The Uncomfortable Truth About Life Most People Learn Too Late | Maya Shankar

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 0:00 Why is it that so many of us struggle with changes that we don't want and are often unexpected?

Dr. Maya Shankar 0:09 Yeah, and I should first say that I'm one of those people who feels a huge allergy to any sort of unexpected changes in my life. And so one of the reasons that I gravitated towards studying this topic is because I find unexpected change really scary. Um, and I don't always feel like I've done the best job of managing my emotions and understanding how to really extract any sense of possibility that sits within the change. There's a lot of reasons why unexpected change is destabilizing. One of the biggest ones is that change is filled with so much uncertainty, and our brains are not wired to like uncertainty. So one of my favorite research studies shows that we are more stressed when we're told we have a 50% chance of getting an electric shock than when we're told we have a 100% chance [laughs] of getting that shock. And so we'd rather be certain that a negative thing is gonna happen than to have to grapple with any ambiguity or uncertainty. And it sounds so silly, Rangan, but if you're like me, you resonate with this finding.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:13 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:13 I like knowing how the story ends. I like having a firm grip at the steering wheel. And so when the future is unknown to me, I start to get anxious, I start to ruminate, I start to over-plan, and it's very hard to sort of embrace the unknown.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:30 It's fascinating when you talk about that research study, and it very clearly demonstrates how much human beings like certainty in our lives. It made me think about the difference between GPs and specialists. So in medicine-

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:49 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:49 ... I used to think about this when I moved from specialism into general practice, and here in the UK, at least, in the National Health Service, if you're a specialist in a hospital, you have access to all kinds of tests, so in many ways you're able to get a higher degree of certainty when your patient comes in, whereas-

Dr. Maya Shankar 2:11 Mm

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 2:11 ... in general practice, you don't have access to all those tests. And so I've often wondered, and I haven't seen any research on this, whether primary care physicians and GPs are better able to manage uncertainty because they have fewer tests and they have to do that as part of their day-to-day job compared to specialists.

Dr. Maya Shankar 2:32 Oh, that's such a fascinating observation. Um, I really do think that tolerance for uncertainty is a muscle that we can all build, and one of my goals actually in writing The Other Side of Change was to learn to live more comfortably alongside uncertainty. And so I think your hypothesis may very well be true, which is that by virtue of not having all the information, they have to feel okay, uh, making recommendations or weighing in on certain treatment options without having the full picture and, and learning to calm their nervous systems even when, uh, they don't have that full information set.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 3:11 Yeah. Would you say that some people are better at navigating change than others, and if so, why do you think that is?

Dr. Maya Shankar 3:22 Yes. So it is definitely true that people who are more open-minded about what may come may navigate change better because they don't seek cognitive closure as much as the rest of us. So what is cognitive closure? It's the desire for clear, definitive answers, black and white answers. The challenge is that when we climb out of the rubble of a negative change in our lives, often all we see is gray space. [laughs] And so, um, we have to be a little bit more open-minded about what may come, and that can be adaptive. But the focus of my work is on figuring out, okay, aside from our natural dispositions, what can each of us do to increase our tolerance in the face of uncertainty so that we can be more resilient in the face of change no matter what our starting point is? And what I've learned is that a subtle shift in mindset can actually have a transformative impact on any given person's resilience. When a big change happens to us, it also leads to lasting change within us, and this is something that most people forget. So at the outset of a change, they might feel extremely daunted, thinking, "There is no conceivable way that I, Maya, am capable of navigating this harrowing change. I just don't have the skills, I don't have the abilities, I don't have the right perspectives or values or beliefs." But what I'm lacking to appreciate when I say that is that I will be changing as a result of this experience, and the person who will emerge on the other side of change will be different from the person I am today. Now, there's a cognitive bias that can often prevent us from realizing this. It's called the end of history illusion. So what does the end of history illusion say? It says that while we all fully appreciate we've changed considerably in the past, so if you were to ask me, you know, "Look at these photos of 10-year-old Maya or 20-year-old Maya. Do you feel that you're different today than you were back then?" I would say, "Of course, Rangan. [laughs] #cringe. This is horrible. [laughs] I thought we were friends. Why are you showing me this footage?" Um, but interestingly, if you were to ask me, "Well, how much do you plan to change moving forward?" I would say, "Oh, no, no, no, no. What you see is what you get."

