it is across psychological distances. Keep that in mind. We’re going to use that fact in our exercise.

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Deep in their paper, the authors write, “Although we may know less about distant than near situations, our greater reliance on high-level construals in predicting the more distant situations may lead us to make more confident predictions about distant than near situations.”

In other words, when we’re anticipating distant-future events that come as a result of our here-and-now decisions, we tend to over-estimate how good we’ll feel about positive outcomes (like getting a new job) and how bad we’ll feel about negative ones (like a rejected application).

That’s because we think about distant-future outcomes in abstract terms, which leads us to de-emphasize how the context of the future outcome might mitigate our feelings toward it.

Have I lost you yet? This is complicated stuff, so let’s take an example.

Imagine you plan to start your dream business—in January 2027. Imagine also that, by June 2027, your business has crashed.

How’s that feel?

Sitting here, at the beginning of 2025, I suspect it’ll feel awful. It might even feel like the worst possible outcome. You saved up for years to start that business. All your training and experience has led to that. And, 26 weeks later, it’s all a bust.

Worst. Possible. Thing.

To 2025 You.

But to Future You, to 2027 You—well that person’s business fails in the middle their day-to-day life. Future You’s business crashes (a bad thing) while the family life is going great, while they’ve also built a beautifully supportive friend group, while they’ve made connections out of the business, while they crushed the triathlon they’d also been training for.

The business crash? Terrible.

But the worst thing ever? Not necessarily. Not in context.

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Contemplating big decisions requires near-term decision-making—Should I update my CV? What about my current patients? Will I need new certifications?—and, at the same time, long-term, high-construal stuff—Should I follow my passion? Could I make a big impact? Could I achieve better work-life balance? Will it all crash and burn?

And our brains struggle to do both, at the same time, well.

So… let’s fix that. 

Here’s a Temporal Distance Mapping exercise that puts Construal Level Theory to use:

1. As always, start by taking out a piece of paper and dividing it into three sections: “1 Month,” “1 Year,” and “10 Years”

2. In each section, write down the concerns you have about a big decision

3. Now, notice how your language changes:

• 1 Month: Probably specific, concrete concerns (call schedules, salary, specific skills)

• 10 Years: Likely abstract concepts (fulfillment, impact, growth, retirement, failure, and the like)

All well and good. But take it one step further to make this exercise really useful. Remember how I told you that the higher the level of construal (that is, the more abstract the construal), the stabler it is across psychological distances? Well let’s take advantage of that.

Pick one abstract, 10-year goal (a positive one, not a failure), and start working backwards.

Let’s say your goal is to retire in 10 years. To do that, what would need to be in place in five years? In three years? 

To achieve that in three years, what would you need to have in place in one year?

And to have that in place next year, what do you need to do in the next month? 

I use this exercise all the time because it reveals something powerful: the anxiety you feel isn’t just about change — it’s about your brain struggling to bridge the gap between abstract desires and concrete realities.

Now, look, I get it. This isn’t going to make the decisions easier. But what it will do is make the struggle infinitely more comprehensible. Because that decision paralysis you’re feeling right now, it’s not because you’re indecisive. It’s because you’re experiencing the natural tension between different levels of mental construal.

So, instead of trying to push that tension aside, pretend it isn’t there, or beat yourself up for being indecisive, make that tension your guide. Use the tension. Let your abstract, stable, high-construal thinking set the destination, and inspire the concrete, low-construal brain’s ability to plot the course. 

(And by the way. My intuition was, unfortunately, right. That ear pain my patient had wasn’t from the changing pressures on a plane. She ended up being diagnosed with a lymphoma at the back of her tongue. The good news is, she got her treatment, and she’s now cancer free). 

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