Things we never say

Unpack with Mehak
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  • Mental Health
  • Updated weekly

Things We Never Say isn’t a collection of answers. It’s an investigation. An investigation into why we repeat patterns we already understand, why we make the decisions we do, and why being aware of ourselves isn’t always enough to change. It begins with questions I’ve lived through myself and grows with every book I read, every study I explore, every conversation I have, and every person I work with through 1:1 coaching. Everything works towards building a progressively more accurate understanding of what it means to be human. https://unpackwithmehak.com unpackwithmehak.substack.com

Episodes

  1. 16 hr ago

    Things We Never Say About Curiosity

    Topics include: curiosity as more than wanting answers, why familiarity can make us stop paying attention, the difference between rest and simply consuming time, unsatisfied curiosity and the experiences we miss by deciding too early, how curiosity can change our experience of ordinary or disliked activities, noticing novelty in familiar people and in ourselves, what neuroscience tells us about uncertainty and information gaps, boredom as a signal for engagement, the three-novel-things practice, how attention changes experience, curiosity and play, the peak-end rule and how memory shapes what we approach next, breaking the loop between experience, memory, expectation, and attention, why the brain relies on familiar patterns, changing the variables in your routines, practicing curiosity in everyday moments, and how curiosity can create a cycle of exploration, discovery, interest, and deeper engagement with your life. Follow the podcast on Instagram: @unpack.with.mehak Subscribe on YouTube: @unpackwithmehak For business: unpackwithmehak@gmail.com For those of you who prefer to read, below is the article version (on Substack): There are so many things I have decided I don’t like without actually giving them a chance. A book I decided would be boring because of the subject. A conversation I didn’t want to have because I already knew where it was going. A place I assumed I wouldn’t enjoy. A hobby that looked completely pointless from the outside. And sometimes I don’t even remember making the decision. It just becomes part of who I think I am. I’m not the kind of person who likes that. I’m not interested in that. That’s not for me. And then, every once in a while, something slips through. You try the thing you had already rejected, and something happens that is almost annoying. You realise you had no idea what you were talking about. And that’s what we’re going to talk about today. If you enjoy what I do and want to support it, you can buy me a coffee here. Hi, welcome to Things We Never Say. I’m your host, Mehak Chhabra, and this is a podcast about the conversations we avoid, the emotional patterns we repeat, and the things we all feel but rarely say out loud. Today we’re talking about curiosity. Not curiosity as in wanting to know the answer to a trivia question. I’m talking about something much more fundamental. The part of you that notices something and thinks, I don’t know enough about this yet. The part that can stay with uncertainty for a little longer. The part that allows you to discover something about another person, a situation, a place, a task, or even yourself that you couldn’t have predicted beforehand. And I think we underestimate how much of our lives are built around the opposite of that. We get very good at knowing. We know what we like. We know what we don’t like. We know who we’re compatible with. We know what kind of work we’re good at. We know what kind of person we are. We know what will be boring. We know what will be uncomfortable. We know what won’t work. And there is a practical reason the brain likes doing this. Familiarity saves effort. You don’t need to consciously reconsider every little thing you do every day. Your brain can recognise patterns, predict what comes next, and move through familiar situations without spending enormous amounts of energy on them. That’s useful. But there is a point where efficiency starts becoming a limitation. Because if you’ve already decided what something is, you don’t have to pay attention to it anymore. And if you don’t pay attention, you don’t discover anything. Think about a normal day. You wake up. You check your phone. You go to work. You do the things you’ve done before. You come home. You watch something. You eat. You scroll. You sleep. And somewhere inside all of that, you might genuinely believe you’re resting. But sometimes you aren’t. Sometimes you’re simply not doing anything particularly demanding. Those are not necessarily the same thing. Todd Kashdan writes about this distinction in Curious?, particularly the difference between activities that actually replenish us and activities that simply consume time. You can spend an hour watching television and finish feeling exactly the same as when you started. Not refreshed. Not excited. Not peaceful. Just slightly dull. And that made me think about how often we confuse the absence of effort with restoration. Something doesn’t have to be difficult to be restorative. But if something is supposed to replenish you, there should usually