Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - How to Handle Life When It Falls Apart: Rewire Your Beliefs, Calm Your Mind, Stop Ruminating & Move Forward With Confidence: Dr Maya Shankar #635

Episode Date: March 11, 2026

Most of us are quite comfortable with change when we’ve chosen it: a new job, new home or new relationship.  It’s the unwanted, unexpected changes that tend to floor us - like an illness, loss or breakup - that leave us wondering who we are and how on earth we’re meant to go on. In today’s episode, I’m joined by Dr Maya Shankar, cognitive scientist and author ofThe Other Side of Change. Maya has spent years studying how our minds respond to change, and she’s also gone through some profound changes of her own – from a hand injury that shattered her hopes of becoming a concert violinist, to a long, painful journey with fertility. We talk about so many different topics related to the theme of change, including why our brains find uncertainty so stressful, how unwanted change can reveal hidden beliefs that we hold and why witnessing other people’s courage or kindness can quietly change what we believe is possible for ourselves. We also explore a variety of evidence-based practical tools to help us deal with things like rumination and negative thought spirals. Throughout the conversation, Maya unpacks some inspiring stories of people facing extreme adversity - things like illness, betrayal, loss and even imprisonment – who were still able to find meaning, new identities and unexpected gifts on the other side. Yes, change is something that many humans struggle with, but as you are about to learn, with the right approach, it can be one of the very best tools to help us transform, grow and evolve. I hope you enjoy listening. Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts https://apple.co/feelbetterlivemore. For other podcast platforms go to https://fblm.supercast.com.   Thanks to our sponsors: https://vivobarefoot.com/livemore https://onepeloton.co.uk https://thewayapp.com/livemore   Show notes https://drchatterjee.com/635   DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or qualified healthcare provider. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website.

We move about in this world carrying so many beliefs and so few of these beliefs we've actually interrogated over the course of our lives. And so we may carry views that don't reflect reality that actually are self-limiting. Change can serve as a moment in which those beliefs are revealed to you and then you can actually revisit them, assess them for their credibility and merit, and then potentially move forward in a world in which we don't have them. Hey guys, how you doing? I hope you having a good week so far. My name is Dr. Rongan Chatterjee,

and this is my podcast. Feel Better, Live More. Most of us are quite comfortable with change when we've chosen it. A new job, a new home, or a new relationship. It's the unwanted, unexpected changes that tend to flaw us like an illness, loss or breakup that leave us wondering who we are and how on earth we're meant to go on.

In today's episode, I'm joined by Dr. Maya Shankar, the wonderful cognitive scientist and author of the brand new book, The Other Side of Change, Who We Become When Life Makes Other Wants, Maya has spent years studying how our minds respond to change, and she's also gone through some profound changes of her own. from a hand injury that shattered her hopes of becoming a concert violinist to a long, painful journey with fertility. In our conversation, we talk about so many different topics

related to the theme of change, including why our brains find uncertainty so stressful, how unwanted change can reveal hidden beliefs that we hold, and why witnessing other people's courage or kindness, can quietly change what we believe is possible for ourselves. Throughout the conversation, Maya shares plenty of practical tools to help us deal with things like rumination and negative thought spirals, and she also shares some incredibly moving stories,

people facing illness, betrayal, loss, even imprisonment, and how they were still able to find meaning, new identities, and unexpected gifts on the other side. Yes, change is something that many humans struggle with. But as you're about to learn with the right approach, it can be one of the very best tools to help us transform, grow and evolve. It strikes me that when we think about change, there are two broad umbrellas for us to think about,

changes that we want and changes that we don't want. I think most of us human beings are pretty good when changes that we want appear in our lives. But when it's changes that we don't want, it can often be quite a different story. You've obviously studied this topic for years. You've written about it in your brand new book. And so I thought we'd start by getting to the heart of the matter. Maya, why is it that so many of us struggle with changes that that we don't want and are often unexpected. Yeah, and I should first say that I'm one of those people who feels a huge allergy to any sort of unexpected changes in my life.

And so one of the reasons that I gravitated towards studying this topic is because I find unexpected change really scary. And I don't always feel like I've done the best job of managing my emotions and understanding how to really extract any sense of possibility that sits within the change. There's a lot of reasons why unexpected change is destabilizing. One of the biggest ones is that change is filled with so much uncertainty. And our brains are not wired to like uncertainty. So one of my favorite research studies shows that we are more stressed when we're told we have a 50% chance of getting an electric shock

than when we're told we have a 100% chance of getting that shock. And so we'd rather be certain that a negative thing is going to happen than to have to grapple with any ambiguity or uncertainty. And it sounds so silly, Rangan, but if you're like me, you resonate with this finding. I like knowing how the story ends. I like having a firm grip at the steering wheel. And so when the future is unknown to me, I start to get anxious, I start to ruminate, I start to overplan. And it's very hard to sort of embrace the unknown. It's fascinating when you talk about that research study. And it's fascinating. it very clearly demonstrates how much human beings like certainty in our lives,

it made me think about the difference between GPs and specialists. So in medicine, I used to think about this when I moved from specialism into general practice. And here in the UK, at least, in the National Health Service, if you're a specialist in a hospital, you have access to all kinds of tests. So in many ways, you're able to get a higher degree of certainty when your patient comes in. Whereas in general practice, you don't have access to all those tests. And so I've often wondered, and I haven't seen any research on this, whether primary care physicians and GPs are better able to manage uncertainty

because they have fewer tests and they have to do that as part of their day-to-day job compared to specialists. That's such a fascinating observation. I really do think that tolerance for uncertainty is a muscle that we can all build. And one of my goals actually in writing the other side of change was to learn to live more comfortably alongside uncertainty. And so I think your hypothesis may very well be true, which is that by virtue of not having all the information, they have to feel okay, making recommendations or weighing in on certain treatment options. without having the full picture and learning to calm their nervous systems, even when they don't have that full information set. Yeah. Would you say that some people are better at navigating change than others? And if so, why do you think that is? Yes.

So it is definitely true that people who are more open-minded about what may come may navigate change better because they don't seek cognitive closure as much as the rest of us. So what is cognitive closure? It's the desire for clear definitive answers, black and white answers. The challenge is that when we climb out of the rubble of a negative change in our lives, often all we see is gray space. And so we have to be a little bit more open-minded about what may come, and that can be adaptive. But the focus of my work is on figuring out, okay, aside from our natural dispositions, what can each of us do to increase our tolerance in the face of uncertainty so that we can be more resilient in the face of change, no matter what our starting point is. And what I've learned is that a subtle shift in mindset can actually have a transformative impact on any given person's resilience.

When a big change happens to us, it also leads to lasting change within us. And this is something that most people forget. So at the outset of a change, they might feel extremely daunted thinking there is no conceivable way that I, Maya, incapable of navigating this harrowing change. I just don't have the skills. I don't have the abilities. I don't have the right perspectives or values or beliefs. But what I'm lacking to appreciate when I say that is that I will be changing as a result of this experience. and the person who will emerge on the other side of change

will be different from the person I am today. Now, there's a cognitive bias that can often prevent us from realizing this. It's called the end of history illusion. So what does the end of history illusion say? It says that while we all fully appreciate, we've changed considerably in the past. So if you were to ask me, you know,

look at these photos of 10-year-old Maya or 20-year-old Maya, do you feel that you're different today than you were back then. I would say, of course, Rungan, hashtag cringe. This is horrible. I thought we were friends. Why are you showing me this footage? But interestingly, if you were to ask me, well, how much do you plan to change moving forward?

I would say, oh, no, no, no, no. What you see is what you get. This is the finished product. And so researchers say that we strangely view the present as a watershed moment in which we have become the person we will be for the rest of our life. lives. And so what this does is that it limits our understanding of how we might transform moving forward, right? Because of course we are continuing to change. And the thesis of my book is that these massive anvil-sized changes that drop from the sky on a clear blue day accelerate these

internal transformations. Yeah. I love that end of history illusion. It's so, so true, isn't it? that we can just reflect on our own lives in terms of, I guess, personal growth, you know, in our 20s, I thought I knew about the world. I thought I knew how I thought, what was going on. And, you know, when I'm 30, I'll probably look back and go, wow, you were quite juvenile and naive back then. 100%.

You know, and you keep doing that. But now, of course, at 48, I know the real deal about the world and how it all is. But of course, that denies the possibility and the probability that I am going to keep on changing as I progress in the world. That's exactly right. And when we are thrust into a new reality

filled with a new set of constraints, what it can do is reveal to us the beliefs that we have that were maybe previously hidden from view capabilities that we didn't know we had in our possession, new vantage points, new perspectives. By and large, the people that I interviewed for the other side of change, and you've read the book,

they've been through harrowing changes, right? Illness, heartbreak, loss, the discoveries of a secret in their families, whatever it was, they're not necessarily happy that the change happened to them. Who would willingly invite loss or heartbreak into their lives?