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 5:42 Yeah.

Dr. Maya Shankar 5:42 "This is the finished product." And so researchers say that we strangely view the present as a watershed moment in which we have become the person we will be for the rest of our lives.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 5:55 Yeah.

Dr. Maya Shankar 5:55 And so what this does is that it limits our understanding of how we might transform moving forward, right? Because of course we are continuing to change, and the thesis of my book is that these massive anvil-sized changes that drop from the sky on a clear blue day accelerate these internal transformations.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 6:17 Yeah.I love that end of history illusion. It's so, so true, isn't it? That we can just reflect on our own lives in terms of, I guess, personal growth. You know, in our 20s, I thought I knew about the world. I thought I knew-

Dr. Maya Shankar 6:30 [laughs]

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 6:30 ... how I thought, what was going on, and you know, when I'm 30, I'll probably look back and go, "Wow, you were quite juvenile and naive back then," and-

Dr. Maya Shankar 6:38 100%.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 6:38 You know, and you keep doing that. But now of course at 48, I know the real deal about the world and how it all is. But of course, that, that denies the possibility and the probability that I am going to keep on changing as I progress in the world.

Dr. Maya Shankar 6:57 That's exactly right, and when we are thrust into a new reality filled with a new set of constraints, what it can do is reveal to us the beliefs that we have that were maybe previously hidden from view, capabilities that we didn't know we were c- we had in our possession. Um, new vantage points, new perspectives. By and large, the people that I interviewed for The Other Side of Change, and you know, you've read the book, they've been through harrowing changes, right?

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 7:29 Yeah.

Dr. Maya Shankar 7:29 Illness, heartbreak, loss, the discoveries of a, of a secret in their families, whatever it was. They're not necessarily happy that the change happened to them. Who would willingly invite loss or heartbreak into their lives? Very few people. But they're deeply grateful for the person that they became as a result of the change they went through. They tapped into newfound confidence, newfound freedom, a new way of seeing their families and their past, a new way of relating to people, just new ways of seeing themselves and the world around them, and their place in it. And all of them emerged with a new kind of enlightenment that really served them well, and a newfound understanding of who they were and who they are and who they can become.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 8:18 Yeah, the stories in the book are, are fabulous. In, in most of those stories we can see an element of ourselves, and I, so I thought that was a really nice way of trying to write this book and, and share these tools with us. I sort of think about some of the things you've said, right? You, you said about beliefs, how important, um, beliefs are, and I think one of my favorite chapters in the book is The Blank Slate. I think it's chapter five.

Dr. Maya Shankar 8:44 Yes.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 8:44 And you know, I'm, I'm fascinated by beliefs and how much our beliefs shape our reality. But of course, beliefs only hold true as long as we believe in them, right? The truth is the truth irrespective of whether we believe in it or not. But a belief only holds true as long as we subscribe to it, and a lot of us are walking around with beliefs that we've never, ever questioned before. And I think that chapter beautifully illustrates this idea that sometimes it takes an unwanted and unexpected change to be thrust upon your life for you to start questioning your beliefs.

Dr. Maya Shankar 9:28 One of the things I talk about in the book is change serving as revelation, and what's so interesting is that when a negative change happens to us, it can feel like a personal apocalypse of sorts. It can feel like the world that was once available to us is no longer in view. And apocalypse actually comes from the Greek word apokalypsis, and interestingly, that word means revelation. And so this etymology is really instructive.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 9:59 Mm.

Dr. Maya Shankar 9:59 Yes, change can upend us, but it can also reveal things to us that, as I was saying earlier, were previously hidden from view. Exactly as you said, we move about in this world carrying so many beliefs, and it's easy to believe that our belief systems reflect an immutable sacred truth about the world. But in actuality, so few of these beliefs we've actually interrogated over the course of our lives. It would be cognitively impossible to do that, right? Because we, we have so, so, so many beliefs, and we don't have the cognitive bandwidth to every day wake up and think, "Which belief should I interrogate today?"