be some change in your internal state. Maybe you feel energised. Maybe you feel peaceful. Maybe you feel interested. Maybe you feel connected. The important thing is that something comes back to you. Because we need energy to explore. And curiosity can also help us figure out what actually gives us energy. That relationship can work in both directions. You try something because you’re curious. You discover that it makes you feel alive. You want to do it again. You become more skilled. You become more interested. And suddenly something that wasn’t part of your life becomes part of it. But there is another category of things that never even make it into the experiment. Things we are curious about, but don’t try. Kashdan calls this unsatisfied residual curiosity. You notice something. You want to know more. You think about trying it. And then you don’t. Maybe you think it’s impractical. Maybe you think you’ll be bad at it. Maybe someone you trust told you it was pointless. Maybe it doesn’t fit the version of yourself you’ve already constructed. And so you never find out. That is one of the costs of losing curiosity. You don’t only miss information. You can miss entire experiences that might have changed your life. There’s a story in Kashdan’s book about a veteran at Walter Reed Army Medical Center who initially rejected his therapist’s suggestion that he try yoga. He thought yoga wasn’t for someone like him. He tried it anyway. And eventually something he had dismissed became part of his recovery. The point isn’t that yoga is secretly the answer to everything. It isn’t. The point is that his first judgment was made before his first experience. And that happens constantly. We do it with people. We do it with jobs. We do it with cities. We do it with books. We do it with food. We do it with hobbies. We do it with versions of ourselves we haven’t met yet. And sometimes the thing we need isn’t something completely new. Sometimes it’s the ability to notice something new inside something familiar. Think about someone you’ve known for years. You already have a version of them in your head. You know what they’re like. You know their habits. You know what they would say. You know what they would never do. But people change. Their interests change. Their fears change. Their values change. Their relationship to the world changes. And if we keep relating to someone through an old version of them, we can become less curious about the actual person sitting in front of us. The same thing happens to ourselves. You can become so familiar with your own story that you stop investigating it. I’m just an anxious person. I’m not creative. I hate exercise. I’m bad at meeting people. I don’t like public speaking. I’m not someone who takes risks. Maybe those statements were true at one point. But curiosity doesn’t ask you to immediately replace them with positive statements. It asks you to leave a little room around them. There might be something you don’t know yet. That doesn’t mean you’re unintelligent. It doesn’t mean you’re lost. It means the story isn’t finished. And neuroscience gives us an interesting reason to take that seriously. Curiosity is often described as emerging when there is a gap between what we know and what we want to know. That gap can create tension that motivates us to seek information. So uncertainty isn’t necessarily something the brain simply wants to eliminate. Sometimes uncertainty is exactly what gets us moving. And curiosity isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it feels like irritation. Sometimes it’s the feeling of not being able to stop thinking about something. Sometimes it’s boredom pushing you toward something more interesting. Boredom can push us away from an environment that isn’t engaging, while curiosity can pull us toward information that feels worth exploring. Which means boredom isn’t always asking for entertainment. Sometimes it’s asking for engagement. And this is where curiosity becomes much more useful than simply telling yourself to “be curious.” Because you can actually practice it. There was an experiment described in Kashdan’s work where people were asked to do something they already disliked. But they were given one additional instruction. While doing it, they had to look for three novel things about the experience. That’s it. Three things they hadn’t noticed before. One participant was an 18-year-old bodybuilder who had dismissed crocheting as something completely uninteresting. He spent 90 minutes doing it. And he discovered that it was physically more demanding than he expected, that it could be meditative, and that the stitches could be used to make something he actually wanted. More importantly, participants who had been encouraged to look for novelty were more likely to return to the activity later. The activity didn’t necessarily change. Their attention changed. And once attention changed, experience changed. That is a very different idea from forcing yourself to like something. You aren’t telling yourself, This is amazing. You’re saying, I don’t know everything about this yet. Try that with something you dislike. Pick something genuinely unappealing. A genre of music you normally avoid. A book you have judged by its cover. A task at work that makes your eyes glaze over. A house

