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
