The promised description link: https://unpackwithmehak.com/

For those of you who prefer to read, below is the article version:

You know what’s so amazing about human beings? Our ability to make plans. We make plans for everything. Maybe not the kind that goes into a planner or a to-do list, but they’re there. We imagine a future all the time. You imagine the career we will have, the city we will live in, the person we will end up with, even the small things.

You book a holiday, and you already imagine what the weather will be like, what you will wear, the photos you will take, how relaxed you will finally feel. Before even a thing has happened, your mind has already lived through it. It happens for the bad moments too.

You go through life thinking, uh, what if I have this conversation, and you already have a plan. I’ll say this, they will say that, and I will say this, then they will say that. And I just want to ask, does it go that way every time? At least for me, it doesn’t. Life usually does what life does. It rains, the flight gets cancelled. The other person says something so off script that I’m like, what are you even saying? And the bigger things: the relationship ends, you don’t get the job. Or even something a little different can happen.

Everything goes according to plan, and you realise that the plan doesn’t make you happy anymore. That’s something that nobody really prepares us for. Because when our plans fall apart, we don’t all respond the same way. Some adapt, some make a plan immediately. They look forward for another way. To get out of it. They still keep believing that things will work out. Other people tend to get stuck. They think, why does this always happen to me?

Maybe I’m just unlucky. Maybe this is how my life is always going to be. Same disappointment, completely different responses. So what is it that separates the 2 people? Why do some people keep going while others slowly stop believing that anything they do will make a difference? That’s the question I want to explore today?

Hi, I am Mehak Chhabra, your host, and this is Things We Never Say, a podcast about the conversations we avoid, the emotional patterns we repeat and the things we all feel, but rarely say out loud. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been reading psychology research trying to understand one thing. Not why some people are successful, but why some people keep going after life doesn’t go according to plan. While others give up on the version of life they once imagined.

I don’t think resilience is luck. I don’t think it’s something you are simply born with. I think it’s a lot more interesting than that. So where does this all actually begin? Stress? I think it begins with stress. Because whenever life does not go according to plan, stress is usually the 1st thing we experience. It could be our career, and you could be 28, and you would be earning a certain amount. And you are planned for something else. You thought that you would be earning much more than that. Or maybe you are close to the number that you had imagined. But everything around you seems to be doing even better, and suddenly your life starts to feel behind.

Maybe it could be the relationship where you thought that you would marry this person and live forever with and it ends. Or you get the job, you get the promotion, you get the relationship that you wanted to have, you reach the goal that you’ve been working towards, and then you realise, I thought getting here would make me happier than this. I think a lot of us have experienced some version of that. Either the plan changes. Or the plan works, and we change. In either of the scenarios, the 1st thing that a body does is it responds with stress.

Now I was listening to a psychologist, uh, who is Kelly McGonigal a few days ago. And she said something about stress that completely changed my view. She said that maybe stress itself is not the biggest problem. Maybe it is what we believe that the stress means. Simple right? We have grown up hearing that stress is terrible for us, that it damages our physical health, that we should avoid it whenever possible. But then researchers came and did something really interesting.

They asked a lot of people 2 questions. 1st one was simple. How much stress have you experienced over the last year? The 2nd question was a little more interesting. Do you believe that stress is harmful to your health? You’re probably nodding your head to this one. And uh, a lot of people did say that they did believe that. And they followed these people for years. And what they found really surprised me. The people who had experienced a lot of stress and believed that it was harming their health had a significantly higher risk of dying during this study period.

But the people who experienced just as much stress and didn’t believe stress itself was damaging them did not show the same increase in risk. I actually had to replay this part because I did not really believe that this was how it worked. I mean, stress affects us physically; it should affect all of us, right? Whatever our beliefs might be. So, um, the stress is not harmless.

But this research does suggest that the story we tell ourselves about stress changes the way our body responds to it. Researchers, we may even have tested this in the lab. Before putting people through really stressful situations like public speaking, in front of judges and with lights on their faces and the camera up close and the judges with like extremely disapproving looks and some difficult math, and after this public speaking debacle, they would send them to do a math test, and even then the examiner would completely discourage them throughout all of this.

And, I mean, if you are anything like me, you are going to feel stressed, right? But before putting these people through these situations, they told one group something very simple. When your heart starts racing, when your palms get sweaty, when your breathing changes and you feel like you are stressed, your body is not failing you. It is preparing you. It’s giving you the energy you need to deal with what’s about to happen. And the other group did not get to hear anything.