    Things We Never Say About Curiosity

  2. 6 days ago

    Things we never say about anxiety

    Topics include: what anxiety actually is (fear plus uncertainty, and why it rarely shows up alone, usually alongside depression), anxiety as a habit loop (trigger, behavior, reward, and reward really meaning result, something that may have paid off years ago but often doesn't anymore), why willpower fails (the prefrontal cortex going offline under stress, and the myth that anxiety fuels performance), mapping your own loops as the first step toward change, paying attention to what a behavior is actually giving you right now instead of relying on old assumptions, finding a genuinely better substitute through curiosity, the RAIN practice, and self-kindness, and finally the shift from asking why you're anxious to asking what's happening in your body right now. If you’ve been stuck in this loop of knowing what to do but not doing it, that’s exactly why I created Unpack with Mehak, and here’s how I can help. If you are ready to ‘Rebuild your Self-Worth,’ I would suggest going ahead with the monthly container that is focused exactly on this. Rebuild Your Self-Worth — $499/month (Monthly Container)For when rejection, comparison, relationships, or other people’s behaviour have started to shape how you see yourself, and you want to change that. Over the month, we’ll work on things like learning to handle rejection without letting it take over your day, responding to shame when it shows up, and breaking the patterns that make you abandon yourself to be chosen by someone else. You get: * 4 × one-hour 1:1 sessions * Personalised ongoing support between sessions * A month of focused work on your patterns, rather than generic advice Pattern Breakdown Session — $149A one-hour 1:1 session to work through a specific pattern, relationship, decision, or situation together. Email Deep Dive — $79For when you want me to go deeper into a specific situation. I’ll analyse what’s happening beneath the surface and send you a detailed written analysis, with three follow-up exchanges to explore what comes up. Loop Breaker — $39Tell me about a specific pattern you’re stuck in, and I’ll analyse it using the Loop Breaker framework and send you a written analysis. One response, no follow-up. Loop Mapper — $9A self-guided framework to help you map the pattern you keep finding yourself in and understand what’s keeping the loop going. Follow the podcast on Instagram: @unpack.with.mehak For business: unpackwithmehak@gmail.com For those of you who prefer to read, below is the article version: You know that feeling of waking up already anxious, before anything has actually happened? No alarm, no bad news, no reason you can point to. Your eyes open and your chest is already tight, like your body got the memo before your brain did. Or the other version. You’re lying in bed at night, exhausted, and your mind starts running through everything that could go wrong tomorrow. The meeting. The email you haven’t replied to. The thing your friend said last week that you’re still turning over. None of it is happening right now. But your body doesn’t seem to know that. It reacts like the threat has already arrived. Most of us have a version of this. And most of us have spent years trying to think our way out of it. Reasoning with it. Telling ourselves to just relax, to stop worrying, to calm down, as if that has ever worked on anyone, even once. Today I want to talk about why it doesn’t work. And about something that changed the way I think about anxiety completely: the idea that anxiety isn’t only a feeling. It’s a habit. Hi, this is Things We Never Say. I’m your host, Mehak Chhabra, and this is a podcast about the conversations we avoid, the emotional patterns we repeat, and the things we all feel but rarely say out loud. Today we’re talking about anxiety, habits, and the loop that connects the two. Before I go further, I want to be upfront about where a lot of this is coming from. Most of what I’m about to walk you through is built on the work of Dr. Judson Brewer, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist, in his book Unwinding Anxiety. I’ve been sitting with his research for a while now, and it’s reshaped how I understand my own anxious patterns, so I wanted to bring it here in a form that actually makes sense to live with, not just read once and forget. --- Part One: Anxiety Is Not a Loner Let’s start with a fact that surprised me. Anxiety rarely shows up alone. Research on generalized anxiety disorder has found that the large majority of people who have it also carry another diagnosis alongside it, most commonly depression. Anxiety brings company. And it doesn’t come out of nowhere either. It’s born from something specific: fear meeting uncertainty. Fear on its own is useful. It’s an old, fast, adaptive system. If a car swerves toward you, you jump back onto the sidewalk before you’ve even had a conscious thought about it. That