Are You Trying To Change, or Seeking Relief?

The year is 1210, in the rugged, rain-swept mountains of North Wales.

The medieval prince, Llywelyn the Great, has just returned to his castle from a long day of hunting. He steps through the heavy wooden doors, expecting to hear the soft breathing of his infant son asleep in the nursery.

Instead, he walks directly into a nightmare.

The nursery is in ruins. The cradle has been flipped upside down. The blankets are torn and soaked in blood. And standing in the middle of the wreckage is his favorite wolfhound, Gelert, the fiercely loyal dog given to him by the King of England. Gelert's jaws are dripping with blood.

In a split second, a wave of pure, agonizing pain hits the prince. His mind screams one thing: make this feeling stop. Give me relief.

He draws his sword.

And in that exact moment, from beneath the overturned cradle, comes a tiny cry. A baby's cry, but Llywelyn does not hear it. He is too deep inside the pain.

He swings, plunging the blade through the side of his loyal friend. The dog collapses to the cold stone floor.

Only now, after the rage, does the cry reach him, and this time, he hears it. His hands tremble as he lifts the blood-stained blankets.

There is his baby boy, completely unharmed, looking up at him. And next to the child lies the mangled body of a massive, dead wolf.

The blood on Gelert's face wasn't the prince's son. It was the wolf's. The dog hadn't murdered the child.

He had fought a brutal battle to the death to protect him. And Llywelyn, deaf to the very thing that could have stopped him, had just slaughtered his protector for it.

Negative Reinforcement

Perfected Relief on a Global Scale

For a very long time, I told myself I wanted to change, without once asking: What is change? And for whom?

Looking back, I can see that I avoided the most uncomfortable truth. Most of the change I was seeking was not change at all.

It was a desperate attempt on my part to remain in a state of emotional comfort.

When I said, "I want to change my body," what it meant was, "I want to stop feeling the pain of inhabiting a dysfunctional body."

When I said, "I want to do something else with my life," what I was really saying was, "I want to stop lying awake at four in the morning with my stomach in knots, trying to justify a lifestyle I already know is a waste of my potential."

What I wanted was not change, because change is hard, deliberate work. I wanted relief from the cumulative effects of my choices and habits.

My focus was never change, and that is why I kept repeating the same behavior without ever actually transforming.

You can give a man a painkiller, and his broken leg will stop hurting, but his leg remains broken. Relief is the painkiller most of us seek.

Change is the setting of the bone, the healing of the tissue, the slow, agonizing rehabilitation most of us avoid.

The first is immediate and passive, and we are all addicted to it.

The addiction resides in the speed we expect the relief to arrive, not in the relief itself, because once we have our relief, we are back exactly where we started.

Any behavior that removes discomfort fast, the brain will create a much more dominant memory of that behavior than it would for any other memory that arrives slowly.

Psychologists call it negative reinforcement: the removal of an unpleasant state is its own reward, and it works even without pleasure.

We do not need the app to do good, but to make the discomfort stop long enough to teach the brain to reach for it again and again. Not to give rise to change, but to deliver relief.

Loneliness rises. We feel a narrowing of our possibilities, a longing for connection.

In that moment, the pull to open the phone begins, our fingers load the feed, and the second we start scrolling, what we yearn for, what we could have been, is dulled. And so is the reflection and exploration of the underlying need behind the loneliness we feel.

The relief is passive because the phone does the work. There is no investment, no effort being made on our part.

The addiction lies in the drop in tension that our drug of choice delivers on demand.

A man drinks not because he wants the alcohol, but because the first sip quiets the anxiety-producing story in his head.

A woman opens the fridge not because she is hungry, but because the chewing interrupts a feeling she knows she hasn't taken the time to address.

Another checks emails at midnight, not to work, but because the act of checking produces the illusion of control over an anxious life.

They are all the exact same mechanism.

What varies is the type of relief each one of us has learned to reach for, and how much of our life is being, chipped away until there is nothing left.

If relief is what we are addicted to, and change is slow and unpleasant, can change ever feel like relief while it is happening? Or is change simply the mastery of learning to tolerate discomfort?

Think about the last time you experienced emotional distress. Did you ask what is left if you removed the thing you assigned as responsible for your discomfort? Or did you just want it to stop?