Very few people. but they're deeply grateful for the person that they became as a result of the change they went through. They tapped into newfound confidence, newfound freedom, a new way of seeing their families and their past, a new way of relating to people, just new ways of seeing themselves and the world around them and their place in it. And all of them emerged with a new kind of enlightenment that really served them well and a newfound understanding of who they were and who they are and who they can become. Yeah, the stories in the book are fabulous. In most of those stories, we can see an element of ourselves.

And so I thought it was a really nice way of trying to write this book and share these tools with us. I sort of think about some of the things you've said, right? You said about beliefs, how important beliefs are. And I think one of my favorite chapters in the book is The Blank Slate. I think it was Chapter 5. And, you know, I'm fascinated by beliefs and how much our beliefs shape our reality. But of course, beliefs only hold true as long as we believe in them. Right?

The truth is the truth irrespective of whether we believe in it or not. But a belief only holds true as long as we subscribe to it. And a lot of us are walking around with business. beliefs that we've never ever questioned before. I think that chapter beautifully illustrates this idea that sometimes it takes an unwanted and unexpected change to be thrust upon your life for you to start questioning your beliefs. One of the things I talk about in the book is change serving as revelation. And what's so interesting is that when a negative change happens to us, it can feel like

personal apocalypse of sorts. It can feel like the world that was once available to us is no longer in view. And apocalypse actually comes from the Greek word apocalypsis. And interestingly, that word means revelation. And so this etymology is really instructive. Yes, change can abend us, but it can also reveal things to us that, as I was saying earlier, we're previously hidden from view. Exactly as you said, we move about in this world carrying so many beliefs. And it's easy to believe that our belief systems reflect an immutable sacred truth about the world. But in actuality, so few of these beliefs we've actually interrogated over the course of our lives. It would be cognitively impossible to do that,

right? Because we have so, so many beliefs and we don't have the cognitive bandwidth to every day wake up and think, which belief should I interrogate today? not to mention that so many of these beliefs sit on a somewhat flimsy foundation. So many of them were born in childhood, right, before our brains were fully developed. We were influenced by messages from caregivers or teachers or peers or popular culture or what we saw on TV for kids these days, social media. And so we absorb these messages somewhat subconsciously and without really anteriority. them through the ideal rational lens. And so what that means is that we may carry so many views that actually are self-limiting

that don't reflect reality that are based on faulty information, but that, for example, if they were formed during childhood, we're bound up in our sense of love and belonging. And so it almost feels too painful to dismantle some of those beliefs and to actually imagine a world in which we don't have them. And so I argue in the book that change can serve as a moment in which those beliefs are revealed to you. And then you can actually revisit them, assess them for their credibility and merit, and then potentially move forward in a world in which you don't have those beliefs. And so in the story you describe with Ingrid about an amnesia actually reveals to her

that she had been carrying all of this shame around her family's indigenous history and heritage. And it is through that experience of losing all of her memories, of having a blank slate, that she feels liberated and free for the first time. She has such an unusual experience with her amnesia. I, for one, would freak out if I had amnesia,

but Ingrid feels this likeness of being. And it's because she's realizing in that moment, oh, my God, all this shame that I was feeling around my family's history was such a burden for me. and now that I can see things anew without the anchors of my past, without all of these biases

that informed my understanding of my family, the future looks so much more hopeful and so much more beautiful. Yeah, it was such an evocative story. I read it over quite a few times, actually. You know, this young lady growing up in Colombia and then she moves, I think, to America from recollection and she's knocked over on her bike.

And it was so striking because I think a lot of us if we really thought about it, it would go, what would it be like if we woke up one day, completely unburdened by the stories of the past? So you, you know, you literally start existing fresh from today. And it was, you know, you just said it, she felt lighter. I remember I underlined that because I thought, wow, she felt lighter after she shed her in a narrative.

For many of us, that's kind of what forgiveness can do to us. You know, if we're able to forgive, we feel lighter afterwards when we, when we let go of this emotional baggage that we're carrying around. So maybe you could continue the story because, you know, your book's called The Other Side of Change, Who We Become When Life Makes Other Plans. Yeah. Well, Life made other plans for her with her bike crash, and she fundamentally changed as a consequence. One thing that I love about Ingrid's story is that it shows that we can often misinterpret interpret messages that we receive when we're younger. But because we haven't interrogated the belief

in the first place, we never realize, again, how flimsy or faulty the foundation is. So as Ingrid was growing up, her mom would tell her, Ingrid, you can never share our family stories with anyone outside the family because you might face the threat of violence or discrimination or any other sort of prejudice. And Ingrid's little mind interpreted that as, well, if I'm being told that I can't share something with the world, it probably means there's something bad about the thing I'm being told I shouldn't share. In actuality, though, Ingrid's mom was deeply proud of her Colombian heritage. She was just issuing an admonition to Ingrid because she wanted her daughter to be safe. It was really a practical piece of advice. And so when Ingrid has amnesia,

and then again, the slate is wiped clean and these stories come back to her, but without the memory of her mom's admonition to never tell anyone about it, She's filled with utter delight around these stories. She thinks, oh, my God, these are so beautiful and so magical. And when she's talking to her boyfriend that day, her boyfriend is thinking, why have you never shared these stories with me? And Ingrid can't understand why, because she's filled with such awe and reverence and wonder for them. And then by the time the memory resurfaces, you know, her memories are coming back after the accident,

when the memory resurfaces of her mom telling her don't share this stuff, and she was reminded, oh my God, I'm ashamed of them. It's too late. She has already renewed her relationship with her family's heritage. She's already built a novel, beautiful relationship with her family's past. And so she rejects the shame element. In fact, she calls it like a block in the Jenga game, right? Because you were, you were posing the question that this chapter of the book surfaces, which is, who would we be without a belief? And Ingrid uses this beautiful metaphor. She says, imagine having a game of Jenga, right? And that shame is just one block. And Ingrid learns that she can actually pull out that block and the apparatus is still fully sturdy. It's still standing, but she actually

feels freer. And so this invites all of us to question, what are the beliefs that I have about myself or the world around me or my family? Do I have really low self-esteem? Do I have low self-confidence that's not rooted in anything real? Do I have shame for something that has to be? Or something that happen in the past that I haven't been willing to talk about. Do I have resentment? Am I unwilling to forgive someone in my life? It just invites people to ask themselves. And then one of the things that I do towards the end of the chapter is that I give people science-based strategies that they can use to actually effectively interrogate their beliefs. So there's a lot of research and cognitive science around how to change other people's minds. And I'm really eager for us to turn those

questions on ourselves so that we can change our own minds. Because self-belief, it's going to be some of the hardest to change, right? When you pull on one little thread of the tapestry of our belief system, the whole thing can feel unsturdy and very discomforting. And so I wanted to give people the confidence to know, actually, it's okay to pull it a few threads. The system can stay intact, and actually there can be a tremendous amount of liberation that's accompanied by that. Yeah, as I was thinking about that chapter and Ingrid's story, I was really led to the conclusion that maybe one of the best things about change that we didn't plan for, that we didn't expect, maybe the best thing about it is that it forces us to think about updating our beliefs in a way that perhaps only change can.

Now, you make the case that there are other things that you can do, right? but there is something revealing about change. Yes. And a lot of it depends on the perspective you take on that situation. And that perspective, of course, can change over time. One of the things I've tried to do with my kids, Meyer, over the last few years, is help them realize that every situation in life has multiple interpretations. And it's because that realization has had such a profound impact on me and how I navigate change

over the last decade or so that I think, well, I've learned that in my kind of 40s. Wouldn't it be cool to learn that when you're 12 years old? And the example that comes to mind that I have said on this podcast before is, I think it was after the summer holidays. My daughter, I think it was a second year in what I guess you guys would call high school. school, what we'd call secondary school here, although it is now called high school, because I think we're becoming more and more Americanized. But when I was a kid, it was secondary school, right? Keep your traditions. Yeah. But I remember a conversation with her about the classes were being changed around for some of the subjects. And, you know, there was this discussion at home, you know, am I still going to be

in that class with my friends? And I remember sitting down with them and I said, hey, darling, listen, Of course, you want to be in a class with your friends. But if you're not, what opportunities are being presented to you that would have never, ever been presented to you, had that change not be made? I think I said it a bit more eloquently than that. That is so eloquent.

What a gift you gave your daughter. I hope so, because, and I thought about that example as I was going through your book, because she, I mean, what she said was, well, Daddy, I guess if I'm not in a class with my friends, I've got a chance to make new friends. And maybe I would never have spent the time trying to get to know them and taught to them

if I'd been put in a class with my existing friends, right? And so my hope as a father is that I'm just ingraining in her and my son from a young age that situations are going to present themselves to you in your life always that perhaps you don't want and you don't expect. but every situation has multiple interpretations. And can you train yourself over time as hard as some of those situations might be to look at them from different angles?