reaction happens in milliseconds, in the oldest part of your brain, the part that isn’t interested in thinking, only in keeping you alive long enough to think later. Anxiety is different. It lives in the newer part of your brain, the prefrontal cortex, the part just behind your forehead that handles planning and prediction. Its whole job is to take what’s happened before and use it to guess what’s coming next. That works beautifully when it has enough information. The problem starts when it doesn’t. An uncertain future, a blank weekend, an ambiguous text message, an unclear diagnosis. Give your prefrontal cortex a gap like that and it will fill it, usually with the worst version of events it can construct. That’s not planning. That just looks like planning. Underneath, it’s your brain trying to manage an information shortage by manufacturing worst cases. Fear plus uncertainty equals anxiety. That single equation explains more about your 2 a.m. spiraling than most of the advice you’ve ever been given about it. --- Part Two: Anxiety Behaves Exactly Like a Habit Here’s the part that actually changes things. Every habit, whether it’s biting your nails or reaching for your phone or spiraling into worry, runs on the same three-step loop. A trigger. A behavior. A reward. You feel a stressful thought, that’s the trigger. You worry about it, that’s the behavior. And somewhere, even though it feels awful, your brain is registering a reward. Maybe it’s the temporary sense of doing something instead of sitting in uncertainty. Maybe it’s a few seconds of relief when you check your phone for the fortieth time. Whatever it is, your brain wouldn’t keep doing it if some part of it wasn’t getting paid. One thing worth slowing down on here. When I say reward, I don’t mean it has to feel good to you right now. Reward is really just a brain term for result, whatever outcome originally taught your brain that this behavior was worth repeating. That teaching often happened years ago, when the behavior actually did something for you. Biting your nails might have soothed you as a kid. Checking on someone constantly might have kept you safe in a relationship that really was unpredictable once. The reward was real, at the time. What’s rarely true is that it’s still real now. Most of the time, the original payoff is long gone, and what’s left is just the loop, running on old instructions, with little or no actual reward waiting at the end of it anymore. This is the same mechanism behind every habit your brain has ever built, useful or not. It’s how you learned to look both ways before crossing a street. And it’s how you learned that when you feel a knot of dread, checking your email or replaying a conversation or reaching for something to eat gives you a few seconds of relief. Brewer describes patients who built entire identities around this loop without realizing it. One man, in his sixties, drank six to eight glasses a night. When they mapped it out, the pattern was simple. Anxiety about unfinished work in the late afternoon, drink to numb it, temporary relief, and then guilt the next morning that fed the same cycle again. Another patient’s trigger was anxiety in the morning at the sight of an unfinished to-do list. His behavior was procrastination. The reward was avoidance, a few hours of not having to feel behind. None of this is a character flaw. It’s reward-based learning doing exactly what it evolved to do, just aimed at the wrong target. --- Part Three: Why Willpower Keeps Failing You If you’ve ever told yourself you’ll simply stop worrying, stop checking your phone, stop spiraling, and then watched yourself do it anyway within the hour, I want you to hear this clearly. That’s not a personal failure. That’s how the system is built. Willpower and reasoning both live in the prefrontal cortex, the same newer brain region that goes offline the moment you’re actually stressed. So the exact moment you need willpower most is the exact moment your brain has taken it away from you and handed control back to the older, faster, more primitive part that just wants relief, now, by any means available. That’s why gritting your teeth works for about a day and then collapses. You’re trying to use the one tool that isn’t available in the situation you’re trying to use it in. There’s also a subtler trap worth naming. A lot of people, myself included at different points, have secretly believed their anxiety is what makes them successful. That without it, they’d stop pushing themselves. But the research doesn’t support that story. Most studies on stress and performance actually show a straight negative relationship: more stress, worse performance, not the inverted curve people like to imagine where a little anxiety sharpens you. If there’s a voice in your head insisting your anxiety is doing you a favor, it might be worth asking honestly whether that’s true, or whether it’s just familiar. --- Part Four: The First Step Is Just Seein