So both groups felt stressed. Their hearts did beat fast. There was one remarkable difference. The people who saw stress as their body helping them did not show the same constriction in their blood vessels that’s typically associated with the harmful stress response. The stress was still there, but the relationship had changed, which, I think, is miraculous- like, it’s so wild how the human body works.

The way we explain things to ourselves can change how they impact our lives. That is insane. And it directly leads us to Martin selling men. Now I wanted to think about something for a 2nd. When something goes wrong in life. What’s the 1st sentence your mind creates? The very 1st one, not the one that you have after you’ve calmed down, but when something does not go according to plan, and you are just getting to know about it.

Because Martin Seligman, one of the founders of positive psychology, spent years, I’m studying something called explanatory style, which is really just a fancy way of asking one question. How do you explain the events in your life to yourself? Because this explanation matters much more than we think. Imagine you have been looking forward to a holiday for months. Imagine the beach, the sunshine, the food. The same holiday from the introduction.

You have pictured yourself relaxing, the outfits and everything. And then you get there, and it rains for 4 days straight. One person looks outside and says: This always happens to me; I cannot even catch a break all day. And there is one more person that looks outside and says, well, you know, that’s disappointing. Let’s see what we can do instead.

Same weather, completely different explanation. Seligman found that people who tend to recover more quickly from setbacks don’t necessarily have easier lives. They just explain those setbacks differently. When something bad happens, they don’t assume it’s permanent. They don’t immediately jump to this is my life now, or this has always been my life. They see it as temporary. As one event. Not an entire story.

And it doesn’t stop there. The same thing happens when good things happen. Imagine the same holiday: you are on it, and the forecast probably said that it’s going to be rainy, and you go there and you reach and you see that the weather is sunny and it’s amazing and it’s beautiful and you are so excited about it. And you end up thinking, I am so lucky. I’ve always, always been so lucky in my life that I get to experience such great things. Or there is someone else who can explain the experience by saying this is just the weather.

This is the, this is climate change, and this was just a lucky break that I caught. So when you, uh, explain the same event again, there are different explanations for the same event. And over years, these explanations can become something much more than sentences. They become expectations. They shape whether you keep trying or stop believing your efforts matter. This was something I kept thinking about when I was deciding whether to leave my job. Every day there was a new what if: what if this does not work? What if this is not good? What if I spent 2 years building this and then I realised I don’t even enjoy it anymore.

The questions never really went away, but there was one answer that stayed the same. I will figure it out. And that sentence did not come from confidence. It came from evidence because when I started writing, I did not have a business; uh, I never imagined that I would have a podcast. I just wanted to write for 5 months; almost nothing happened. For the 6th month, when the 6th month started, I got around 5000 subscribers in one month alone.

And then in the next month, I was at 25,000 subscribers. At the end of month 5, if you had looked at the numbers, which were approximately around 200, you would have told me to stop. There were days when I asked myself to stop. I was genuinely exhausted during the time, and every evening I would come home and write anyway. There wasn’t a single piece of evidence that suggested this was going to become my career- none.

But there was one thing that kept changing. Me. Every week I became a slightly better writer. Every week, I understood my readers a little more. Every week I learned something new about storytelling, headlines, psychology, marketing, or simply how to show up consistently. And I still am, every day, learning something new. From the outside, it looked like nothing was happening; from the inside, however, everything was.

And there might be some people who looked at my 6th month or 7th month and thought, wow, that happened so quickly, but it did not. It took 6 months. The 6th month only existed because of the 5 that came before it. Those 5 months were not empty. They were just invisible. We forget that sometimes. We judge our progress by visible results.

Life often rewards invisible efforts first. If I had stopped at month 5 because there wasn’t enough evidence that it was going to work, there never would have been a month 6. I would have gone back to the life I had planned when I was 15, a perfectly reasonable life, a stable life. But not a life that felt like mine. That’s something that the fear of failure really steals from us. It doesn’t just stop us from succeeding. It stops us before we have stayed long enough to find out what’s possible. Talking about fear, I came across another idea that

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. I was reading The Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter, and he talks about research on the evolutionary origins of fear. When you think about the lives our ancestors lived, fear made a lot of sense; there were predators, venomous snakes, hostile drives, etc.

So over thousands of years, our brains became very good at noticing anything that looked like danger.

That’s why, even today, we’re naturally alert to things like heights, strangers, sudden movements, or something rustling in the bushes.