And I guess that is a theme that sort of underpins the other side of change is this idea that change is an opportunity. Change reveals things that perhaps would never have been revealed without it. and if you're smart about it and you use the techniques that you write about, change can sometimes be the best thing that ever happened to you. I want to say again, what a gift you've given your daughter, because to encourage flexibility of thinking from the time you're very young is one of the most powerful tools that a person can have as they navigate their life.

I think in many ways we discuss. courage, that kind of flexibility. We want kids to give us clear answers to things. We kind of lock them into certain ways of thinking, right? And cultivating that kind of mindset where you are willing to see situations from new perspectives and new angles, where you're willing to question your beliefs or assumptions, that kind of mindset will aid your daughter and your son for the rest of their lives. I wish I had actually built that muscle more when I was younger. And so, So that's exactly right. So I really believe that we can come to see change,

not simply as something to endure, but as an opportunity to reimagine who we can be. At the end of the day, the other side of change is really a book about self-identity and exploration. And that was the gift that I got from interviewing the remarkable people that I profile in the book and then enduring a change of my own over the course of writing the book.

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so that you can move freely and let Peloton handle the rest. Let yourself ride, lift, stretch, move and go. explore the new Peloton cross-training byte plus at onepellaton.com.uk. That's on e-pe-el-o-t-o-t-o-com.uk. And please note, Peloton all-access membership is required to access all Peloton content and applicable features on your Peloton hardware. As I was interviewing people, where the book took me three and a half years to write, my husband and I were navigating a change in our own lives. So long story short, we have been trying

to start a family for about six or so years at this point in time and had been unsuccessful. So we had faced many obstacles and disappointments and failures and miscarriages with our surrogate. And I remember Rungan that even though I had experienced formative changes as a child, for example, I was an aspiring concert violinist and then a hand injury ended those dreams in a moment. I felt so unprepared for this particular change. And I think one reason for that is, and I imagine many of your listeners can relate to this,

I love being in control and I love being able to outwork the challenges in my life. So historically, when I face setbacks, I just think, okay, how can I creatively overcome this? How can I find a work around? I'll just work harder. And that way I'll get to the outcome that I'm after. When you're in the space of fertility, it is one of the most humbling spaces because the universe is indifferent towards how much you want something, how deep your desire is, how, quote, hard you're willing to work. And so you are forced to reckon with the true limits

of your control and to surrender in some ways to the universe. And so, as I was undergoing this whole experience, I still remember to this whole discussion around belief systems that on the night we found out that we had lost identical twin girls, I felt in many ways like it had threatened the entirety of who Maya was. It felt like my life turned from color to gray scale in a moment. And what that change in part revealed to me, which I don't know would have been revealed to me otherwise, as we've just talked about, is that for whatever reason, maybe it was the influence of my Indian culture, or maybe it was through popular culture and the messages that I heard growing up. But I had come to believe that so much of my value and worth

as a woman in the society needed to come from becoming a parent. And that required a lot of unpacking because I had to ask critically, who gave me that belief system? And do I really believe that's the right way of seeing things? Shouldn't it be the case that I think my life can be rich and full of color and meaning and purpose, even in the absence of having children? And I talk about this evolution in the final chapter of the book, as I'm navigating these losses I share, I sort of turned the mirror on myself because I had been, you know, investigating other people's change stories, but I felt I owed my reader, my own experience of change and the lessons I'd learned from the people I interviewed. But that was an incredible evolution

that was occurring within me where I had to challenge my own belief systems in when I was writing this book in my late 30s. And I think it was a testament to the fact that it's never too late for a change in your life to surface beliefs that have been so deeply entrenched, they may force you to go all the way back to when you're five years old or six years old, but it is still possible for those beliefs to be malleable enough to play around with, to question, to actually override. Thank you for sharing that. And first of all, I'm sorry you and your husband have been through such challenges

when trying to start your own family. Also, I know you try to give a shortened version of that story, but I know in the book, you sort of go into a lot more detail, how you really, really did from a young age take on this belief that what it means to be a woman in this world is to be a mother. And you wanted to be a mum, even as a, I think as a little girl and as a teenager, it was kind of something that you just thought would happen.

You probably never even questioned whether it would happen. And there are a few cognitive, biases that you speak to in the book. One, you mentioned right at the start, this end of history illusion, but there's also the illusion of control, right? I guess you touched on it there. You were forced to, yes, I guess, confront your own belief systems, but also on a much broader scale, we're forced to confront this idea that I can't control everything that happens to me in this world. And one of the things I was hoping to talk you about today, which perhaps now is a good time to bring up,

is the death of my father. So when we're talking about unexpected and unwanted changes, divorce, relationship breakups, death, I guess, is one of the ultimate forms of change or ultimate types of change that we don't like. You know, many of us struggle to deal with a death are for a loved one, understandably. But my whole relationship with my dad's death since it occurred in March 2013

has completely changed. You know, 12, almost 13 years in now. The situation is the same, right? The event stayed the same. My dad died in March 2013. But my interpretation and my perspective on that situation is completely different. from 12 years ago. And I think there's a lot of hope in that where even if we're struggling with some change right at the start, over time, you can start to reinterpret that situation and look at it through a different lens.

So now, Maya, without going into every bit of detail, to do with it, I honestly now see my dad's death as a gift. Wow. I see it as a gift my father gave to me. I moved back to the northwest of England after medical school to help my mum and my brother look after my dad. He was super unwell with lupus, he had kidney failure. And so for 15 years, our whole lives were around dad and his care.

And I think that I also used to suffer from the illusion of control bias. So maybe I do a little bit to a degree now, but I think in a big way, if dad was ever sick during, that time, I would by hook or by crook, sort the situation out. I'd get his hospital. If he wasn't getting the right care, I'd get hold of the consult. I guess I had that belief that if I want it enough, I can sort it. Yes. Whereas, of course, when he died, suddenly I'm confronted with this idea that, oh, you kind of can't control everything, right? That, you know, So I think my belief in that illusion was shattered when my dad died.

And once it shattered, I think it then gets easier to start to look at change in a slightly different way. And, you know, why do I say to you that my dad's death, I see it as a gift? It's because the things I've learned about myself, the person who I've become, the career I have today, I don't think any of those things would have happened if my dad was still alive. It doesn't mean I don't love my dad. It doesn't mean I don't wish my dad was still here. Yes, I do.

And at the same time, I have chosen to believe, and that's the thing about beliefs, I'm not asking anyone else to believe that, but I have chosen to believe that, actually, you know what, that's in many ways a gift that my father gave to me. And that helps me move on with my life. navigate that change. So I said quite a few things there, Maya. And yeah, I was just trying to, I guess, in some ways, get your take on that because that is change. And I think that really does speak to some of these ideas in the book that change. You know, what did you say right at the start? You said, you know, when an unexpected change happens to us, it can inspire lasting change within us.

Well, that's what's happened through my dad's death. Yeah, thank you so much for sharing that. It's a deeply beautiful reflection. And I think it speaks to the overarching thesis of the other side of change, which is that our relationship to the events in our lives is an ongoing dialogue. It's an ongoing discussion. It is not fixed in stone. And I think you have seen that progression happen within yourself since your dad's death, right? The symbolism. the meaning it's taken on, the way that you think about the experience emotionally has shifted dramatically. And I think my goal when writing this book was to show the power of even these small shifts in perspective. So let me rewind a little bit. I mentioned that I struggled for years and years with the challenge of not starting a family. And in my moments of despair and frustration, there was this mantra that would kind of play in my head that I would hear from people and I would see on social media and that I knew was rooted in ancient wisdom, but for me, it rung hollow. It's the idea that while we can't change what happens to us, we can change how we respond to what happens.

It is meant to be empowering, but in my state, in my compromise mental state, I had no idea how to actually execute on this wisdom, on this guidance. It's not like there's a switch in my brain that I could just flip on that would suddenly make me feel more peaceful or more hopeful or more enlightened or more filled with a sense of possibility about what the future might hold. And so I desperately wanted to have a manual of sorts, a roadmap, some concrete strategies that I could use to actually feel and think differently about the changes that had happened in my life. And so that is why I actually wrote this book. It came from a deeply personal need to want to think and feel differently about the big changes in my life, but to not know how. And so I have written this book for people who are not just in the throes of change right now, but for people like you, Rungan, who are maybe looking to change their relationship with a past event to see it differently. and also who are anxious about a future change, right,

are trying to renew their relationship with change altogether so that they can try and extract whatever meaning or possibility might lie within it. And so I went on this journey to find the most exceptional stories of change that I could worldwide, but importantly, to find stories that had a universal lesson that lay within them. So one of the things I love that you shared earlier on in the, this conversation that I wanted to comment on is that you found resonance in the, you found personal resonance in the stories in this book, despite the fact that they cover so much terrain, so much ground, there's such a diverse set of stories. And I imagine that many of

the actual experiences that my subjects went through are not experiences that you have gone through. And that was another really important lesson I wanted to capture in this book, which is that we are often instructed by others and by society to look for people in moments of stress who have gone through experiences that look like our own. So for example, oh, you're going through a divorce. Oh, I have a friend who went through a divorce. You should talk to them. Oh, you're navigating a loss. Oh, go to the bereaved section of the bookstore. Oh, you're navigating an illness. Oh, here's a support group of other people who are going through illness. It is absolutely true that you can extract insight from those whose stories look like yours.