  3. 3 Sept

    Things we never say about happiness

    Topics include: What is happiness?, pleasure vs. happiness, hedonic adaptation, affective forecasting, is happiness a choice?, biology and happiness, depression, anxiety and mental health, the neuroscience of happiness, dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin and endorphins, reward and motivation, relationships and social connection, belonging and social rejection, laughter and happiness, autonomy and locus of control, competence and motivation, intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation, ideal self vs. ought self, goals, meaning and purpose, environment and nature, novelty and the brain, gratitude and positive experiences, happiness optimization, agency without self-blame, building a meaningful life The promised description link to explore Rebuild Your Self-Worth. And to become a part of Beyond Willpower (a 90-minute masterclass exploring why we get stuck, how our behavioural loops keep repeating, and how to make small, consistent action easier, even when motivation isn’t there), register here Follow the podcast on Instagram: @unpack.with.mehak For business: unpackwithmehak@gmail.com For those of you who prefer to read, below is the article version: You know that thing where you really, really want something, and you become convinced that once you have it, you’ll finally feel happy? Maybe it’s a new job. A relationship. Moving to a different city. More money. Losing the weight you’ve been trying to lose. Getting your dream apartment. Finally having enough time. Finally figuring out what you’re supposed to be doing with your life. And you don’t just want the thing. You can almost feel the version of yourself that comes with it. You’ll be less anxious. You’ll feel more confident. You’ll wake up excited. You’ll stop comparing yourself to other people. You’ll finally feel like your life is going somewhere. And then you get the thing. And for a while, you do feel different. Sometimes dramatically different. But then, slowly, your brain gets used to it. The new apartment becomes the apartment you live in. The new job becomes your job. The relationship becomes your relationship. The number on the scale becomes normal. The money becomes something you’re used to having. And suddenly you’re looking around thinking, why don’t I feel as happy as I thought I would? Which raises a slightly uncomfortable question. If getting the things we want doesn’t guarantee that we’ll stay happy, and if happiness can disappear even when nothing is particularly wrong, then what exactly are we supposed to do with it? Is happiness something we can actually choose? Or are we putting another impossible responsibility on ourselves when we tell people to just be happier? Because there are parts of happiness we have some influence over — things we can do that genuinely affect our well-being. But there are also things happening in the brain and body that we don’t simply decide away. Depression exists. Anxiety exists. Biology matters. Circumstances matter. So when someone says “happiness is a choice,” I think we need to be much more precise about what we mean. Because if happiness is entirely a choice, then not being happy starts to feel like a personal failure. And I don’t think that’s what the science actually tells us. That’s what we’re going to talk about today. Hi, this is Things We Never Say. I’m your host, Mehak Chhabra, and this is a podcast about the conversations we avoid, the emotional patterns we repeat, and the things we all feel but rarely say out loud. Today we’re talking about happiness: what actually influences it, and how much of it is really within our control. --- What We’re Actually Talking About Before we go further, I think we need to separate happiness from pleasure, because we use the word “happiness” to describe a lot of different things. Getting a message from someone you like can make you happy. Eating your favourite food can make you happy. Getting a promotion, falling in love; these can make you happy. But those are moments of pleasure, excitement, relief, pride, connection. Happiness, in the broader sense we’re talking about today, is something bigger. Sonja Lyubomirsky defines happiness as an experience of joy, contentment, or positive well-being, combined with a sense that your life is good, meaningful, and worthwhile. I like that definition because it leaves room for a life that isn’t constantly pleasant. You can be happy and still have a terrible day. You can be deeply satisfied with your life and still be anxious about something. You can love your life and still cry. You can have a meaningful life and still go through grief, disappointment, anger, boredom, frustration. Happiness isn’t the absence of every uncomfortable emotion. And this matters because I think we’ve built a version of happiness that’s almost impossible to maintain. You’re supposed to be positive, enjoy your work, love your body, have good relationships, wake up grateful; productive but not stressed, ambitious but not burnt out, present but also successful. And when you inevitably feel bad, you start wondering what you’re doing wrong. But feeling bad is part of having a nervous system. The question isn’t whether you can eliminate every negative emotion. The question is what kind of life you’re building, and what happens inside you when difficult emotions show up. --- Why Happiness Fades So if happiness isn’t a constant pleasant state, why does even the good stuff stop feeling as good as it did at first? This is where the brain gets interesting. There isn’t one part of your brain responsible for happiness. There’s no happiness button, no single chemical that gets released and suddenly you’re happy. You’ll often hear dopamine described as “the happiness chemical,” but it’s much more complicated than that; it’s heavily involved in reward prediction, motivation, learning and wanting. Your brain is constantly making predictions about what’s going to happen. You see a notification from someone you want to hear from; you expect a message, you anticipate the reward, and your reward system is involved before you even get the thing. That’s one reason anticipation can sometimes feel better than the experience. You check the delivery status on something you’ve wanted for weeks; you imagine opening the package; you think about how good it will feel. Then it arrives, and it does feel good. But the intensity doesn’t last forever. That doesn’t mean something is wrong with you; the brain is designed to notice change. Novelty matters. Unexpected rewards matter. Once something becomes familiar, the response changes. And dopamine isn’t alone in getting oversimplified this way. Endorphins, oxytocin, serotonin: these are all involved in processes that can feel rewarding, pleasurable, calming, social, or emotionally meaningful. But none of them is simply “the happiness chemical.” Endorphins are involved in pain modulation and stress responses. Oxytocin is involved in social bonding. Serotonin has functions throughout the body and brain. It would be an enormous oversimplification to say low serotonin causes depression or more serotonin creates happiness. We tend to take incredibly complicated systems and turn them into simple explanations: low dopamine, you’re unhappy; get more serotonin; hack your brain. But the brain isn’t a machine with four buttons labelled happiness, motivation, love and calm. It’s a network. Happiness emerges from a combination of things happening across the brain, the body, our thoughts, our behaviour, our relationships and our environment. This is also where hedonic adaptation comes in. We adapt to changes in our circumstances; something good happens, our happiness goes up, and over time we adjust. The thing that initially felt extraordinary becomes part of normal life. This happens with positive experiences as well as negative ones, though not every event follows the same pattern and not everyone adapts to everything the same way. There are things people adapt to surprisingly well, and things that can have long-lasting effects: disability, chronic pain, serious illness, bereavement, major trauma aren’t things you can put in a neat “you’ll get used to it” category. But there’s a general tendency for the emotional impact of many positive changes to soften over time. --- Why We Keep Getting the Prediction Wrong There’s another problem layered on top of adaptation: we aren’t actually very good at predicting what will make us happy in the first place. Daniel Gilbert has written extensively about what he calls affective forecasting: the way we imagine the emotional impact of future events, and tend to get those predictions wrong. Not because we’re stupid, but because we’re trying to imagine an emotional future using the information we have right now, and we forget how much the future version of us will adapt. We also tend to focus on the thing we’re thinking about and underestimate everything else that will still be happening in our lives. You think, “If I get this job, I’ll be happy”, but you don’t imagine the commute, the difficult colleague, the boring Tuesday three months later. You imagine the event. You don’t imagine the entire life around the event. I think that’s one reason our brains can keep selling us the same promise: once this happens, you’ll feel different. And sometimes you will; a new job really can improve your life, leaving a bad relationship really can make you happier, more money genuinely can remove stress, treatment for an illness really can change someone’s entire experience of living. So I’m not saying circumstances don’t matter. They absolutely do. I’m saying the relationship between circumstances and happiness is more complicated than we think. --- What’s Actually in Your Control So between a brain that adapts to everything and a brain that’s bad at predicting what it wants, w