Our brains evolved to keep us alive.

The interesting part is that while our world has changed dramatically, our brains haven’t changed nearly as quickly.

Today, most of us aren’t running away from predators.

We’re running away from embarrassment.

From rejection.

From criticism.

From failing publicly.

From someone thinking we weren’t good enough.

And our bodies often react as though those two things carry the same weight.

I know that because I feel it too.

Even recording this podcast, there’s a part of me wondering,

“What if people don’t like it?”

“What if I get something wrong?”

“What if this isn’t good enough?”

Those thoughts still show up.

The difference is that I’ve slowly realised something.

Just because my brain labels something as dangerous doesn’t mean it actually is.

Michael Easter writes about someone called Elliot who said something I loved.

He said that most of us are living inside a much smaller circle than our actual potential.

Imagine your potential is this huge circle.

Most of us spend our lives somewhere near the middle of it.

Not because that’s all we’re capable of.

But because we rarely go close to the edge.

We don’t apply for the job.

We don’t start the business.

We don’t speak up.

We don’t ask someone out.

We don’t publish the thing we’ve been working on.

Not because we know we’ll fail.

But because we’re trying so hard to avoid finding out.

And if we never get close to the edge of what we’re capable of…

we never actually discover who we could have become.

I think that’s one of the saddest possibilities.

Not failing.

Never giving yourself the chance to find out what you were capable of in the first place.

So if resilience can actually be built, the obvious question is…

How?

One of the most interesting ideas I came across was something called a Misogi, which Michael Easter writes about in The Comfort Crisis.

The idea is surprisingly simple.

Once every year, do one thing that feels almost impossibly difficult.

There are only two rules.

The first is that it has to be really hard.

The second is that you can’t die.

That’s it.

Now, how do you know if something is hard enough?

Easter gives an example.

Let’s say your Misogi is running twenty-five miles.

If you’re already training by running twenty miles at a time and logging thirty or forty miles every week, that’s probably not your Misogi anymore. You’re almost certain to finish.

But if the furthest you’ve ever run is ten miles, you think maybe you could push yourself to fifteen, and you’re honestly not sure if twenty is even possible…

then twenty-five miles probably is.

The goal isn’t certainty.

The goal is choosing something where, even if you do everything right, you only have about a fifty percent chance of succeeding.

When I first read that, I thought,

“Why would anyone intentionally put themselves in a situation where they might fail?”

But then I realised that’s exactly the point.

The point isn’t to finish the twenty-five miles.

The point is to become the kind of person who’s willing to find out what they’re capable of.

Because even if you don’t finish…

maybe you run twenty.

That’s still twice as far as you’ve ever gone before.

Your brain now has evidence that your limits weren’t where you thought they were.

And I think that’s something we forget.

Resilience isn’t built by succeeding over and over again.

It’s built by repeatedly discovering that you can survive things you once believed were beyond you.

Michael Easter shares another analogy that I really liked.

Imagine someone who has spent years swimming.

Then one day they decide to go for a run.

Even though they’ve never trained specifically for running, they’re often capable of running much farther than someone who has never exercised at all.

Why?

Because swimming built their cardiovascular capacity.

The strength transfers.

Resilience works in a similar way.

When you deliberately choose difficult things, you’re not just getting better at that one thing.

You’re teaching your brain something much bigger.

You’re teaching it,

“I’ve done difficult things before.”

“I’ve been uncomfortable before.”

“I’ve thought I couldn’t do something… and then I surprised myself.”

So when life inevitably throws something difficult at you—a career change, a breakup, losing someone you love, starting over—your brain isn’t facing difficulty for the very first time.

It already has evidence.

Evidence that you’ve survived uncertainty before.

Evidence that you can adapt.

Evidence that discomfort isn’t the end of the story.

And what’s fascinating is that the research seems to support this.

One study followed around twenty-five hundred people from across the United States and found something that sounds almost counterintuitive.

The people who had experienced some adversity in life actually reported better psychological well-being than people who had been completely sheltered from hardship.

They were more satisfied with their lives.

They had fewer psychological and physical symptoms.

They used fewer healthcare services.

They were less likely to describe themselves as disabled.

Notice the word some.

Not overwhelming trauma.

Not constant suffering.

The researchers weren’t saying that endless hardship is good for us.

They were saying that never being challenged isn’t good for us either.

There’s a middle ground.

A place where we experience enough discomfort to discover that we’re stronger than we thought.