But my argument as a cognitive scientist is that we all have a shared psychology. The stuff of change actually looks quite similar, irrespective of the specifics of what we're navigating. We often are bristling at the unfairness of the world. We're grieving a past that is no longer available to us. We're anxious about our self-identities and who we can be in this new world. Maybe we're resentful. Maybe we're struggling to forgive someone.

And so if the stuff of change is similar, then you can imagine that the solution set is going to be similar to, right? Problem statement, solution set. And so I remember having this insight first when I was interviewing a cancer patient and a woman who found out that her late husband had had a decades-long affair and was realizing, oh, my gosh, they're both navigating this deep feeling of betrayal. And so there was so much more that connected their stories than people might have thought. And so it touches me deeply.

I just wanted to say as an author, when you tell me that you found resonance in each of the stories, right? Even though one woman's has locked in syndrome and another person has annesia and another person, you know, has this terrible accident, those are not necessarily things that remind you of your own life. But the psychological lessons are universal and there's something to learn from everyone's story. And I love this message because during a time of deep division and disconnection worldwide, it is a way of feeling closer to our fellow humans to remember that there is so much more that unifies us than may separate us in this particular domain. One of the stories that resonated with me the most really speaks to that idea, Dwayne, who has been in prison, right? I've not been in prison. Yet, his struggle and the way he had to reimagine a future self for him compared to the self that he had previously imagined was so beautiful, particularly when you bring in that concept of moral elevation.

So, yeah, maybe talk to me about Dwayne a little bit and tell us what we can learn from Dwayne's story. Psychologists have this notion of possible selves. and they come in three forms. There are hoped for selves, which reflect our dreams and aspirations. There are feared selves, which reflect our worries and anxieties.

And then there are our expected selves, which reflect our expectations of what is likely to happen, good or bad. So, yes, maybe I want to be Taylor Swift one day, but more likely than not Rangan, I'm going to be a cognitive scientist in 10 years. Okay? So I think so many of us can relate to the,

experience of an unexpected change coming our way and many doors closing that were once open to us. This is exactly what happened to Dwayne Betts. So when Dwayne was 16, he was sentenced to nine years in adult prison for a carjacking that he committed. He had had such a promising future. He was voted class treasurer. He was identified as talented and gifted. He was hoping to study engineering at Georgia Tech. He was such a devoted and loving son to his mother. And yet one evening, he was so eager to prove his strength and machismo to the boys in his neighborhood. And so he committed this horrible crime. As you can imagine, Duane experienced his world shrink in that moment, right? So all of these futures that he had once imagined for himself were no longer accessible.

And Dwayne describes the fact that he wasn't just mourning the loss of those future selves. He was also so fearful of who he might become within the walls of prison. He worried for the first time, am I going to develop a gambling addiction? Am I going to become an addict? Am I going to become violent? Am I going to be able to protect myself from violence? All of these thoughts were swirling around his mind. And what research shows, Rangan, is that we can actually needlessly constrain ourselves when it comes to imagining what the future can hold for us even in our newly constrained environments.

And that's because we have all sorts of prejudices. We have all sorts of stereotypes that we attach to certain roles or labels in this world. So we might have a very limited understanding of the kinds of futures that are available to a high school dropout or a teen mom or a caregiver or someone with a chronic illness or in Dwayne's case, someone who is incarcerated. And one of the ways that we can actually crack open our imagination of what we are capable of in our new environment is this concept of moral elevation. Moral elevation is the warm, fuzzy feeling we get in our chest when we witness someone else's extraordinary behaviors or actions. So that might be their courage or kindness or self-sacrifice or wisdom or fortitude or resilience or ability to forgive others. Whatever outstanding character trait it is, this can inspire this warm feeling within ourselves. But really critically, moral elevation doesn't just make us feel good about humanity.

It actually rewires our brains. And that's because in witnessing other people violate our expectations, our understanding of what humans are capable of in the best way possible. It actually cracks open our own imagination about what we are capable of. And so, going back to Dwayne's story, it was actually an experience of moral elevation that completely changed the trajectory of Dwayne's life. Dwayne encountered a fellow prisoner named Boul about a year or so into his time in prison. And Bollal, in Dwayne's mind, defied his understanding of what it meant to be a prisoner

and how you had to be in order to survive prison. Dwayne had believed that you needed to be ruthlessly self-interested, that you had to keep all your cards close to the chest, that you had to be a certain way. But Balal acted in ways that defied this. He went out of his way to protect the younger prisoners. He taught them how to box to protect themselves from the threat of violence in prison. He actively played a mentorship role for the younger boys. He woke up an hour or two before count time.

It did 250 push-ups in his prison cell even before the guards came by. He would iron his prison uniform every single morning. He made sure that he was clean-shaven each and he was. every day. Duane says that Bilal carried himself like a man in uniform, that he showed Dwayne what it meant to be lovely. And by the way, those words still give me tingles when I hear them. To Dwayne, Balal showed him that maybe he didn't have to be a certain way just because he was a prisoner. Maybe there were other futures available to him. And so it was with this empowered mindset that when Dwayne encountered a book of poetry in his prison cell a couple weeks later

and read one poem in particular that spoke to the experience of young boys of color in the prison system, Dwayne for the first time realized, hey, wait, maybe I could be a poet. I can't do what Bilal does for the younger boys in prison. I'm not strong. I don't know how to box. I can't protect them in that way. But I can dignify their experiences through writing, which was a gift that he knew he had. Fast forward a few decades. Today, Dwayne is a graduate of Yale Law School. He's a MacArthur Genius Prize winner. And he writes some of the most beautiful stirring poetry that I've ever read that dignifies the experiences of young men of color in the prison system. And he credits this entire transformation to that one experience of moral elevation that he had within the walls of prison.

And I just find that to be such a beautiful moving story because moral elevation is something that is available to all of us. It is actually all around us all the time if we are just intentional and we are observant and we put our phones down and we just witness the world around us. It's such a beautiful story. I love it because it made me think that, as well as helping someone like Dwayne or helping us navigate change,

I think we can also flip it, Meyer, and think about ourselves and go, well, the way we conduct ourselves is really, really important because you never know when someone's going to witness you doing an act of kindness, acting in alignment with your values, doing the right thing when it would be easy to do the wrong thing or the dishonest thing. Like, it's very, very inspiring. It makes me want to be a better person when I, hear stories like that. Me too. And I want to share that one of my favorite aspects of moral

elevation is that it does transcend circumstances and the specific thing you're trying to improve within yourself. So you might witness an extraordinary act of forgiveness in someone else. And you might not be looking to forgive someone in your life, but maybe inspires you to expand your sense of empathy for others. Maybe it leads you to be a kinder person. Maybe it inspires you to be a more resilient person. And so the impact as far as it, the impact can be widespread when it comes to you in your life overall. And I love that because I might just be walking down the street or I might be at the coffee shop and I witness a barista's kindness to one of the patrons who's obviously having a bad day. And then maybe I go to work.

And again, it's not necessarily kindness that this experience of moral elevation leads me to tap into, but it's some other character. trait that it leads me to tap into. And so the effect is profound and I have really made it a point to try and welcome moral elevation into my life each and every day. Yeah. Because I have found it to be omnipresent. And it is a wonderful counterforce to all the negativity that we experience. When we turn on the news, when we read the newspaper, right? We just get bombarded by the worst of humanity sometimes. we engage in those experiences and to know that we can reclaim some of our optimism and our hope and our joy about the future of humanity from these everyday moments, from these seemingly small moments in the life of someone else, but it has a profound outsized impact on the recipient,

on the observer of that action. It is profound. It's beautiful. I guess what Dwayne, or one of the things Dwayne saw in Belal was, even though I'm in prison, and even there's many people around me who are being aggressive and are not being nice and are adapting to try and survive in this situation, I don't have to end up like that. And the reason I know that is because Belal hasn't ended up like that. That's exactly right. Dwayne says at one point, Belal was saying, this is my identity. And what I love about that quote is it reminds us we actually each have agency in our new environments. We can choose who we want to be.

We can reject the stereotypes, the cultural expectations of us, what society thinks we are destined to become. And we can carve our own path and say, no, I'm resisting whatever norms might exist out there, whatever expectations might exist, and I'm deciding, this is who I'm going to be right now. And I love that sense of empowerment so much, because while I would love to say that I wrote this book and on the other side, I'm thinking, I don't need control anymore in my life. I'm good. I have achieved a Buddhist-like state. Of course, I still want to feel control. And at a minimum, what I'm hoping the other side of change does is it allows people to reclaim the agency they still have in their new their new circumstances. So yes, they can't change the cancer diagnosis.