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 10:39 Mm.

Dr. Maya Shankar 10:39 Um, not to mention that so many of these beliefs sit on a somewhat flimsy foundation. So many of them were born in childhood, right? Before our brains were fully developed. We were influenced by messages from caregivers or teachers or peers or popular culture or what we saw on TV. For kids these days, social media. And so we absorb these messages somewhat subconsciously and without really interrogating them through the ideal rational lens. And so what that means is that we may carry so many views that actually are self-limiting, that don't reflect reality, that are based on faulty information, but that, for example, if they were formed during childhood, were bound up in our sense of love and belonging. And so it almost feels too painful to dismantle some of those beliefs-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 11:33 Yeah

Dr. Maya Shankar 11:33 ... and to actually imagine a world in which we don't have them. And so I argue in the book that change can serve as a moment in which those beliefs are revealed to you, and then you can actually revisit them, assess them for their credibar- assess them for their credibility and merit, and then potentially move forward in a world in which you don't have those beliefs. And so in the story you describe with Ingrid, a bout of amnesia actually [laughs] reveals to her that she had been carrying all of this shame around her family's indigenous history and heritage. And it is through that experience of losing all of her memories, of having a blank slate, that she feels liberated and free for the first time. She has such an unusual experience with her amnesia. I, for one, would freak out if I had amnesia [laughs] but Ingrid feels this lightness of being, and it's because she's realizing in that moment, "Oh my God-All the shame that I was feeling around my family's history was such a burden for me. And now that I can see things anew without the anchors of my past, without all of these biases that informed my understanding of my family, the future looks so much more hopeful and so much more beautiful.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 12:44 Yeah. It was such an evocative story. I, I, I read it over quite a few times actually. You know, this young lady growing up in Colombia, and then she, she moves, I think, to America from recollection.

Dr. Maya Shankar 12:55 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 12:55 And she's, she's knocked over on her bike. And it was so striking because I think a lot of us, if we really thought about it, would go, "What would it be like if we woke up one day completely unburdened by the stories of the past?" So you, you know, you literally start existing fresh from today. And it was... You know, you just said it, she felt lighter. I, I remember I underlined that 'cause I thought, "Wow, she felt lighter after she shed her inner narrative." For many of us, that's kind of what forgiveness can do to us. You know, if we, if we're able to forgive, we, we feel lighter afterwards when we, when we let go of this emotional baggage that we're carrying around. So maybe you could continue the story because, you know, your book's called The Other Side of Change: Who We Become When Life Makes Other Plans.

Dr. Maya Shankar 13:48 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 13:48 Well, life made other plans for her with her bike crash, and she fundamentally changed-

Dr. Maya Shankar 13:54 Yes

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 13:54 ... as a consequence.

Dr. Maya Shankar 13:56 One thing that I love about Ingrid's story is that it shows that we can often misinterpret messages that we receive when we're younger. But because we haven't interrogated the belief in the first place, we never realize again how flimsy or faulty the foundation is. So as Ingrid was growing up, her mom would tell her, "Ingrid, you can never share our family stories with anyone outside the family because you might face the threat of violence or discrimination or any other sort of prejudice." And Ingrid's little mind interpreted that as, "Well, if I'm being told that I can't share something with the world, it probably means there's something bad about the thing I'm being told I shouldn't share." In actuality, though, Ingrid's mom was deeply proud of her Colombian heritage. She was just issuing an admonition to Ingrid because she wanted her daughter to be safe. It was really a practical piece of advice. And so when Ingrid has amnesia, and then again, the, the slate is wiped clean and these stories come back to her, but without the memory of her mom's admonition to never tell anyone about it, she's filled with utter delight around these stories. She thinks, "Oh my God, these are so beautiful and so magical." And when she's talking to her boyfriend that day, her boyfriend is thinking, "Why have you never shared these stories with me?" And Ingrid can't understand why, because she's filled with such awe and reverence and wonder for them. And then by the time the memory resurfaces, you know, her memories are coming back after the accident. When the memory resurfaces of her mom telling her, "Don't share this stuff," and she was reminded, "Oh my God, I'm ashamed of them," it's too late. She has already renewed her relationship with her family's heritage. She's already built a novel, beautiful relationship with her family's past. And so she rejects the shame element. In fact, she calls it like a block in the Jenga game, right?