And maybe that’s what resilience really is.

Not avoiding difficult experiences.

But collecting enough evidence that difficult experiences don’t have the final say.

Looking back, I think I eventually found my own Misogi.

It wasn’t resigning from architecture.

That was one decision.

The real challenge was everything that came before

It was waking up every day and continuing to build something that gave me almost no evidence it was going to work.

For months, nothing happened.

And every single day I had to answer the same question.

“Am I going to keep going?”

Looking back now, I realise something.

Resilience isn’t built on the day everything works out.

It’s built on the ordinary days when nothing seems to be working…

and you decide to continue anyway.

I think that’s what all of this research has been trying to say.

Resilience isn’t about never failing.

It’s not about pretending setbacks don’t hurt.

It’s not about positive thinking.

It’s about refusing to let one moment become your identity.

There’s a huge difference between saying,

“I failed.”

and

“I’m a failure.”

One describes an event.

The other describes a person.

One can change.

The other traps you.

And that’s what Martin Seligman spent years studying.

The people who kept going weren’t the people with easier lives.

They weren’t the people who never experienced disappointment.

They were the people who refused to explain one difficult chapter as the entire story of who they were.

So if you’re listening to this today and it feels like your life hasn’t gone according to plan…

I’d like you to do something.

Look back over your life.

Not to look for proof that everything has always worked out.

Because it hasn’t.

Look for proof that you’ve handled things you once believed you couldn’t.

Think about the exam you thought you’d never pass.

The heartbreak you thought you’d never recover from.

The city you thought you’d never adjust to.

The conversation you thought you’d never have.

The version of yourself you thought you’d never become.

You’ve already survived more uncertainty than your mind gives you credit for.

And maybe that’s the evidence you need.

Not evidence that life will always work out.

None of us can promise that.

But evidence that whatever happens next…

you’ll probably find a way through it, just like you have before.

Before we end this episode, I would like you to try something with me.

So after reading all of this research, I don’t think resilient people are fearless. I don’t think they’re luckier. And I don’t think they have easier lives. I think they do four things differently. They explain setbacks differently. They don’t see stress as proof that something is wrong. They deliberately do difficult things. And over time, they collect evidence that they can survive uncertainty.

So here’s something I’d love for you to try.

Think about the last thing that you would call a failure.

For just a few minutes, don’t think about it emotionally.

Think about it analytically.

Almost like you’re a researcher looking at someone else’s life.

Ask yourself,

What actually happened?

Just the facts.

No opinions.

No labels.

What was I trying to do?

What part of it worked?

What part of it didn’t?

If you had to put a percentage on it, how much of it was actually successful and how much of it didn’t go the way you wanted?

Now comes the important part.

Imagine this wasn’t your story.

Imagine it happened to someone you care about.

How would you explain what happened?

Would it be the same way that you explain it to yourself?

And then I’d ask you one final question.

What’s one thing you would do differently the next time?

So see what you can learn from it and try to understand that failure isn’t what your life is, it is a part of your life.

If you’ve been listening to this episode and realised that you’re carrying a story about yourself that’s become heavier than the event that created it, that’s exactly the kind of work I do in Unpack with Mehak.Sometimes what keeps us stuck isn’t the event itself.

It’s the explanation we’ve quietly repeated ever since.

That’s the work we do together

If that feels like the kind of conversation you need right now, you’ll find all the details through the link in the description.

Thank you so much for spending this time with me.

And remember…

Maybe resilience isn’t believing that life will go according to plan.

Maybe it’s trusting yourself enough that when it doesn’t…

you’ll build another one.

I’ll see you in the next episode of Things We Never Say.

The promised description link: https://unpackwithmehak.com/

For those of you who prefer to read, below is the article version:

If you’ve ever thought to yourself, “I know exactly what I need to do. I know how I want to react. I know where these patterns are coming from. So why do I keep repeating them?”

You tell yourself that this time you’ll respond differently. This time you’ll speak up in the meeting. This time you won’t pull away from someone who genuinely cares about you. This time you won’t overthink that text message. This time you’ll stop people-pleasing.

And then the moment arrives. You freeze. Or you stay silent. Or you react exactly the way you’ve reacted a hundred times before. Afterwards you’re sitting there thinking, “I understood this. I worked on this. I know why I do this. So why am I still here?”

If you’ve ever had those thoughts, keep reading.