    Things we never say about happiness

  4. 27 Aug

    Things we never say about shame

    Topics include: self-worth, shame, vulnerability, authenticity, psychology, connection, courage, compassion, love, belonging, Brené Brown, development, feeling stuck, not enough, self-awareness, personal growth,rejection, lack, loss, insecurity and more. The promised description link to explore Rebuild Your Self-Worth: https://unpackwithmehak.com/ Follow the podcast on Instagram: @unpack.with.mehak For business: unpackwithmehak@gmail.com For those of you who prefer to read, below is the article version: You know that thing that happens when someone looks at you funny, and suddenly you go into a complete spiral inside your head? Was it the pimple on my face? Was it something I said in that meeting? Do they just not like me? Do they think I’m rude? Did I say something weird? Should I have said it differently? And suddenly, one person’s facial expression has somehow become a referendum on your entire personality. You start thinking about how you can make that person like you. Should I change the way I dress? Should I change my hair? Should I talk a little more softly? Should I be less opinionated? Should I be more agreeable? You could do a million things to make yourself more palatable to other people. And sometimes, some of that self-reflection is actually useful. If you’re angry all the time, if you’re uncooperative, if people genuinely don’t enjoy being around you, maybe there’s something there worth looking at. But what I’m interested in is what happens when that isn’t what’s happening. When someone reacts badly to you once, and instead of thinking “maybe they’re having a bad day” or “maybe we just don’t get along,” you immediately think, “what’s wrong with me?” And then you start evaluating your entire worth based on someone else’s reaction. That is when this stops being about the other person. It becomes about shame. And eventually, it becomes about self-worth. Because shame and self-worth are deeply connected. When we repeatedly experience ourselves as flawed, rejected, or inadequate, shame eats away at our sense of worth. And when our sense of worth is already fragile, we’re much more vulnerable to experiencing ordinary moments of rejection or criticism as evidence that something is fundamentally wrong with us. It’s a loop. And that’s what we’re going to talk about today. Hi, this is Things We Never Say. I’m your host, Mehak Chhabra, and this is a podcast about the conversations we avoid, the emotional patterns we repeat, and the things we all feel but rarely say out loud. Today we’re talking about shame, vulnerability, and ultimately, self-worth. --- Part One: What Shame Actually Is Before I get into this, I want to say something, because I’ve been reading a lot of Brené Brown recently. A significant amount of what I’m going to talk about today comes from her research and her books, particularly *The Gifts of Imperfection*, along with the broader research she draws on around shame, vulnerability, worthiness, belonging and wholehearted living. So I want to give credit where it’s due. Some of the language and frameworks here are directly inspired by her work, not things I came up with myself. I’m also going to connect those ideas to some of the other psychology I’ve been studying, and to my own understanding of how shame shows up in our lives. So let’s start with the simplest question: what actually is shame? Shame is the intensely painful feeling of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging. And I think the easiest way to understand it is through one distinction: Shame says, “I am bad.” Guilt says, “I did something bad.” That difference is enormous. If I did something wrong, I can fix my behaviour. I can apologise. I can learn. I can do something differently next time. But if I believe I *am* wrong, there’s nothing to fix. Because the problem is me. That’s why shame is so corrosive. It attacks the part of us that believes we can change. And shame doesn’t always look the same. There are broadly three ways we experience it. The first is “characterological shame”: shame about who you are. “I’m a bad person.” “I’m not intelligent.” “I’m boring.” “I’m difficult.” “I’m unlovable.” The second is behavioural shame, shame about something you did. You failed. You lied. You made a mistake. You didn’t perform well. You lost. And behavioural shame has a way of sliding into characterological shame. You don’t just think “I failed this exam,” you start thinking “I’m stupid.” You don’t just think “that relationship didn’t work,” you think “I’m incapable of having a healthy relationship.” You don’t just think “I made a mistake at work,” you think “I’m not good enough to be here.” The third is bodily shame, shame attached to your physical body and appearance. Your weight. Your skin. Your hair. Your face. Your clothes. This one is particularly loud right now, because we live in a culture that gives us an almost endless number of opportunities to compare our bodies to other people’s. All three eventually feed the same belief: there is something about me that makes me less worthy. --- Part Two: Where Shame Lives, and What It Makes Us Do And shame isn’t just intellectual. You actually feel it. Your face gets hot. Your heart starts racing. Your mouth gets dry. You might sweat. Your body feels tense. Time can almost feel like it’s slowing down. You might get tunnel vision. One of the most useful things you can do is learn your own physical signs of shame. Because if you can recognise, “oh, my face is getting hot, my heart is racing, I’m suddenly feeling this urge to disappear,” you have a chance to interrupt the pattern instead of automatically reacting. And what happens next matters, because when shame corners us, we develop ways of protecting ourselves. Some people move away: they withdraw, hide, stop talking, keep secrets, disappear. Some people move toward: they people-please, appease, become extremely accommodating, try to make everyone happy so nobody has a reason to reject them. And some people move against: they get aggressive, try to gain power, attack before they can be attacked, use shame against someone else because they’re trying to protect themselves from feeling it. So ask yourself: who do you become when you’re backed into the shame corner? Do you disappear? Do you become the coolest person in the room? Do you become extremely agreeable? Angry? Perfectionistic? Do you start fixing everything, scrolling, sleeping, staying busy? Sometimes what looks like personality is actually protection. Here’s the thing worth holding onto, though: shame is universal. Everyone experiences it. And the less we talk about it, the more power it has. Shame needs secrecy, silence and judgment. It convinces you that your experience makes you uniquely defective: “nobody else feels like this, nobody else would understand, if people knew this about me they wouldn’t like me.” But feeling shame doesn’t mean you’re uniquely defective. It means you’re human. --- Part Three: How Shame Builds an Identity This is also why I’ve been thinking back to my previous episode on resilience while making this one. I’ve failed at a lot of things. Friendships. Parts of my career. School. Relationships. Hobbies. There are probably very few areas of my life where I haven’t experienced some version of failure. But I have never really identified myself as a failure. And I think a huge part of that has to do with how I explain failure to myself. If I fail a test, I can say, “I didn’t prepare properly for this test”, that’s an explanation of an event. Or I can say, “I’m just not intelligent enough”, that’s an explanation of my identity. If a relationship ends, I can say “that relationship didn’t work,” or I can say “nobody will ever love me.” If someone doesn’t like me, I can say “maybe we’re just not compatible,” or “there’s something wrong with me.” That second explanation, every time, is where shame starts building an identity. And eventually you create an entire self-image through your own internal narration: I’m not smart enough, not beautiful enough, not interesting enough, not successful enough, not lovable enough. Not enough. Which brings us to what that actually sounds like, day to day. You can wake up in the morning and, before your feet even touch the floor, you’ve already started counting everything you don’t have enough of. I didn’t get enough sleep. I don’t have enough time. I don’t look good enough. I didn’t work enough yesterday. I don’t exercise enough, don’t make enough money, I’m not thin enough, not smart enough, not productive enough. By the time you go to bed, you’re running through everything you didn’t accomplish. So you sleep with a feeling of lack, and wake up with another one. Eventually, what began as a busy life becomes an entire identity built around inadequacy. This is where perfectionism comes in: not as an accident, but as a strategy. Perfectionism is not simply wanting to do well. It’s not healthy ambition. It is the belief that if I live perfectly, look perfectly and act perfectly, maybe I can avoid blame, judgment and shame. It’s a protection strategy: if I get everything right, nobody can criticise me. Except there is no such thing as getting everything right. So perfectionism creates an impossible bargain; I will finally feel worthy once I become impossible to criticise, and that day never comes. Which takes us back to the beginning. Why do we care so much about whether someone likes us? Because belonging is a fundamental human need. But somewhere along the way, we confuse belonging with fitting in. Fitting in says: let me assess the room and become whoever I need to be to be accepted. Belonging says: I can enter this room as myself. Those a

    Things we never say about shame

  5. 19 Aug

    Why can’t I move on?