They can't change the loss of someone. They can't change the loss of a job. They can't change that maybe there is a betrayal by a friend. But what I'm arguing is that they can change what's up in here through these science back strategies or reframes or perspective shifts or thought experiments. You shared in that chapter your own experience of moral elevation, when I think it was the shooting of Nadine Collier's mum. And you saw her, I think on television, say, I think to the killer, you took something precious from me, but I forgive you.

Again, it was one of those where you stopped reading and go, wow, it shows you, it inspires you to know what people are capable of. Her mother has been murdered, and yet still very soon after, she's able to forgive the killer despite what has been done, right? So it's very, very inspiring. What do you think witnessing that act of moral elevation did for you? Today's episode is sponsored by The Way. I have tried so many meditation apps over the years,

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in South Carolina. And as you mentioned, the daughter of one of the victims extended forgiveness to the racist killer in the courtroom. And I was so moved by Nadine's capacity for forgiveness. I mean,

it was stunning to me. I mean, to this day, reflecting on that experience, I get chills through my spine and my brain almost struggles to assess. assimilate that information. I feel like I have to, in fact, this is what moral elevation does. It forces you to update your mental models of what humans are capable of. And I would say that

what Nadine did for me through her example is inspired me to think, I am capable of so much more than I have currently given to humanity and to others, that whatever I believe my limits of, are when it comes to empathy or kindness or compassion or forgiveness, raise the bar significantly, Maya, because that is what Nadine has shown you as possible. And so you carry that with you. And the thing about moral elevation is you don't know when it will play out. You don't know when that influence will reveal itself.

But then as you live your life, you realize, oh, in this moment, I'm being asked to show more compassion that I might be comfortable with. But I have Nadine now in the back of my head reminding me that I actually am capable of more compassion. Yeah. Right? Or maybe I need to show more patience

than I feel I'm capable of showing. I'm a fairly impatient person. And I think, no, no, no, you actually are capable of more patience. Yeah. I love that. In my last point, I sort of tried to examine what a hero really is to us. And one of the things I concluded is that

when we see someone who we regard as a hero or someone who really, really inspires us, often it's because they reflect back to us something that we know we have within us. So instead of worshipping the totality of who that person is, it's trying to go, what is it this person is reflecting back to me that I know if I can cultivate it, I can bring out of me as well?

And it kind of reminds me a little bit about that. Do you think, Maya, one of the reasons we like films so much as a society, right? And of course, there's different types of films. But often in films, there is an uplifting component. You know, the hero does something truly wonderful, right? They do the right thing, not the easy thing. Is that an example of moral elevation? And why perhaps we're drawn to these feel good films?

films? Yeah, it's so interesting you mentioned that because some of the research that I did for this book explores the role that fiction broadly plays in cracking open our imagination about what is possible for us. So it is sometimes hard to invite moral elevation into your life at exactly the moment you need it, right? And so I do advise people reflect on the past because you might actually have moments of moral elevation. You've already experienced that could be helpful to you in this moment. But you can't exactly manufacture or you can't engineer that the moment of inspiration that you need right now. And so what you can do actually is read fiction or I think the same insight would apply to watching movies. Researchers call fiction

an identity laboratory. And that's because when we read about other people or in your case with the film, we watch other people, we effortlessly blend our self-identities with the character that we're reading about. And what this allows us to do is cultivate a psychologically safe space in which we can embody new personality traits. We can make maybe more risky decisions than we would otherwise feel comfortable making in our everyday life. We can try on for size different ways of being and moving about in this world and see what it feels like via this character or via our own imagination. And so I think you're your exact. you're spot on. When we witness these beautiful acts and other people, or when we just

witness them making decisions that might not look like our own, it just pokes a little hole in our minds, thinks, oh, wait a second. I kind of always thought that I would need to do X in circumstance Y, but maybe that's not the case. Maybe I could take a few more risk. Maybe I could make different decisions that I'm used to making and actually it would lead to great returns. And so I encourage people to, in moments of inflection, actually just pick up a fiction book. I want to delight because a lot of people love reading fiction. It turns out that there's huge cognitive science benefits to doing that. Because again, we get to explore new sides of ourselves without the risk that we might endure in everyday life.

Yeah, it makes me think that moral elevation or witnessing these acts of courage and just, frankly, exquisite moral beauty, can impact us in a couple of different ways. You write them out in the book as a way of helping us deal with change. So Dwayne is struggling with his new scenario in life that he's in prison and witnessing this helps him navigate his change better. But as you were just talking then, I thought, yeah, but it works the other way as well, doesn't it? We may not be looking for change. We may just be going about our day-to-day life and existing

and witnessing moral elevation can actually inspire us to change. Exactly. It can help us deal with unwanted change, but it can also inspire us to, I guess, choose a different path of change for us. So it's quite interesting to explore, isn't it, how it affects us on multiple different levels? Yes, the bidirectional impact.

I love that you've just said this rungin, because one of my secret hopes for this book, was that yes, it would help people who are navigating unexpected change, but I really wanted to help people who are resistant to change or maybe just a little too comfortable with the status quo, aren't looking for any big shifts. I'm in that current phase in my life. I'm like, please, nothing. I would just like to maintain business as usual. Thank you very much, universe. And yet we would actually benefit from inspiring a change in our own life. And we just need a little bit of that kick in the butt in order to make it happen. And it's been a joy, actually,

to hear from readers of the book who said, I wasn't looking to inspire any change. But then I read Dwayne's story or I read Tara's story or I read Ingrid's story. And they actually inspired me to initiate a new change in my life, that maybe that was changing a job or changing the relationship they're in or revisiting parts of their past that they never thought to revisit. that they felt were holding them back. I actually just heard from, oh my God, I just got this essay from a reader last night. He had unexpectedly lost his wife just 18 months ago, and reading the book led him to reflect on who he's become on the other side of change. And what was so beautiful about the essay that he wrote was that he didn't simply say, this is how I'm rethinking my relationship

with my grief or this experience, but he had all of these goals for who he wanted to become moving forward. One of them was about like career shifts and how this might inform his next business ventures and his relationships with his kids. And I just found that so, such a beautiful expression again and one of my secret hopes to the book

and I was hoping to achieve that. But I was obviously very humble about it. I didn't know whether it would have that effect. So yeah, I just love your observation. That's wonderful to hear that. it's already having such an impact on people. I want to talk about rumination in just a moment because I think that's something that people really, really struggle with

and often go to when dealing with an unexpected change. But before we go there, though, I just want to revisit the topic of death for a moment because this idea that our beliefs have a huge impact on how we deal with change was really brought home to me early on in my career as a family practice doctor, so as a GP. I remember so well, one morning, this young couple came in for their appointment and their baby boy had died over the weekends.

You know, I think it was two or three months old. I can't remember the exact details now. But the thing I remember from that consultation, is that they had very strict religious beliefs. And they said to me, they were clearly upset, they were tearful, but they said to me, this was God's will. Now, to me, at the time, it was quite confronting to hear that, I guess.

I've reflected on it a lot since then, Maya, and I thought about it again whilst reading your book, because I thought, I think their belief, their strong belief in something greater than their existence, help them navigate arguably one of the most harrowing human experiences. Because I saw them a few times over the next few months and years. And I guess the question I have for you is, what role do you think having a belief in something greater, whether that's religion or spirituality or, you know, something else,

what role do you think that plays in our ability to navigate change? I think irrespective of whether we are religious or not or spiritual or not, we are natural-born storytellers. we want to create narratives out of our experiences because it can just be mentally devastating to really confront the idea that the universe can be so indiscriminately cruel and callous towards people who simply don't deserve it.

You know, there's a psychological concept called belief in a just world, and I think we all gravitate towards that belief or most of us do because it is so uncomfortable to think that the universe is kind of indifferent to words whether we're good people or bad people, right? It's so comforting to think that good things will happen to good people and bad things will happen to bad people or that there is a larger plan. There is some way of explaining away injustice. And so I think each person has a different way of explaining

away the injustice. For me personally, I fall back to you. on the science of the mind and human psychology to try to figure out, well, I don't believe things happen for a reason personally, but that doesn't mean that I don't want to extract as much meaning and value as there is to extract from the hardest moments of my life. And so I still engage in that narrative making. You know, I still engage in trying to construct meaning out of things. And I respect any way that a person is able to achieve that end goal, you know, but it just looks different for each, for every one of us.

Yeah, I think what that situation taught me is that everyone's entitled to navigate the world in whichever way they see fit. You know, if that helps someone navigate adversity, who am I to say that's good or bad? If I wasn't trying to do that, it was just very interesting for me to observe it and go, wow, that is amazing.

Maybe one of the reasons that in Western society, we struggle so much today at dealing with change is because we become more secular and less religious. Yeah. And I'm just, again, I'm not trying to come down on either side, say one's better than the other. Not at all. It's just simply when you do have a strong belief system, it probably helps you navigate. Oh, absolutely. I mean, my uncle and aunt, for example, in India, are deeply religious. And I can see how differently they engage with trauma and negative events. They really do believe that it is part of a bigger plan for them and it is God's will.