Today I want to talk about one of the biggest misconceptions I think we have about personal growth. We assume that understanding ourselves should automatically change us. That once we know why we behave the way we do, the behaviour should disappear. But that’s not what happens. You can understand yourself completely and still find yourself repeating the exact same patterns.

So today I want to talk about why that happens, what self-awareness actually is, why insight alone isn’t enough, and what real change actually looks like.

Before we understand why awareness isn’t enough, I think we first have to ask another question.

Are we even as self-aware as we think we are?

Most of us would probably say yes. I definitely would’ve. If someone had asked me a few years ago whether I knew myself well, I would’ve said absolutely. I know my patterns. I know my strengths. I know my flaws. I know why I react the way I do.

Then I came across a piece of research that completely changed how I thought about self-awareness. Around 90% of people believe they’re self-aware. Do you know how many researchers estimate actually are? Around 10 to 15%.

When I first read that, I genuinely thought, How is that even possible? How can almost everyone think they’re self-aware if so few people actually are? The answer surprised me. Because we’ve confused thinking about ourselves with knowing ourselves.

Tasha Eurich talks about this beautifully in one of her TED Talks. She explains that introspection and self-awareness aren’t the same thing.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Reflection is valuable. Thinking about your experiences matters. Journaling can help. Therapy can help. Trying to understand yourself is important. But reflection isn’t automatically accurate. Sometimes it simply becomes rumination.

And one of the biggest reasons for that is the kind of questions we ask ourselves. Think about how often we ask why.

* Why do I keep falling for emotionally unavailable people?

* Why didn’t I get promoted?

* Why can’t I speak in public?

* Why did I react like that?

* Why can’t I just change?

It feels productive. It feels like we’re uncovering some deep truth about ourselves. But a lot of the time, we’re not uncovering anything. We’re inventing explanations.

Now you might be thinking, “No. The answers I give myself are true.”

I used to think that too. But let me tell you about one of my favourite psychology experiments.

Researchers showed participants two photographs and asked them to choose the person they found more attractive. They made their choice. A little while later, the researchers came back and handed them the photograph they supposedly chose. Except it wasn’t the photograph they had chosen. It was the other one.

Then they asked them, “Tell us why you chose this person.”

Only around 20 to 26 percent of participants noticed that they had been given the wrong photograph. Everyone else confidently explained why they had chosen it.

Someone who originally preferred one photograph because the woman wasn’t wearing earrings would suddenly say, “I actually liked this one because she’s wearing earrings.”

They weren’t lying. Their brains were simply trying to make sense of what they believed had happened.

Our brains don’t like gaps in the story. When we don’t know why we did something, they often create an explanation that feels true. Not because we’re dishonest, but because our brains want coherence. They’d rather have a convincing story than no story at all.

I’ll give you another example.

A friend of mine went dancing one night. The next morning she woke up with pain all over her body. She remembered the night perfectly. Or at least she thought she did. She assumed she was sore because she’d spent hours dancing.

A day later she spoke to the people she’d gone out with. They told her, “You fell twice.” She had completely forgotten.

Her brain had filled in a perfectly reasonable explanation.

That’s what our minds do. They hate uncertainty. They’d often rather create a convincing story than admit, “I don’t actually know.”

So if constantly asking why can sometimes lead us further away from ourselves, what should we ask instead? Ask what.

* Instead of asking, “Why do I get anxious?” ask, “What about this situation makes me anxious?”

* Instead of asking, “Why can’t I speak up?” ask, “What happens inside me just before I stop myself?”

* Instead of asking, “Why do I keep choosing emotionally unavailable people?” ask, “What makes someone feel emotionally safe or unsafe to me?”

Those questions keep us grounded in what we’re actually experiencing instead of the stories we’re creating about ourselves. And once we start asking better questions, we become genuinely more self-aware. But here’s the interesting part.

Let’s imagine you’ve done all of that. You’ve reflected. You’ve understood your patterns. You’ve probably spent years trying to figure yourself out. And even then, there are moments where you’re standing in the exact situation you prepared yourself for, and you still do the thing you promised yourself you wouldn’t.

You tell yourself you’ll speak up in the meeting. You rehearse the sentence in your head.

“Just say it. Just say it. Just say it.”

The discussion moves on. Someone else says exactly what you wanted to say. Everyone nods. And you’re left wondering, “I knew what I wanted to say. So why couldn’t I just say it?”

Or maybe it’s a relationship. You know you have a tendency to pull away when someone gets too close. You’ve understood where it comes from. You’ve journaled about it. Maybe you’ve talked about it in therapy. You’ve promised yourself you’ll stay this time.