There is a famous and quite amusing experiment by Timothy Wilson and colleagues at the University of Virginia.

They left people alone in a room with nothing to do but think, and gave them a button that would deliver an electric shock.

Most people, when left with their own thoughts for just fifteen minutes, chose to shock themselves rather than sit in silence. Some men shocked themselves repeatedly.

The shock is not the point. The point is our inability to embrace the emotional discomfort boredom, inadequacy, and anxiety triggers. That most of us will go to great lengths to avoid any type of discomfort, including hurting ourselves. And how we hurt ourselves to escape what makes us great. How we mangle our minds and bodies, our relationships, reaching for the shock because losing control feels unbearable.

We have perfected relief on a global scale. Ultra-processed food, ultra-processed entertainment, ultra-processed consumerism, ultra-processed relationships—all engineered to spare us a single uncomfortable moment, and all of it leaving us feeling deprived of some of the most important skills in life.

The Biology of Change

Why The Body Interprets Change as a Threat

I have been obsessed with one question for the past ten years: why is it so hard to change?

I know I need to, I can see it, and even feel it, yet still in a trance-like state I catch myself reaching for relief.

The human brain did not evolve to self-actualize, or find peace; it evolved to keep its host alive.

To our hunter-gatherer ancestors, predictability equaled survival.

The brain does not distinguish between physical pain and normal, necessary existential discomfort. Any conscious deviation from the norm registers in the brain’s threat-detection center, as a potential risk.

Attempting to alter our baseline behavior triggers a stress response, urging a retreat to familiar territory, even if that territory is destructive.

To the primal brain, a known misery is infinitely safer than an unknown joy. It doesn't care whether we are healing or numbing; its only focus is to remove the discomfort, even when it makes us miserable.

Resistance to change is not a lack of willpower; it is metabolic system working precisely as it should.

The brain is ruthlessly efficient at conserving energy.

Change is learning and learning is costly, that is why the brain will keep defaulting to the familiar and we will keep feeling like we are failing whenever we try to change a behavior.

Repeated behaviors are the brains preferred way of interacting with the world, since they are offloaded to the basal ganglia, functioning as paved, low-energy roads.

A new behavior, requires the prefrontal cortex, an absolute energy hog.

Change is like trying to hack through a dense jungle with a machete while your biology begs you to take the paved, downhill path. That is why we reach for the drink, the sugar, the scroll, the ADHD medication, or the Ozempic shot.

The brain doesn't want change. It wants relief from the emotional discomfort.

The Grandiose, Superior Self

Clarity, Freedom and Two Competing Forces

Which self is asking for change, and which self is asking for relief?

While this might seem like an odd question, it cuts to the heart of much of our primitive collective suffering.

Which self is driving our reactions, choices, and habits?

The self that is in pain and wants the pain to stop?

Or the self that is trying to become something new?

I have lost count of how many times I have had the bizarre experience of seeing two versions of me at war. The first version of me sabotaging the second. The second version judging the first. The result was always the same: me torn between two selves, not embodying, or enjoying, either of them fully.

Or at least until I realized that the part of me that wants to change and the one judging are both an illusion.

There is no fixed, permanent, unchanging, superior "if I could only change" self.

Such a creature is a psychological defense that protects me from four uncomfortable truths: I change, I am finite, I am not special in any way, shape, or form, and I will never fully control my actions, or other people.

We humans are a meaning-making, death-aware, status-seeking species, so we build a self-model that feels solid, coherent, and above average.

That model buffers us from our existential terror.

When we go out of our way to create a self that feels permanent and superior, so death feels less final and life more significant, change, aging, and failure become existential threats, not just inconveniences.

The grandiose, superior self functions as a shield against vulnerability.

If I am permanently superior, I do not have to feel the pain of being ordinary, dependent, wrong, or unwanted.

Change threatens identity, and the threat feels like annihilation.

So we become rigid, defend and obsess about insignificant things.

We don't fail changing, we avoid it by design because in order to change we have to give up the benefits our current behavior provide.

Add to the complexity that culture rewards a fixed, superior self. Individualism, destructive drama, outrage, religion, toxic self-help—all advertised as a desirable self, when in reality it is slowly killing us.