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 15:49 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Maya Shankar 15:49 'Cause you were, you were posing the question that this chapter of the book surfaces, which is who would we be without a belief? And Ingrid uses this beautiful metaphor. She says, "Imagine having a game of Jenga," right? And that shame is just one block. And, and Ingrid learns that she can actually pull out that block, and the apparatus is still fully sturdy. It's still standing, but she actually feels freer. And so this invites all of us to question, what are the beliefs that I have about myself or the world around me or my family? Do I have really low self-esteem? Do I have low self-confidence that's not rooted in anything real? Do I have shame for something that happened in the past that I haven't been willing to talk about? Do I have resentment? Am I unwilling to forgive someone in my life? It just invites people to ask-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 16:38 Yeah

Dr. Maya Shankar 16:38 ... themselves. And then one of the things that I do towards the end of the chapter is that I give people science-based strategies that they can use to actually effectively interrogate their beliefs. So there's a lot of research in cognitive science around how to change other people's minds, and I'm really eager for us to turn those questions on ourselves so that we can change our own minds, because self-beliefs can be some of the hardest to change, right? When you, when you pull on one little thread of the tapestry of our belief system, the whole thing can feel unsturdy and very discomfiting. And so, um, I wanted to give people the confidence to know actually, it's okay to pull at a few threads. Um, the system can stay intact, and actually, there can be a tremendous amount of liberation that's accompanied by that.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 17:21 Yeah. As I was thinking about that chapter in Ingrid's story, I was really led to the conclusion that maybe one of the best things about change that we didn't plan for, that we didn't expect, maybe the best thing about it is that it forces us to think about updating our beliefs in a way that perhaps only change can. Now, you make the case-

Dr. Maya Shankar 17:48 Definitely

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 17:48 ... that there, there are, there are other things that you can do, right? But there is something revealing about change.

Dr. Maya Shankar 17:56 Yes.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 17:56 And it, it, a lot of it depends on the perspective you, you take on that situation, and that perspective, of course, can change over time. One of the things I've tried to do with my kids, Maya, over the last few years is help them realize that every situation in life has multiple interpretations. And it's, it's because that realization has had such a profound impact on me and how I navigate change over the last decade or so that I think, well, I've learned that in my kind of 40s-I've... Wouldn't it be cool to learn that when you're 12 years old? And, and, you know, the example that comes to mind that I have said on this podcast before is, I think it was after the summer holidays, my daughter, um, I think it was her second year in what you, I guess you guys would call high school, what we'd call secondary school here. Um, although it is now called high school, 'cause I think we're becoming more and more Americanized. But when-

Dr. Maya Shankar 18:56 Oh, no [laughs]

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 18:56 ... when I was a kid, it was, it was secondary school, right?

Dr. Maya Shankar 18:59 Keep your traditions. [laughs]

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 19:00 Yeah. But I, I remember a conversation with her about the classes were being changed around for some of the subjects. And, you know, there was this discussion at home, you know, "Am I still gonna be in, in that class with my friends?"

Dr. Maya Shankar 19:14 Hmm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 19:14 And I remember sitting down with her and I said, "Hey, darling, listen, of course you want to be in a class with your friends, but if you're not, what opportunities are being presented to you that would have never, ever been presented to you had that change not been made?" I think I said it a bit more eloquently than that, but in a-

Dr. Maya Shankar 19:37 That is so eloquent. What a gift you gave your daughter.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 19:40 Well, I hope so. Because, because... And I, and I thought about that example as I was going through your book because she... Well, I mean, what she said was, "Well, Daddy, I guess if I'm not in a class with my friends, I've got a chance to make new friends, and maybe I would never have spent the time trying to get to know them and talk to them if I'd been put in a class with my existing friends," right? And so my hope as a father is that I'm just ingraining in, in her and my son from a young age that situations are gonna present themselves to you in your life always that perhaps you don't want and you don't expect, but every situation has multiple interpretations. And can you train yourself over time, as hard as some of those situations might be, to look at them from different angles? And I guess that is a theme that, that sort of underpins The Other Side of Change is this idea that change is an opportunity. Change reveals things that perhaps would never have been re- revealed without it. And if you're smart about it and you use the techniques that you write about, change can sometimes be the best thing that ever happened to you.