Then someone starts getting emotionally close, and before you even realize what’s happening, you’ve already started distancing yourself. It’s one of the strangest experiences.

Your mind understood everything. Your body just didn’t get the memo.

So why does that happen?

To answer that, I want to go back to something that happens long before any of us can remember. Long before we could explain our feelings. Long before we could think rationally. Because the emotional part of our brain starts learning about the world much earlier than the thinking part.

As babies, we don’t understand the world through language. We understand it through experience. Through someone’s tone of voice. Through facial expressions. Through touch. Through rhythm. Through whether someone comes when we cry. Through whether our emotional needs are met consistently.

Our nervous system is constantly asking one question: “Am I safe?”

Every one of those experiences becomes information. Not information that we consciously remember, but information that our nervous system remembers.

By the time we’re old enough to explain our emotions, our nervous system has already spent years learning what safety feels like. It’s already learning things like: Is the world predictable? Can I trust other people? Is it okay to ask for help? Is it safe to express my emotions? Or do I need to hide them? And that’s where attachment comes in.

When psychologists talk about secure attachment, they’re not talking about parents being perfect. They’re talking about a child repeatedly having the experience that their emotions are met. That when they’re distressed, someone helps regulate them. That when they’re overwhelmed, someone stays with them.

Over time, something remarkable happens. That regulation slowly becomes internal. The child doesn’t need someone else to calm them every single time anymore. Their nervous system learns how to do it itself. They develop the ability to tolerate difficult emotions, recover after stressful situations, and feel safe even when life isn’t perfect.

But what happens when that process is interrupted?

Maybe there was inconsistency. Maybe there was emotional unavailability. Maybe there was neglect. Maybe there was trauma. Maybe the people around the child were dealing with things they couldn’t cope with themselves.

Children don’t get to choose the environment they grow up in. The only thing they can do is adapt to it.

* If home feels unpredictable, becoming hypervigilant makes sense.

* If expressing emotions leads to rejection, learning to hide them makes sense.

* If love feels inconsistent, staying emotionally distant might become the safest option.

These aren’t flaws. They’re adaptations. In fact, they were probably incredibly intelligent adaptations at the time because they helped you survive.

I also want to be careful here because this doesn’t mean your childhood permanently determines your future. It means your earliest experiences become your first draft of how relationships, safety, and emotions work. And first drafts can be edited.

The problem is that our nervous system doesn’t automatically realize when the environment has changed. So years later, you might be in a healthy relationship. You might be surrounded by safe people. You might consciously know that opening up is okay. But your nervous system learned something different a long time ago.

And that’s why anxiety, emotional numbness, chronic self-criticism, fear of closeness, or feeling constantly on edge often aren’t signs that you’re weak or irrational. They’re signs that your nervous system is still using strategies that once helped you survive.

That’s why simply understanding the pattern doesn’t always make it disappear. Because the pattern wasn’t originally learned through logic. It was learned through repeated emotional experience.

And what is learned through repeated experience is rarely undone by a single insight. That’s the gap so many of us find ourselves living in.

We understand our patterns. We understand where they came from. And yet, when life happens, we still repeat them. So what actually happens inside the brain in those moments? Why does it feel like your body takes over before your mind has a chance to respond?

The answer has to do with the fact that your brain doesn’t have just one job.

Part of your brain helps you think. It helps you reflect, plan, solve problems, imagine the future, and decide the kind of person you want to become. This is where insight lives. This is where self-awareness lives. This is the part of you that’s listening to this podcast thinking,

“That makes sense.”

But there’s another part of your brain. A much older part. A part that isn’t trying to understand your life. It’s trying to keep you alive. It learns through repetition. Through experience. Through emotion. And unlike your thinking brain, it doesn’t stop to ask,

“What’s the healthiest thing to do here?” Instead it asks,

“Have I been in a situation like this before?”

“What helped me survive last time?”

And then it repeats that response. Because your brain loves predictability. One of the brain’s primary jobs is to make predictions about what’s going to happen next. It uses your past experiences to prepare you for the future. If you’ve had the same experience enough times, your brain starts expecting it. Those expectations become predictions, and those predictions shape how your body responds before you’ve even had time to think. Predictability takes less energy. It’s fast. It’s familiar.

Imagine you’ve spent years believing that speaking up would lead to embarrassment. Maybe nobody actually told you that. Maybe you just slowly learned it.