We are brainwashed to “find our true self,” “to be our best self,” “build our online persona.” A fixed, marketable, superior identity rather than a fluid, relational, changing one. While these cultural ideas may have many virtues, clarity is not one of them.

Clarity and thus freedom comes from change, which is in essence the art of holding our body and mind more lightly.

Accepting that we are not a permanent position we must defend, but a process we get to choose to participate in every single day.

Decades of psychological research converge on an uncomfortable finding: change is not a single decision and never a straight line. The self is a process, a river, a configuration of causes, conditions, and context we rarely understand and most likely never will.

The version of me that made that promise at half past midnight is not the version of me that wakes up at 6 a.m. tired, hungry, distracted, nudged by an environment I did not design. I am not a lake, but a river that keeps moving and changing.

Any suffering I have ever experienced, and will ever experience, will come not from the change itself, but from the resistance to change. From the desperate grip on a version of me that is already gone, or a version I believe I need to become to be accepted.

Goals vs. Results

The Illusion of the Finish Line

Because the nervous system perceives change as a metabolic drain and an evolutionary threat, the traditional "goal-oriented" approach to self-improvement becomes toxic.

We believe change is linear in the same way we believe that time is linear. Calendars are linear; bodies, seasons, grief, learning, and motivation are not.

Whenever change loops, stalls, or doubles back, the linear map says, If I did not change what I set out to change, I have failed.

When in reality, change is a spiral.

This is where we must untangle two concepts we habitually confuse: a goal and a result.

A goal is a fabricated finish line. It is an arbitrary point in the future (e.g., "lose 20 pounds," "never get angry again"). Because a goal lives entirely in the future, it inherently implies that my present state is unacceptable. Goals are rigid and binary.

I either achieve it or I fail, that is why missing the mark triggers shame.

When I set a goal, I am telling my brain that I am not allowed to feel successful until I cross that imaginary line, which keeps my nervous system in a state of chronic tension.

A result, on the other hand, is a physical, biological, or practical reality. It is the natural, unavoidable lagging indicator of a system or an experiment.

I can achieve magnificent results without ever having a specific goal.

In the past I have experimented with eating more fiber and walking for twenty minutes a day to see how my energy levels would feel, without having a rigid weight-loss "goal." And six months later, my blood pressure had dropped and my weight changed.

That is a result, achieved precisely because the pressure of a goal was absent.

Goals aren’t useless. They’re just bad judges.

A goal is a compass, not a verdict.

If the goal is “I must be X by Y,” then every deviation will feel like failure.

If the goal is “I am experimenting with X,” then a missed day is just data.

Healthy Emotional Distance

Learning to Work with Our Evolutionary Biology

If we view change as a continuous learning process instead of a binary goal, the ultimate method for learning becomes experimentation.

Most people approach the first months of habit formation as a rigid performance, a test of their discipline and worth.

Under this pressure, falling back into an old habit at month four feels like a catastrophic failure. But what becomes possible if we choose to see that entire first year not as a pass/fail test, but as a clinical trial?

When I frame change as an experiment, I change my relationship with failure.

In a laboratory, a failed experiment is not a verdict on the scientist. It is data used to adjust the input and context to alter the outcome.

When I first started running in my thirties, I went for a run every morning and quit after three weeks.

In the moment I felt I had failed.

Today, with healthy emotional distance, I can see that I was misinterpreting neutral data, mistaking it for personal failure, and missed one of the most important variables every time I tried to change something.

I overcommitted too much, too often, and for the wrong reasons.

I had just gotten a divorced, was studying to become a nurse, working nights, all while trying to be a present father to two small boys. Still, I continued my old life as nothing had happened.

I did not fail. The variables changed.

I was no longer running the same experiment, and the most honest humane step had been to embrace the change, the new version of me, not to grieve the old one.

When I first moved into my cabin deep in the forest I tried to keep my Sunday rituals, go to the same coffee shop, the same long walks by the sea, meet up with the same friends.

It worked for about two months and then it felt exhausting.

At first I interpret it as loneliness, as something going wrong. But the changes I had made didn't fail, my life had just changed overnight.

The variables that made it work when I was living in the city where no longer compatible with the new phase in my life.

Calling it an experiment is not self-deception, it's a brilliant way of hacking our evolutionary biology.