Dr. Maya Shankar 20:56 I want to say again, um, what a gift you've given your daughter. Because to encourage flexibility of thinking from the time you're very young is one of the most powerful tools that a person can have as they navigate their life. I think, um, in many ways we discourage that kind of flexibility. We want kids to give us clear answers to things. We kind of lock them into certain ways of thinking, right? And cultivating that kind of mindset where you are willing to see situations from new perspectives and new angles, where you're willing to question your beliefs or assumptions, that kind of mindset will aid your daughter and your son for the rest of their lives. I wish I had actually built that muscle more when I was younger. [laughs] And so that's exactly right. So I really believe that we can come to see change not simply as something to endure, but as an opportunity to reimagine who

Dr. Maya Shankar 21:57 we can be. At the end of the day, The Other Side of Change is really a book about self-identity and exploration, and that was the gift that I got from interviewing the remarkable people that I profile in the book and then enduring a change of my own over the course of writing the book. It's so interesting because, to turn things personal for a moment, I, as I was interviewing people, the book took me three and a half years to write, my husband and I were navigating a change in our own lives. So long story short, uh, we had been trying to start a family for about six or so years at this point in time and had been unsuccessful, so we had faced many obstacles and disappointments and failures and, um, miscarriages with our surrogate. And I remember, Rangan, that even though I'd experienced formative changes as a child, for example, I was an aspiring concert violinist and then a hand injury ended those dreams in a moment, I felt so unprepared for this particular change. And I think one reason for that is, and I imagine many of your listeners can relate to this, I love being in control and I love being able to outwork the challenges in my life. So historically when I face setbacks, I just think, "Okay, how can I creatively overcome this? How can I find a workaround? I'll, I'll just work harder, and that way I'll get to the outcome that I'm after." When you're in the space of fertility, it is one of the most humbling spaces because the universe is indifferent towards how much you want something, how deep your desire is, how, quote, "hard" you're willing to work. And so you are forced to reckon with the true limits of your control and to surrender, in some ways, to the universe. And so as I was undergoing this whole experience, um, I still remember, to this whole discussion around belief systems, that on the night we found out that we had lost identical twin girls, um, I felt in many ways like it had threatened the entirety of who Maya was. It felt like my life turned from color to grayscale in a moment. And what that change in part revealed to me, which I don't know would've been revealed to me otherwise, as we've just talked about, is that-For s- whatever reason, maybe it was the influence of my Indian culture, or maybe it was through popular culture and the messages that I heard growing up, but I had come to believe that so much of my value and worth as a woman in this society needed to come from becoming a parent. And that required a lot of unpacking because I had to ask critically, who gave me that belief system, and do I really believe that's the right way of seeing things? Shouldn't it be the case that I think my life can be rich and full of color and meaning and purpose even in the absence of having children? And I talk about this evolution in the final chapter of the book. As I'm navigating these losses, I share, um, I tr- I sort of turn the mirror on myself because I had been in, you know, in, in investigating other people's change stories, but I felt I owed my reader my own experience of change and the lessons I'd learned from the people I interviewed. Um, but that was an incredible evolution that was occurring within me where I had to challenge my own belief systems in, when I was writing this book in my late 30s. And I think it was a testament to the fact that it's never too late for a change in your life to surface beliefs that have been so deeply entrenched. They, they may force you to go all the way back to when you're five years old or six years old, but it is still possible for those beliefs to be malleable enough to play around with, to question, to actually override.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 26:12 Thank you for sharing that. And, uh, first of all, I'm, I'm sorry you and your husband have been through such challenges when trying to start your own family. Also, I know you tried to give a shortened version of that story, but I know in the book you, you sort of go into a lot more detail how you really, really did from a young age take on this belief that what it means to be a woman in this world is to be a mother, and you wanted to be a mum, even as a, I think as a little girl and as a teenager.