    Topics covered * Drug addiction & relationships * The habits we struggle to break * Learning to let go and move forward * What it really takes to rebuild yourself In this episode of Things We Never Say Circles, Calypso Moon and Rocco Roviaro join me for a real conversation about addiction, relationships, and the things we sometimes find ourselves unable to move on from. Things We Never Say Circles is about real people sharing real experiences and real advice about the things happening in their lives, without experts. Just honest conversations. Want to join the next Circle? Reply to this email and tell me you’d like to be part of one. And if you’re ready to start rebuilding your self-worth, you can begin here: Rebuild Your Self-Worth. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit unpackwithmehak.substack.com

    Why can’t I move on?

  6. 9 Aug

    Why Being Needy Is Actually a Dating Superpower

    Topics include: attachment theory, anxious attachment, avoidant attachment, secure attachment, emotionally unavailable partners, relationship anxiety, dating psychology, healthy relationships, communication in relationships, emotional needs, relationship advice, psychology of love, relationship patterns, attachment styles, intimacy, dating tips, self-awareness, personal growth The promised description link: https://unpackwithmehak.com/ Follow the podcast on Instagram: @unpack.with.mehak For business: unpackwithmehak@gmail.com For those of you who prefer to read, below is the article version: Have you ever noticed that you keep ending up with the same person? Different name, different face, but somehow it’s the same relationship every time: someone who doesn’t really consider your needs. And eventually, either you break up, or they do, and you’re left feeling hopeless about the whole thing. Back to square one. Actually, back to square minus one, if I’m being honest. So why does that happen? Why do we keep being attracted to people who were never going to meet our needs in the first place? Why do we think being low-maintenance is the answer to all of this? Why do we assume we’re the ones pushing people away, instead of considering that maybe they just couldn’t have met our needs no matter how we communicated them? Why is being the cool girl still such a trend, hiding what we need so the relationship can supposedly work? Why do we put so much pressure on ourselves to make sure our partner is comfortable with whatever pace we’re moving at? That’s what we’re getting into today. Hi, I’m 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. I’ve been reading about attachment theory and relationships lately, because I wanted to understand something a lot of us experience: knowing exactly what kind of relationship doesn’t work for us, and then somehow finding ourselves in another version of the same thing. Different person, different circumstances, same emotional experience. And the more I read, the more interested I got in something we don’t talk about enough when it comes to dating. Neediness has basically become synonymous with being undesirable. We’re told to be independent, don’t text too much, don’t care too much, don’t make yourself too available, give them space, don’t ask for reassurance, don’t expect too much, don’t make them feel like your life revolves around them. And honestly, there’s some decent advice buried in there. You shouldn’t make another person responsible for your entire emotional life. You shouldn’t abandon your friendships, your work, your identity, just because you’re in a relationship. But somewhere along the way, we took a reasonable idea and pushed it way too far. We started acting like having needs is the problem itself. Wanting closeness isn’t automatically unhealthy. Wanting reassurance isn’t automatically unhealthy. Neither is wanting consistency, or wanting to know where you actually stand with someone, or wanting your partner to consider you when they’re making decisions. The question was never whether you have needs. It’s what those needs actually are, how you communicate them, and whether the person you’re with is even capable of meeting them. And I think that distinction changes the entire way we approach dating. What attachment theory actually tells us Attachment theory started with John Bowlby’s work on our need to form close emotional bonds. The idea is that attachment isn’t some childish thing we’re supposed to grow out of; close relationships actually shape how we experience safety, exploration, and emotional regulation throughout our whole lives. Mary Ainsworth’s work, including the Strange Situation experiment, showed how a caregiver’s availability can affect how willing a child is to go out and explore the world around them. And I think that secure base idea is especially interesting once you apply it to adult relationships. A secure base doesn’t mean someone does everything for you. It just means you know someone’s there. And that knowledge alone can make it so much easier to go out into the world. Think about the difference between travelling somewhere completely unfamiliar knowing you have someone you can call if things go wrong, versus feeling like you’ve got absolutely nobody to turn to. The destination is exactly the same. You’re the same person. But having that support changes how safe you feel actually exploring. And that’s where I think we’ve misunderstood independence. We’ve started treating dependence and independence like opposites, but healthy relationships don’t really work that way. Sometimes knowing you can depend on someone is exactly what gives you the freedom to be independent. There’s some genuinely interesting research on this. In one well-known fMRI study, sixteen married women were exposed to the threat of an electric shock while holding either their husband’s hand, a stranger’s hand, or nobody’s hand at all. The researchers found reduced neural responses to the threat when the women were holding their husbands’ hands, and that effect was even stronger among women who reported higher marital quality. Now, I don’t think the takeaway here is that your partner needs to hold your hand every single time you’re stressed. What’s actually interesting is what the study represents. A supportive relationship can change how we experience threat. Being connected to someone doesn’t automatically make you weaker, sometimes it just gives your nervous system a little more room to deal with the world. Which brings me back to neediness. Because maybe the goal was never to become someone who doesn’t need anyone. Maybe it’s to become someone who understands what they need and knows how to actually communicate it, without making another person responsible for everything they feel. So why do some of us keep choosing people who can’t give us what we need? This is where attachment theory gets interesting. People with more insecure attachment patterns can experience intimacy and threat pretty differently. Someone leaning more anxious might become especially sensitive to signs of rejection or abandonment, while someone leaning more avoidant might feel uncomfortable with too much closeness, almost like intimacy itself feels like a threat to their independence. I don’t want to turn this into one of those internet videos where we diagnose everyone we’ve ever dated as anxious or avoidant, though. People are more complicated than four boxes, and attachment patterns can genuinely shift across relationships and over time. What I find more useful is looking at the cycle itself. Picture someone who wants a lot of closeness with someone who tends to pull away the moment intimacy increases. One person moves closer, the other moves away. The first person gets more anxious, so they try harder, which makes the second person feel more pressure, so they create even more distance. And now the first person is even more activated than before. Suddenly both people are behaving in exactly the way that confirms the other’s deepest fear. The person seeking closeness is thinking, see, people leave when I need them. And the person seeking distance is thinking, see, people always want more from me than I can give. And now they’ve built a relationship that confirms both of their existing beliefs. There’s research on couples that’s found associations between anxious-avoidant pairings and heightened stress responses during conflict, though real relationships are obviously far messier than just matching two attachment labels together. And this is where something really strange can happen. You can start confusing activation with chemistry. You meet someone inconsistent. They text constantly for three days and then disappear. They tell you they really like you, and then suddenly go distant. Affectionate one week, emotionally unavailable the next. You don’t know where you stand, so you think about them constantly. You check your phone. You replay conversations. You analyse their tone. You wonder if they still like you. And then they finally give you the reassurance you’ve been waiting for, and suddenly you feel incredible. The anxiety disappears. You feel chosen again. And because that relief is so intense, you might interpret it as passion. You might think, this person drives me crazy because I really love them. But an activated attachment system isn’t necessarily the same thing as romantic chemistry. Sometimes what feels like an incredible connection is really just uncertainty followed by relief. And that distinction matters, because if you’ve spent enough time in relationships where you have to earn closeness, a relationship where someone is simply consistent can feel strangely quiet. You don’t have to decode them. You don’t have to chase reassurance. You don’t have to wonder if they’re pulling away. And you might mistake that calm for a lack of chemistry. This is also where the whole low-maintenance thing gets interesting. I think a lot of us have learned to perform being low-maintenance. We don’t say we want to see someone because we don’t want to seem clingy. We don’t ask where the relationship is going because we don’t want to seem intense. We don’t ask for reassurance because we don’t want to seem insecure. We don’t say something hurt us because we don’t want to be difficult. We give them space even when what we actually want is closeness. And eventually we get so good at hiding our needs that we stop knowing what our needs even are. You become completely focused on one question: what will make this person stay? And you stop asking the more important one: is this relationship actually working for me? That’s wh