When we tell our amygdala, "We are changing who we are forever," it panics and triggers the stress response.

When we say, "We are just going to run a 14-day experiment to see what happens," the brain relaxes.

The stakes are low. The threat level drops.

When we remove moral judgment from our actions, we free up massive amounts of cognitive energy that used to be wasted on guilt.

Instead of abandoning a new habit entirely when we hit a wall, we become incredibly resilient.

We simply isolate the friction point, tweak one variable, and run the next trial.

Integration and Expansion

Broadening Our Behavioral Repertoire

I used to treat change as an assassination of the old, "defective" self, which only triggered my deepest psychological defenses.

I later found that change is not a demolition but an expansion: the old self stays, and the new one grows around it.

Real change is not about adding more to a life already straining under its own weight. It is about connecting better to what is already there, letting the pieces I have been holding apart finally touch every corner of my being.

A curious consciously broadening of my behavioral repertoire, giving my nervous system more options for how to respond to the world.

The question needs to shift from “Am I where I should be?” to “What season am I in, and what does it ask of me?”

Social media and commercials keeps trying to convince us that change should be frictionless.

Overweight? Get an Ozempic shot instead of doing the hard work of understanding why you overeat.

As a nurse I see that the shot works, I administer it on a daily basis, and that is what makes it so seductive.

The patient feel they finally have control over their life, because the extra pounds are coming of.

In my observations I see that their dysfunctional relationship with food is still there.

The anxiety is still there. The only thing that changed is the number on the scale.

I see the lonely swiping through a hundred faces on a dating app instead of learning how to sit with their own company first, or practice the slow, terrifying art of being seen by someone who might reject them.

What does not sit well with me at all is that we keep trying to remove all friction in every area of life and call it freedom.

It is not.

Removed friction is an emotional imprisonment that provides temporary relief , without requiring us to step naked into the arena of our own life.

The feeling of having done something without having done it feels like progress, but its what keeps us from doing the things we know we need to do.

It's a false sense of progress that imprison us, that makes us confuse friction as the obstacle to change, when friction is the change.

The sore legs after the first run.

The awkward silence in the first vulnerable conversation that we know could cost us the relationship.

The blank page on Day One.

I have learned that discomfort is tissue remodeling, the rewiring of the nervous system, and every time I remove the friction, I shut out the lessons and the change.

The painkiller lets me walk on the broken leg. I feel fine and for a moment I can keep walking, but it heals wrong.

Now I have a limp for life.

Every time I don't treat change as learning a new skill, every time I choose the pill, the Ozempic, or any other shortcut, I am teaching my children by example they lack the internal resources to change.

I am robbing them of seeing that change is the act of learning to become a better person to be around, which is a privilege, not a burden.

If they see me start the thing and give up the moment it becomes uncomfortable, they are learning what to do when it gets hard.

The way I lead myself is at any point in time signaling whether the messy middle is a place they go or a place they should avoid.

That is what I consider being a loser.

Not someone who does not have an education, a low paid job, or takes a pill, but one who robs themselves and their children of the beauty of being a beginner.

Coordinates

Awareness, Presence and One Coherent System

I want to leave you with some coordinates that has helped me navigate change and achieve constructive results.

Change is a process, not a one-time event.

Relief is a short lived state, not a goal.

Goals are maps, not the territory.

I and those closest to me will often seek relief, while calling it change, set goals, and then blame ourselves for not transforming..

Change is mostly about practicing our ability to hear through the noise of the pain.

Any type of change needs to begin with awareness and presence.

What I am not aware of I can not be present for

The real work lies not in change itself, but in staying with what arises long enough for it to take form, even and especially when it feels uncomfortable.

A question I keep asking is: What becomes possible when I slow down enough to notice my impulse for relief?

The moment I catch myself reaching for relief I don't have to ask how to stop, but what type of human being is what I am reaching for creating?

So, today, before you swing your sword, try to look under the blankets.

Not glance, but really look underneath them and ask: am I trying to change, or am I trying to make the pain stop?

The first invites you to listen.

The second makes you swing the sword before looking under the blanket without thinking.

If you wonder how to tell which one is doing the thinking, observe whether you are connecting your thoughts, emotions, behaviors, and values into one coherent system, or simply seeking relief.