Now you’re sitting in a meeting. You know the answer. You know your idea is valuable. You even tell yourself,

“Just say it.”

“Come on… just say it.”

But while your thinking brain is trying to convince you, your nervous system has already made its decision. It says,

“We’ve been here before.”

“Speaking up doesn’t feel safe.”

“Let’s stay quiet.”

And by the time the meeting ends, someone else has already said exactly what you wanted to say. You walk away frustrated. Not because you didn’t know what to do. But because your body responded before your thoughts had a chance to catch up. The same thing happens in relationships. Maybe someone starts getting emotionally close. Your conscious mind says,

“This is different.”

“This person is safe.”

But your nervous system remembers something much older. It remembers that vulnerability once led to pain. So it reaches for the strategy it has practiced the most. It pulls away.

Not because it wants to sabotage your relationship. Because it thinks it’s protecting you. And I think that’s one of the hardest things to accept. It can feel like your body is betraying you. But it isn’t.

Your nervous system isn’t trying to ruin your life. It’s trying to protect you using a strategy it learned years ago. The problem is that what once protected you may now be keeping you stuck. This is also why understanding ourselves can sometimes become so frustrating. We assume that because we’ve had the insight, the behaviour should disappear. But insight and behaviour don’t live in the same place.

Insight can happen in a single conversation. A single therapy session. A single book. A single podcast. Capacity develops much more slowly. It develops through repeated experience. Through practice.Through showing your nervous system, over and over again, that something different is also safe.

And there’s something else that’s really important to understand. Your nervous system prioritizes short-term regulation over long-term psychological goals.

Think about what happens when you avoid a difficult conversation. Does it solve the problem? Probably not. But it does reduce your anxiety, at least for tonight. Think about reassurance seeking. Every time you ask someone, “Are you sure everything’s okay?” you feel better for a little while. Or perfectionism. You spend hours trying to make something perfect because uncertainty feels unbearable.

In every one of those situations, your nervous system isn’t choosing what will make your life better next year. It’s choosing what helps you feel safer in the next ten minutes. And those are two very different goals. That’s why avoiding vulnerability feels easier than risking rejection. That’s why staying silent feels easier than speaking up. That’s why people-pleasing feels easier than disappointing someone.

Your nervous system chooses immediate relief. Not because it’s weak. Not because you’re lazy.

Not because you don’t want to change. Because immediate relief has worked before. Now, for some people, this gap between knowing and doing can feel even bigger. If you’re living with chronic stress, if you’ve experienced trauma, if you have ADHD, or if you’re struggling with anxiety or depression, putting insight into action can become even harder.

Wanting to change and having the mental capacity to change aren’t always the same thing. That doesn’t mean change is impossible. It means we have to stop measuring ourselves by insight alone. Because insight was never meant to do the whole job.

So now you know something that I think a lot of us were never taught.

You know that understanding yourself and changing yourself aren’t the same skill. You know that your nervous system is trying to protect you. You know that these patterns didn’t appear overnight, and they’re probably not going to disappear overnight either.

So the obvious question becomes: What do I actually do?

The first thing I want you to understand is that your nervous system learned these patterns through repetition. Which means it also unlearns them through repetition. Not through one moment of insight. Not through reading one book. Not through listening to one podcast.

Through repeated experiences that slowly teach your brain,

“Maybe this situation isn’t as dangerous as I thought it was.”

Let’s go back to the example of speaking in a group. You’re sitting there. Your heart is racing. You’re rehearsing the sentence over and over in your head.

“Just speak.”

“Just speak.”

“Just speak.”

What usually happens is that we wait until the fear disappears before we say something. But that’s almost never how it works. The fear doesn’t disappear first. The action comes first.

So maybe instead of waiting until you’re completely comfortable, you say one sentence. Just one. You don’t try to sound brilliant. You don’t try to impress anyone. You don’t replay it in your head afterwards. You simply contribute once. That’s it. The goal isn’t to become confident overnight. The goal is to give your nervous system one new experience.

One experience where you spoke, and nothing terrible happened. Then you do it again.And again. One new experience usually doesn’t change a belief. If you’ve spent ten years learning that speaking up isn’t safe, your nervous system probably isn’t going to erase that after one successful meeting. It’s looking for consistency. It changes its expectations the same way it formed them in the first place: through repetition. Eventually your brain starts updating its prediction. It slowly realizes,

“Maybe speaking isn’t as dangerous as I believed.”