Dr. Maya Shankar 26:42 Absolutely.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 26:43 It was, it was kind of something that you just thought would happen. I bet you probably never even questioned whether it would happen.

Dr. Maya Shankar 26:49 [laughs]

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 26:49 And it, you know, there, there are, there are a few cognitive biases that you speak to in the book. One you mention right at the start, this end of history illusion, but there's also the illusion of control, right? I guess you touched on it there. You were forced to, yes, I guess, confront your own belief systems, but also on a much broader scale, were forced to confront this idea that I can't control everything that happens to me in this world. And

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 27:19 one of the things I was hoping to talk to you about today, which perhaps now is a good time to bring up, is, is the death of my father. So when we talk about unexpected and unwanted changes, you know, divorce, relationship breakups, death, I guess, is one of the ultimate forms-

Dr. Maya Shankar 27:39 Absolutely

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 27:39 ... of change or ultimate types of change that we don't like. You know, many of us struggle to deal with the death of a loved one, understandably. But my whole relationship with my dad's death since it occurred in March 2013 has completely changed. You know, 12, almost 13 years in now, the situation is the same, right? The event has stayed the same. My dad died in March 2013. But my interpretation and my perspective on that s- situation is completely different from 12 years ago. And I, I think there's a lot of hope in that where even if we're struggling with some change right at the start, over time you can start to reinterpret that situation and look at it through a different lens. So now, Maya, without going into every bit of detail to do with it, I honestly now see my dad's death as a gift.

Dr. Maya Shankar 28:44 Wow.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 28:45 I see it as a gift my father gave to me. I, I moved back to the northwest of England after medical school to help my mum and my brother look after my dad. He was super unwell with lupus. He had kidney failure. And so for 15 years, our whole lives were around, uh, Dad and his care. And I think that I also used to suffer from the illusion of control bias.

Dr. Maya Shankar 29:11 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 29:11 So maybe I do a little bit to, to, to a degree now, but I think in a big way, if Dad was ever sick during that time, I would by hook or by crook sort the situation out. I'd get him to hospital. If he wasn't getting the right care, I'd get hold of the consult- I, I, I guess I had that belief that if I want it enough, I can sort it.

Dr. Maya Shankar 29:34 Yes.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 29:34 Whereas of course when he died, suddenly I'm confronted with this idea that, oh, you, you, you kind of can't control everything, right? That, you know... So, so I think my belief in that illusion was shattered-

Dr. Maya Shankar 29:49 Yes

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 29:49 ... when my dad died. And once it shattered, I think it then gets easier to start to look at change in a slightly different way. And, you know, why do I say to you that my dad's death I see as a gift? It's because the things I've learnt about myself, the person who I've become, the career I have today, I don't think any of those things would have happened-

Dr. Maya Shankar 30:15 Mm

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 30:15 ... if my dad was still alive. It doesn't mean I don't love my dad. It doesn't mean I don't wish my dad was still here. Yes, I do. And at the same time, I have chosen to believe, and that's the thing about beliefs, I'm not asking anyone else to believe that, but I have chosen to believe that actually, you know what? That's in many ways a gift that my father gave to me, and that helps me move on with my life and navigate that change. So I said quite a few things there, uh, Maya, and, um-Yeah, I w- I was just trying to, I guess, in some ways get your take on that because-

Dr. Maya Shankar 30:50 Yeah, absolutely

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 30:50 ... that is change, and I think that really does speak to some of these ideas in the book that, that change... You know, what did you say right at the start? You said, you know, "When an unexpected change happens to us, it can inspire lasting change within us." Well, that's what's happened through my dad's death.

Dr. Maya Shankar 31:10 Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing that. It's a, it's a deeply beautiful reflection, and I think it speaks to the overarching thesis of The Other Side of Change, which is that our relationship to the events in our lives is an ongoing dialogue. [laughs] It's an ongoing discussion. It is not fixed in stone, and I think you've seen that progression happen within yourself since your dad's death, right? The symbolism, the meaning it's taken on, the way that you think about the experience emotionally has shifted dramatically.