And they, whereas I'm, you know, I'm engaging in all of this stress and anxiety around it, I feel like my uncle and on are able to reach acceptance so much more quickly. Radical acceptance that remains elusive to me to this day. And so absolutely, I mean, I witness it all the time just within my own family. It's interesting because you say that. The book is full of these science-backed strategies. And we're going to get to some of them shortly, right? So you've done a lot of the research.

You show what the research has demonstrated and how we can apply it in our lives. But I guess what I think about is the moments when you wrote about your own father, and there's two points in your life. I think before you went to college, after you've had to give up the dream of being a professional concert violinist, where he gives you some quite sage advice, that was perhaps not based on science, but based on his wisdom, but that also massively helped you like that moment when he took you to the cemetery.

Yeah, it's so funny because when I was reflecting just now, on my life as a cognitive scientist, right? Undergrad, PhD, postdoc. I was trained in empirical methods, right? And so in some sense, the academic community in that sphere would say, oh, why are we talking about stories? Why are we talking about narratives? That's diluting the strength of the recommendation.

And I have totally changed my tune on that front. So when I first started my podcast, a slight change of plans, back in 2021, it was like being hit by a freight train in terms of the power of marrying science and storytelling to help us extract the most value, the most benefit when it comes to navigating change. And so I'm such a firm believer that is the intersection of these two spheres that leads to maximum insight. And for that reason, when I was even thinking,

about writing this book, I wanted it to be narrative first. I really believe that it is in people's, it is in reading people's stories that we feel truly transformed. And yes, the science is really nice and I wanted to give people some structure so that, you know, as you know at the end of the book, I give people a quote, change survival kit.

Yeah. I want them to have a guide when they're navigating change in their own life. But importantly, I really wanted them to internalize these lessons. And I felt that myself, you know, I'm aware of the concepts, the scientific concepts I write about in the book, but it was only in going on the journey with Olivia, with Dwayne, with Ingrid, with Matt, that I started to truly practice some of the science in my own life. So I think the narrative component is so, so important. I wanted to share a little bit more

about the violin experience because I feel like I did learn some really valid. insights from that experience, some of it only recently, and then, like you said, from my dad. So from the time I was six, my life really centered around the violin. My mom went up to her attic and brought down my grandmother's violin that she had played as a young girl living in India and in Burma. And I was so close to my grandmother when we would go to India over the summers. She and I were just inseparable. You know, I'd sleep next to her on the linoleum floor.

We would fold up sari cloth that would serve as our pillows. I would sit next to her in the prayer room as she prayed for hours and hours, and I would try to simulate her rocking motions and her prayer position. I would stand next to her and tug at her sari when she was cooking delicious Indian food. And so I think that when my mom brought down this violin and my three older siblings rejected it, I, because I felt so close to my potty, to my maternal grandmother, said, yes, I want to play this instrument. And the connection was instant, Rungen.

So even though I was so little, my parents never had to really tell me to practice, which was kind of extraordinary. I mean, they had to tell me to do all sorts of other things. But my love of music was really visceral. And when I was nine, I auditioned for the Juilliard School of Music in New York. And I started going there every weekend from Connecticut to New York. So I would get up at 4.30 in the morning, take a train to New York. I would have 10 hours of classes,

home at night and I started to develop big dreams of becoming a professional. And then when I was a teenager, the renowned violinist Itsok Perlman invited me to be his private violin student. And that was really the vote of confidence I felt I needed to believe that I could actually make it in this fiercely competitive world. You know, as you can imagine, I had a lot of imposter syndrome operating in this very elite circle. And I never really knew if I had what it took. And so everything was going according to plan until I had my slight change of plans. I overstretched my pinky finger playing a note in a very challenging piece. And I damaged tendons in my hand.

And despite months and then years of resistance and denial and stubbornness and experimental treatments and surgeries and physical therapy and cortisone injections and anti-inflammatories, I was unable to heal. And so doctors finally told me, look, your dream is over. You really need to stop playing. And there was something so curious about my grief, which was that, of course, I was grieving the loss of the instrument.

But I really felt like I was grieving the loss of myself in this more foundational way. It felt like in losing the violin, I had lost Maya. And I think sometimes in our lives, lives, we don't realize how much something has come to define us until we lose it. But so much of who I was was entangled with the violin. My sense of meaning and purpose, my sense of self-confidence and value, my sense of belonging. You know, I was one of a few brown kids in a predominantly

Caucasian community and I was bullied by the girls in my neighborhood. But when I was at music school, which was more international, I felt warmly embraced. I felt like my, peers loved me and appreciated me and valued me. And so it was a more devastating loss than I think I could have imagined if you had told me earlier that you might one day lose the violin. And it's taken me now decades to learn the lesson I'm about to share, but I really hope it's helpful to listeners of your podcast. It can be quite precarious for us to anchor our self-identity to what we do. And that's because life can take away that what in an instant, as I experienced myself, right? I went from being a violinist to not being a violinist just like that.

And instead, I have learned to anchor my self-identity to why I do something. So what do I mean by this? I asked myself, what is it that I loved about playing the violin? And I realized that at its core, was a deep need for human connection. That is what made me tick. I loved feeling close to my fellow musicians, to members of my audience, to everyone that was in my musical orbit. And music was this beautiful vehicle

through which I could achieve that deep emotional connection with other people. And just because I lost the violin did not mean that I lost what led me to love it in the first place. that part of Maya was actually still very much intact. And it could serve as a compass of sorts to help guide me towards my next steps. I mean, at the time, I wasn't aware.

I wasn't thinking about, you know, why versus what and how that might constitute myself identity. But it turns out that I naturally gravitated towards pursuits that fed this deep part of me. I, in starting my podcast, a slight change of plans, it was all about forging deep emotional connections with humans from my closet in my apartment building. you know, but talking with people about their incredible stories of change all over the world.

And then writing the other side of change in which I interviewed people over the course of years, you know, dozens and dozens of hours probing their life stories and narratives. That was also feeding this deep desire for emotional connection. And so I now see myself as the kind of person who thrives when in conversation with others, who loves the feeling of being deeply connected to other people. And life can't actually take that passion away from me. And so when I think about my self-identity now, it feels more resilient to change.

It feels more durable and long-lasting. And that even if life takes away my ability to be a writer, to be a podcaster, there will still be other outlets through which I can express this part of myself. And so I would encourage people who are listening to ask themselves, what is their why? What makes them love doing the things they love? Maybe it's a love of service or a love of learning or seeing themselves improve at a craft

or maybe it's having a creative outlet. If you can define yourself in that way, then you have this durable, robust self-identity that will persist even if you're navigating a big change. Yeah. It's a great way of looking at things. You know, what you do, it's just a role that you play. It's not who you are.

Yeah. And I've heard you once say that you don't like it when adults ask children the question, what do you want to do when you grow up? Did I get that right? You're not a fan of that question. Yeah, I just think that we are re-emphasizing that the what is what is what's going to last and be important. When I want to also ask kids,

who do you want to be when you grow up? What kind of person? What are your values? What's going to matter to you? Do you want to give back to others? Do you want a life in which you're constantly intellectually stimulated? Do you want to be an adventurer? I want people to think about personality and character traits

and how they might cultivate those. Yeah. And if you don't mind my asking, I'm curious to know when it comes to this brilliant podcast that you have, what is your why? What do you think motivates you such that if I, if I were to tell you, I'm so sorry, Runkin, but the podcast is going to go away tomorrow, what that why would be and other outlets through which you might feed that passion? That's a great question. It's not one I've thought about before. I would say what this podcast does for me is feed what I consider

to be a core value of mine, which is curiosity. I love that. So I'm a very curious person. I think I've always been, frankly, I think everyone actually is, but I think it sometimes gets schooled out of us. But I certainly believe myself to be a very curious person, and I feel that this podcast allows me to explore that curiosity in the most wonderful way. And I have thought long and hard over the last eight years as to

how and why I pick guests. As podcasting has become more and more popular and people are starting podcasts as good business ventures and they have teams who monitor algorithms and choose guests who are going to perform. I'm aware of all of that and I rebel against it and go, that's great for other podcasts who want to play that game.

It's not the game I want to play. I choose every single guest on this show. I research the guest myself. It is my way of exploring my own curiosity. Not only do I think that contributes to the quality of the conversation, I think it also contributes to longevity and why I still love doing this eight years on. Because I'm not doing it for an external metric.

I'm doing it for an internal metric, which is my own curiosity. So the next part of your question is, you know, if it disappeared overnight, how would I still feed that value? And it's a great question. I would miss it, sure, right? Or if AI takes over and nobody ever needs now real podcasts anymore. And I know, you know, you've got a wonderful podcast yourself.

There's many ways I can do it. You know, I'm curious with my children when they come back from school. I'm, you know, I love reading books. You know, I read books to explore curiosity. In fact, I would argue that one of the best things about the show, for me, is that it forces me to read all these great books. Because if I wasn't interviewing you today, Maya, I might have bought it, and it might have sat alongside a few other books that I've meant to read on the shelf.