  7. 2 Aug

    Your plan for life failed, now what?

    Topics include: resilience, psychology, stress mindset, fear of failure, optimism and pessimism, Martin Seligman, Kelly McGonigal, Michael Easter, career change, consistency, personal growth, handling setbacks, life transitions, self-improvement, mindset. 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

    Your plan for life failed, now what?

  8. 26 Jul

    Why does being self-aware not bring change?

    Topics include: self-awareness, nervous system regulation, attachment theory, psychology, emotional healing, behaviour change, trauma, anxiety, people-pleasing, and personal growth. The promised description link: https://unpackwithmehak.com/ Also, if you already know that the way you see yourself is affecting the way you’re living, and you’re actually ready to work on it, you can book Rebuild Your Self-Worth here 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 determin

    Why does being self-aware not bring change?

  9. 20 Jul

    Why making a decision is so difficult?

    Why is making decisions so hard? In this first episode of Things We Never Say, Mehak Chhabra explores the psychology of indecision, perfectionism, overthinking, and the fear of making the wrong choice. Through personal stories, psychological research, and practical frameworks, she explains why certainty is impossible, how the paradox of choice keeps us stuck, and why confidence comes after making a decision, not before. 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! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit unpackwithmehak.substack.com

    Why making a decision is so difficult?
  • 9 Episodes

About

Things We Never Say isn’t a collection of answers. It’s an investigation. An investigation into why we repeat patterns we already understand, why we make the decisions we do, and why being aware of ourselves isn’t always enough to change. It begins with questions I’ve lived through myself and grows with every book I read, every study I explore, every conversation I have, and every person I work with through 1:1 coaching. Everything works towards building a progressively more accurate understanding of what it means to be human. https://unpackwithmehak.com unpackwithmehak.substack.com

Information

  • Creator
    Unpack with Mehak
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    9
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Things we never say
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    Things we never say