Change is one of life’s inevitabilities, but our brains aren’t wired to like the uncertainty that comes with it.
Here & Now‘s Indira Lakshmanan speaks with cognitive scientist and podcaster Maya Shankar, author of “The Other Side of Change: Who We Become When Life Makes Other Plans,” about how we process uncertainty and the way change transforms us.
Book excerpt: ‘The Other Side of Change’
By Maya Shankar
There are moments in each of our lives that seem to change everything. A relationship ends without warning. A close friend gets into a serious accident. Routine medical tests reveal something concerning. Secrets about a loved one come to light. A job is lost. As our lives veer off course, it can feel like time is dividing into a “before” and an “after.”
I had one of these experiences recently. My husband and I were on the cusp of becoming parents after years of navigating various obstacles and disappointments. We were brimming with relief and excitement—emotions that I imagine many parents-to-be feel. As we received one piece of good news after another, we allowed ourselves to conjure up cozy images of life with our future child: snuggling in bed and readingCalvin and Hobbes together or breaking out into a silly dance in our kitchen. We were finally starting a family!
Until, suddenly, we weren’t.
I still remember how I felt when I heard the news. Anxiety pooled in the pit of my stomach. Ordinary sounds—like the closing of a door or a stranger’s voice—were jarring, as if the volume of the outside world had been dialed up. My colleagues at work, unaware of what was going on, were emailing me about assignments that were due. I struggled to comprehend how everything was just moving forward as usual. I knew my situation was not unique, but somehow that awareness couldn’t penetrate the visceral, chilling feeling that I was alone.
As the weeks and months passed, what disoriented me the most was the loss of control I felt. In everyday life, it’s easy to overestimate the degree to which we influence how things turnout—psychologists call this the illusion of control. When a bad thing happens unexpectedly, it can shatter that illusion. As my detailed plans unraveled one by one, I became agitated by all the uncertainty that now lay ahead. There’s a research study showing that people are more stressed when they think they have a 50 percent chance of receiving an electric shock than when they think they have a 100-percent chance. This finding resonates deeply with me: I like knowing how the story ends. Whenever I’ve faced a setback or a failure, my instinct has been to jump into action and to try to reduce any uncertainty by outworking the challenge. But what would it even mean to work harder in the context of trying to become a parent?
I’d often heard that while we can’t control what happens to us, we can control our reaction to what happens. It’s meant to be an empowering mantra, but as I grappled with my negative emotions, it registered as a platitude. Sure, it’d be great to somehow react in a more constructive manner, but how was I supposed to go about doing that? It’s not like I could flip a switch in my brain that would make me feel more at peace, or more hopeful, or more certain about what to do next. I wanted to figure out how, exactly, to think and feel differently about my situation.
As I sat there, isolated in my sorrow and confusion, I sought to connect with others who’d navigated big life disruptions. What began as a series of informal conversations eventually grew into a podcast called “A Slight Change of Plans,” which I started in 2021. Each episode was an opportunity to have a one-on-one conversation with someone who’d gone through a life-altering change: a young, self-proclaimed “health nut” who was diagnosed with aggressive bone cancer, a woman who found out that her late husband had had an affair, a friend of mine who’d lost her little sister in a car accident.
I didn’t know what their stories might reveal, but I hoped that my academic expertise might lend me a unique perspective. In my work as a cognitive scientist, I’ve spent the past two decades exploring the human mind through disciplines like psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy. I’ve studied how we develop our beliefs, make decisions, and respond to uncertainty, risk, and failure. And so, in these interviews, I focused on understanding people’s interior lives—what was shifting within them as they went through their changes. What were they experiencing on a psychological level that might not be visible to us from the outside?
Excerpted from “The Other Side of Change” by Maya Shankar. Copyright © 2026 by Maya Shankar. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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