But I'm like, no, Maya's given me some time to talk. You need to get through the books. So I feel very lucky that, you know, lucky that this kind of structure almost encourages me to sort of feed that curiosity even more. So maybe a slightly waffled answer there, but that's my initial answer to your question. Absolutely. And I'm so delighted to see someone like you who I think is in this, quote, for the right reasons, not to quote The Bachelor, but you really are, you're doing this for the right reasons and to see that reward it and for it to pay off and you have this extremely loyal

listener base. Like it makes me feel so hopeful about the future of podcasting. Yeah. Well, thank you for the kind words. And I think for me, it really ties in with the message you're trying to share with your story about, you know, what was it that you got out of playing the violin beyond just the violin? Okay. It was community, connection. It was these other things that you can still nourish without the violin. Yes. And I guess that's a nice lesson for all of us, because things do change in life. You know, our kids will leave home at some point.

You know, we will not be in the same job at some point, whether that's through retirement or A-high or whatever it might be. Yeah. And it's really useful for us to examine, well, what was it that we liked about it? and how can I get that somewhere else? Another helpful thought experiment can be when you're in a moment of disruption or inflection, who else can this person be?

Sometimes we forget in the face of a hard pivot that we haven't actually lost everything, all of the skills we've built, all the knowledge we've accrued, all the wisdom we've gained, all the perspectives we've built, maybe by traveling to different countries or having new experiences, those can all be purposed to serve you

in your next steps, in your next pursuits. And when I think about the violin, for example, it is true that the technical skills I built as a violinist are not useful to me, right? However, the grit that I built, the resilience in the face of failure, overcoming some of my stage fright and getting comfortable, performing in front of audiences,

having or cultivating my creative, spirit, these are all things that have been so helpful to me in my role as a cognitive scientist and being a podcaster in writing this book. And so I would urge people to reflect on the entirety of who they've become as a result of their life experiences and to imagine that they're reading that person's life CV on a piece of paper, not simply their academic accolades or job experiences, but the entirety of who they are. And just to have this distance thought experiment, like if I was reading about this person for the first time, what might they be capable of?

Yeah. Surely there are so many opportunities for this incredible person that I'm reading about. And I just wanted to share one other anecdote that I think relates to this conversation. So I'd heard from a guy named Scott. And Scott went to Harvard for law school. He is a human rights lawyer. I guess you guys would say barrister. Is that right?

Yeah, but it's okay. What happened is that he received a devastating long COVID diagnosis. He suffers from vertigo, nausea, severe brain fog. He has had to quit his job as a lawyer. And as you can imagine, he experienced profound grief for quite some time. But then he asked himself, well, why did I love being a human rights lawyer? And for him, his passion came from a deep satisfaction in representing underrepresented communities, communities that needed a voice.

That's why he wanted to be a human rights lawyer in the first place. And then Scott realized that while he couldn't do that in the context of being a lawyer, he could do that as a long COVID advocate. And so now, even though he faces profound physical, cognitive limitations, He is an outspoken advocate for those in his community. He's helped draft legislation. He's part of clinical trials. He's speaking to these voices that need to be heard about the devastating aftermath of a long COVID diagnosis.

And so, yeah, I'm just so grateful to Scott for sharing that with me. Yeah, it's a lovely story and very inspiring for us to think about, in our own lives, if we've come across something that has unfortunately changed what we thought we were going to do for whatever reason, like, of course, you and the violin, can I just ask you on that? When was the last time you picked up a violin? Oh, yeah. Well, so my story is a little bit more complicated and it actually intersects with the UK, so I'll share it here. What I didn't write about in the book is that I was actually diagnosed with, juvenile rheumatoid arthritis when I was 17. So my hand wasn't healing. I was getting a lot of

inflammation and doctors thought that maybe it was actually a systemic degenerative disease. And so I started taking immunosuppressants and anti-inflammatories to treat rheumatoid when I was 17. And it was actually only in the UK when I saw a specialist at Oxford that it was made clear that it was actually a misdiagnosis. So I actually have this UK doctor to thank you. I think I wrote to him a couple years ago just saying, thank you for changing my life and revealing that it was a misdiagnosis. So when I found out that I did not have rheumatoid arthritis, I actually had a little bit of a comeback year. So I was invited to perform with Joshua Bell in South Africa. I played on NPR, which in the U.S. I'd played on a couple times in my childhood.

They were having a 10th anniversary celebration. Wow. And it was a wonderful reunion. with the violin. I actually couldn't play long term because I had developed so much scar tissue in my hand from the initial injury and also from surgery that I had done. So it wasn't a long-term thing. But to be able to play the violin again after all that time away and to have become a different person in those intervening seven or so years, I felt that my emotional affection for the instrument had only grown and that despite having barely practiced for these performances, I delivered what I felt was my most beautiful performance. Yeah. I said earlier on that we're going to talk about rumination and I must come back to it because I know this is something that

so many people struggle with. You have a whole chapter on it called mental smirals. What is rumination? You know, why do we do it? And what are some of your best? strategies to help us deal with it? So I should first say that I basically have a personal PhD in rumination. I'm an expert in getting up at three in the morning and letting myself spiral. And so there's a reason I devoted a whole chapter to it, which is that rumination gets us all. If you haven't experienced rumination, consider yourself one of the lucky ones because I think

most people have in some form or another. But, you know, we are thinking and problem solving machines. So typically when we confront a problem, we want to figure out a solution. And that usually serves us very well. The problem happens when it turns into ruminations. So rumination by definition is when we are trying to solve a problem, but we're actually running in circles, and we're making no progress at all on the problem.

We had the illusion that we're making progress. So we think to ourselves, well, if I just replay that interaction that was so awkward with my coworker one more time, maybe I'll feel better about it. Maybe I'll figure out what went wrong. Maybe I'll be able to go back in the past and change my reaction and make it better. We can kind of engage in magical thinking. But we actually are making no progress at all.

And we're actually just doubling down on our negative emotions. And so I think one of the reasons why we ruminate is because, again, we like certainty. We like clarity. We like definitive answers. And so when we are faced with a lot of uncertainty or anxiety, in an effort, to quell those emotions, we try to outthink the problem space when in actuality there are no definitive answers to be found. So I talk in the book, for example, about a woman named Florence who's navigating the aftermath of an unexpected divorce. She's a science journalist. She thinks that

she can kind of hack her heartbreak and find her way out of it. And so she commits herself to doing a deep dive. She thinks, okay, if I can just figure out what led our marriage to end, then I'll feel better. If I can just figure out why he stopped loving me, then I'll make sure I never get in this situation again. If I can just figure out what I did wrong, then I will avoid a future breakup. These are all illusory guarantees, right? There's no such thing as getting such clarity that you can insulate yourself from any future risks. And so in that particular chapter, I actually have some, you know, several portraits of people who are in these mental spirals for many different reasons. So one of them has a panic attack on air as a journalist and has to contend with a career that is now under threat.

Another person is dealing with an unknown medical diagnosis. Another person is dealing with heartbreak. Another person is dealing with eco-anxiety. And yet they're all having to, to our, an earlier conversation we had, contending with the same anxieties and worries and ruminative spirals. and are trying to find ways to break out of the mental prisons they constructed and to actually emerge to see their situation from new perspectives or with greater clarity. Yeah, it's such a common issue that keeps many people stuck. You do have in your survival kit at the back and in that chat,

all kinds of practical strategies to help, psychological distancing, cognitive reappraisal, mental time travel, or effective labeling, distraction, are there any one of those strategies or a couple of them that you'd like to talk about? Oh, sure, yeah. And I should also share that I encourage readers to be really experimental

with the tools that I've given them. Some tools will work in certain situations and not in others. They'll work for one change, but not another. They'll work for certain people, but not another person. And so it's really important to have an experimental mindset when it comes to engaging with these tools. There's a couple that I use regularly.

The first is mental time travel. So our brains have the remarkable ability to go backwards and forwards in time, and we can actually use this to our advantage when we are stuck in these mental spirals. We can travel into the past to remind ourselves of moments in which we surprised ourselves

with our resilience, our ability to overcome any kind of adversity. We can also travel into the future to remind ourselves that our current problem is in fact transient. So let's say you did have a very uncomfortable or negative interaction with a coworker, right? You find yourself up at 3 a.m. replaying that incident

over and over again. You don't know how to break out of this negative spiral that you're in. You can ask yourself in that moment, how am I going to feel about this situation five hours from now, five days from now, five years from now, 15 years from now? What that does is it breeds psychological distance between you and your current preoccupations. Because as you likely know, Rangan, when you're in it, you're in it. You feel subsumed by these negative emotions.