That’s one of the brain’s primary jobs. It’s constantly trying to predict what’s about to happen next. Every repeated experience shapes those predictions. When your experiences change consistently enough, your predictions begin to change too.

That’s how change happens. Not because your mind finally found the perfect explanation. But because your body had enough experiences to believe something new.

Another thing that helps is practicing self-awareness in real time.

Not afterwards. Not three hours later while replaying the conversation. In the moment. The next time you notice yourself freezing, pause. Instead of asking,

“Why am I like this?” Ask,

“What about this moment feels unsafe?”

That one question changes everything. Because it shifts your attention away from judging yourself and toward understanding what your nervous system is trying to protect you from. Then remind yourself of something important. This isn’t who I am. This is what my nervous system has practiced. There’s a difference. One is your identity. The other is a learned response. And learned responses can change.

Another thing that can really help is deciding what you’re going to do before you’re in the situation. Your brain likes familiar responses, so don’t wait until you’re anxious to figure out how you’ll respond. Decide beforehand. Maybe you know you’re going into a meeting. You can tell yourself,

“If someone asks for my opinion, I’m going to share one thought.”

Maybe you’re going into a difficult conversation. You can decide,

“If I feel the urge to shut down, I’m going to stay for five more minutes before walking away.”

You’re giving your brain another path to take. A response it can become familiar with. Because eventually, that new response starts becoming the familiar one. And that’s really what we’re trying to do. We’re not trying to eliminate fear. We’re trying to teach our nervous system that fear doesn’t always mean danger. I think that’s one of the biggest misunderstandings we have. We assume that if something feels uncomfortable, it must be wrong.

But discomfort and danger aren’t the same thing.

* Speaking honestly is uncomfortable.

* Setting boundaries is uncomfortable.

* Being vulnerable is uncomfortable.

* Asking for help is uncomfortable.

* Trying something new is uncomfortable.

That discomfort doesn’t necessarily mean you’re making the wrong choice. Sometimes it simply means you’re doing something your nervous system hasn’t practiced yet. And every single time you choose the new response, you’re teaching your brain something. You’re saying,

“This situation didn’t destroy me.”

“I can survive this too.”

That’s how your nervous system changes. Not through one big breakthrough. But through hundreds of ordinary moments where you respond a little differently than you did before. So if you’ve been asking yourself,

“I understand myself enough. Why am I still here?”

Maybe the answer isn’t that you haven’t understood enough. Maybe your understanding arrived much faster than your nervous system could change. Insight can happen in a single afternoon. Capacity is built in hundreds of moments afterwards. Insight tells you where the pattern came from.

Practice teaches your nervous system that it doesn’t need the pattern anymore. That’s why awareness matters. It really does. It’s where change begins. It was just never meant to do the whole job. And if you’ve listened to this episode and found yourself thinking,

“This is exactly what’s happening to me,”

I want you to know that understanding the pattern is often just the beginning. Changing it is a different kind of work. It’s difficult to do alone because we’re often too close to our own patterns to see them clearly. We can understand them intellectually and still struggle to respond differently when we’re actually in the moment.

That’s why I created Unpack with Mehak.

These aren’t sessions where I tell you what to do or give you a list of techniques. They’re conversations where we slow things down together, understand the patterns you’re living with, identify what your nervous system has learned to protect you from, and work toward building new ways of responding that actually feel possible. You probably don’t need another explanation. You need somewhere to practise responding differently while someone helps you notice the patterns you can’t see on your own. That’s the work we do together.

If that sounds like something you’re looking for, you can find all the details through the link in the description. I’d genuinely love to work with you.

Thank you so much for reading another episode of Things We Never Say.

If this episode resonated with you, I’d really appreciate it if you shared it with someone who keeps wondering why they know exactly what to do but still find themselves repeating the same patterns. Maybe you were never stuck because you didn’t understand yourself enough. Maybe you were waiting for understanding to do a job that only experience could do.

Thank you for spending this time with me.

I’ll see you in the next episode.

If you’ve been struggling with career decisions, relationships, life transitions, or constantly asking “What if I make the wrong choice?”, this episode offers a different way to think about uncertainty. You’ll also learn a simple three-step framework to move from anxiety to action without waiting for certainty.

Topics covered: indecision, overthinking, decision making, perfectionism, fear of failure, psychology, self-doubt, life choices, uncertainty, confidence, personal growth, mental health, emotional clarity.

Thank you for tuning in!