And your app, like your camera lens is so zoomed in on this problem. It's hard to imagine any other problem in your life because you're solely focused on this. And so you zoom out the lens and you start to see, oh, wait a second. well, probably either maybe I found a resolution with this co-worker in five days from now or even if I haven't. I mean, in five years from now, this person might not even be my coworker anymore. And so it's just a gentle nudge to your brain that you might feel this problem is less significant to you in the future. There's also a technique called affect labeling. We can often feel a flurry of negative emotions in the aftermath of change.

And what research shows is that simply giving a label to one of these emotions. to identifying what you're feeling as envy or grief or frustration or anger or resentment can help you shift your focus away from being the emotion, embodying the emotion, to simply having the emotion. That's another way of breeding this kind of psychological distance. And then I think, and again, there's like a dozen or so of these strategies, but I think one that's been very helpful to me is to try to take a third-party view. on the problem you're facing. So when we are in that first person perspective, we have a very limited, narrow vantage point on the challenge that we're up against.

And we have a certain narrative that we told ourselves about what actually led to the problem. And the goal, when you're in a negative mental spiral, is to actually poke holes in your narrative, to actually see the situation from new angles, from new perspectives. In some sense, you actually did this with your daughter, right? When your daughter was like,

what if I'm not in the same class as my friends? you actually gave her a new perspective with which to look at this challenge. Well, if you're not, guess what? You might have new experiences. You might make new friends who you never would have met otherwise, right? So you were poking a hole in this negative narrative that she had built for herself. If you don't have a friend who can serve in this cognitive role of saying, well, are you sure that that's what they meant when they said that?

Or are you sure when you said this, you meant this and not that? Are you sure that the narrative you're telling about yourself is accurate? I think you're not really giving yourself enough credit. You can actually play the role of that fly on the wall, of that neutral arbiter. By imagining that you are observing the situation from afar. So you can imagine you replay the interaction with you and your coworker, but this time you literally imagine yourself as the fly on the wall, observing it from both angles,

trying to see things from multiple perspectives rather than your own. And then there's one like little tweak and frame. that can sound silly but has been proven enormously effective across a range of circumstances and across a range of negative emotions, which is to simply coach yourself in the third person. So rather than saying in the throes of a heated moment, oh my God, I need to get a grip, which is what I might say to myself. I would instead say, Maya, you need to get a grip. Yeah.

What this does is that it tells your brain, you're actually coaching a friend right now. that breeds that psychological distance. It gives you a bit more objectivity on your problem. And then importantly, it helps cultivate more self-compassion. Because we often reserve the least amount of compassion for ourselves. We have plenty on reserve for others. But we self-burate. You know, we replay the same situation over and over again in horror.

Like, oh, I can't believe I said that. I can't believe I did that. I'll never forgive myself. But you would never talk like that to a friend. And so when you coach yourself in the third person, you empathize more with yourself. You start to see, oh, actually, it's okay that you erred in this way. All humans make mistakes. Yeah.

I love that. A real quick whistle stop tour, practical things we can do to deal with rumination. One thing you make really clear in that chats, which I think is really important, is this idea that loneliness and rumination often mutually reinforce each other, creating a vicious cycle. and I guess the take home is, you know, get around with other people. You know, don't stay isolated in that moment and it will make it worse. Maya, listen, it's been such a joy talking to you. I think we've barely scratched the surface of what's in your book.

The book is called The Other Side of Change, Who We Become, When Life Makes Other Plans. Just to finish off, Maya, your final chapter is very, very personal. You open up about your own struggle with trying to become a mum and starting a family with your partner. Having written this book, having examined change for so long, what does your relationship with starting a family look like today? It's been such a deeply personal and profound experience for me to write this book. I mean, it was truly, it was truly life-changing.

I don't see the world in the same way anymore, having had the deep honor of interviewing people for this book. But more importantly, it's changed my life because I was able to, in real time, integrate their wisdom, their advice, their knowledge into my own experience of navigating unexpected change. and I transformed in ways that I wasn't expecting. And I should say, by the way, coming from a scientific background, I'm as skeptical as the next person, right?

So when I started to observe, wow, there is this silver lining to unexpected change. People are feeling so much gratitude. I was like, really? Is that just what you're telling yourself to make yourself feel better? You know, I like to say I'm allergic to two things. soy and platitudes. And so I wasn't really sure what to make of it. But then I witnessed this extraordinary evolution within myself

that really made me believe the thesis of the book. And there have been many parts to this journey, but I just want to share one anecdote. So I remember on the night of the second miscarriage when we had found out we lost identical twins. And it was such a roller coaster of a day Rangan because just a few hours earlier, we had seen healthy beating hearts on ultrasound. And so to go from the highest high to the lowest of lows was so jarring for my nervous system.

I could barely piece together reality. You know, it was like my brain was constantly having to catch up to the latest information we were getting. And I still remember that night as we were winding down and I was, you know, struggling to think, am I even going to sleep tonight? My husband Jimmy comes into the room and he said, Maii, Maie's his pet name for me. He goes, Ma'i, let's just say a couple things that we're grateful for.

And I remember in this moment being like, dude, no, you take your toxic positivity into the corner. You do the gratitude exercise, okay? I'm staying under the sheets feeling badly about my life and myself. And yet, when I looked up at Jimmy, there was something. just so sweet and earnest about this request, you know? And, and I was reminded that I was always also looking at the person that I was most grateful for in this world. And so I thought to myself, okay, Maya, just do this hard thing, like go through the gratitude exercise. At a minimum, you'll get Jimmy off your back. And so I start with my list. I say, well, first of all, Jimmy,

I'm so grateful for you. And, you know, this experience could have driven us apart. And I'm so grateful that it's brought us closer together. I'm also so grateful that I'm an aunt to my six nieces and nephews. They fill my life with so much joy. I'm grateful for the radiant sunshine in California and the fact that I get to work with the same people at my job that I've worked with for over 10 years. What a joy to work alongside my friends. And this list just poured out of me. I mean, I wasn't expecting to feel overcome by gratitude, but I just kept having item after item after item after item. And I swear something magical happened in that moment

because I felt myself zoom out on my life. And I realized that in my effort to achieve this goal at becoming a parent, I actually developed tunnel vision. I become so single-mindedly focused on this goal that I had lost sight of how otherwise rich and multidimensional my life was, that there were so many parts of my identity that I found so much meaning and value in that were still so very much intact.

And that was a transformative moment for me because it was a reminder that when we go through a big change, it really can make us feel like everything in our life. is gone. Everything has been threatened, but there's often, that's often a fiction. And so did I go to bed that night feeling amazing and happy? Of course not. Still felt horrible. Yeah. But I did go to bed that night feeling more whole. And what Jimmy didn't know, he's a software engineer, is that he was actually engaging me in what's called a self-affirmation exercise. And anyone can do this exercise. It can take you five minutes. You could do it right after listening to this podcast. But all it involves is just writing down all of the parts of your life

and your identity that bring you a sense of meaning and purpose and fulfillment. And importantly, you want to focus on the parts of your life that are not threatened by the change you're going through. So if you're experiencing a rough patch in your relationship, you might focus on your spiritual life or if you're having a rough go of it, go of it at work, you might focus on the fact that you're part of this wonderful pickleball community that you just joined. And that it's really fun to meet everyone on Thursdays and to have a drink right after. And what a self-affirmation exercise can do is not only decreased denial because you realize, oh, my entire identity is not under threat.

And so therefore, you're more willing to absorb reality versus rejected. But it can massively boost your resilience in well-being in the longer term. Okay, so that's one part of the story. And then if you don't mind, I just want to share that I'm in such a different place today that I ever thought I would be. And I think that's the power of change. If you had asked me on that night, will there ever be a silver lining to this? I would have said no. Maya, will you ever feel happy and fulfilled in the absence of children?

I would have said no. I really felt like there was nothing redemptive about this situation, whatsoever. And yet, here I am many years later, still child-free, and I am the happiest, most hopeful, most liberated version of myself that I've ever been. And I really truly mean this. I never saw that coming. I wasn't expecting to have this personal evolution. And it has been one of the greatest gifts of the experience of writing the other side of change. because to feel like I have become a new person on the other side, even though I didn't achieve this lifelong dream,

that there was still so much happiness and richness to be found, I hope that's, I hope there's something meaningful for that in someone who's listening who cannot see the light at the end of the tunnel. It's a beautiful message. It's a hopeful message. As you say, towards the end of your book, Change does not have to limit us. It can actually expand us. Stay curious when life makes other plans. Change can transform us in unexpected ways. We simply don't know how until we get there.

Maya, it's been such a joy talking to you. I think the book is fantastic. It's the other side of change, who we become when life makes other plans. And yeah, I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. I thoroughly enjoyed talking to you. And I hope we get to meet in person at some point in the future. Thank you so much for having me, Rangan. It's really an honor. Really hope you enjoyed that conversation. Do think about one thing that you can take away and apply into your own life. And also have a think about one thing from this conversation that you can teach to somebody else. Remember when you teach someone, it not only helps them. It also helps you learn and retain the information. Now, before you go, just wanted to let you know about Friday 5. It's my free.

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