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Dr. Maya Shankar 34:37 I think my goal when writing this book was to show the power of even these small shifts in perspective. So let me rewind a little bit. I mentioned that I struggled for years and years, um, with the challenge of not starting a family. And in my moments of despair and frustration, there was this mantra that would kind of play in my head that I would hear from people, and I would see on social media, and that I knew was rooted in ancient wisdom, but for me, it rung hollow. It's the idea that while we can't change what happens to us, we can change how we respond to what happens. It is meant to be empowering, but in my state, in my compromised mental state, I had no idea how to actually execute-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 35:27 Mm-hmm

Dr. Maya Shankar 35:27 ... on this wisdom, on this guidance. It's not like there's a switch in my brain that I could just flip on that would suddenly make me feel more peaceful or more hopeful or more enlightened or more filled with a sense of possibility about what the future might hold. And so I desperately wanted to have a manual of sorts, a roadmap, some concrete strategies that I could use to actually feel and think differently about the changes that had happened in my life. And so that is why I actually wrote this book. It came from a deeply personal need to want to think and feel differently about the big changes in my life, but to not know how. And so I have written this book for people who are not just in the throes of change right now, but for people like you, Rangan, who are maybe looking to change their relationship with a past event to see it differently, and also who are anxious about a future change, right? Are trying to renew their relationship with change altogether so that they can try and extract whatever meaning or possibility might lie within it. And so I went on this journey to find the most exceptional stories of change-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 36:46 Mm

Dr. Maya Shankar 36:46 ... that I could worldwide, but importantly, to find stories-That had a universal lesson that lay within them. So one of the things I love that you shared earlier on in this conversation that I wanted to comment on is that you found resonance in the... You found personal resonance in the stories in this book, despite the fact that they cover so much terrain-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 37:10 Mm

Dr. Maya Shankar 37:10 ... so much ground. There's such a diverse set of stories, and I imagine that many of the actual experiences that my subjects went through are not experiences that you have gone through. And that was another really important lesson I wanted to capture in this book, which is that we are often instructed by others and by society to look for people in moments of stress who have gone through experiences that look like our own.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 37:38 Mm.

Dr. Maya Shankar 37:38 So for example, "Oh, you're going through a divorce? Oh, I have a friend who went through a divorce. You should talk to them. Oh, you're navigating a loss? Oh, go to the bereaved section of the bookstore. Oh, you're, you're navigating an illness? Oh, here's a support group of other people who are going through illness." It is absolutely true that you can extract insight from those whose stories look like yours, but my argument as a cognitive scientist is that we all have a shared psychology. The stuff of change actually looks quite similar irrespective of the specifics of what we're navigating. We often are bristling at the unfairness of the world. We're grieving a past that is no longer available to us. We're anxious about our self-identities and who we can be in this new world. Maybe we're resentful. Maybe we're struggling to forgive someone. And so if the stuff of change is similar, then you can imagine that the solution set is gonna be similar, too, right? Problem statement, solution set. And so I remember having this insight first when I was interviewing a cancer patient and a woman who found out that her late husband had had a decades-long affair and was realizing, "Oh my gosh, they're both navigating this deep feeling of betrayal." And so there was so much more that connected their stories than people might have thought. And so it touches me deeply, I just wanted to say as an author, when you tell me that you found resonance in each of the stories, right? Even though one woman's locked, has locked-in syndrome, and another person has amnesia, and another person, you know, has this terrible accident. Those are not necessarily things that-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 39:14 Yeah

Dr. Maya Shankar 39:14 ... remind you of your own life, but the psychological lessons are universal, and there's something to learn from everyone's story. And I love this message because during a time of deep division and disconnection worldwide, it is a way of feeling closer to our fellow-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 39:29 Yeah

Dr. Maya Shankar 39:29 ... humans, to remember that there is so much more that unifies us, um, than may separate us in this particular domain.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 39:38 One of the stories that resonated with me the most really speaks to that idea. Duane, who has been in prison, right?

Dr. Maya Shankar 39:48 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 39:48 I've not been in prison, yet his struggle and the way he had to reimagine a future self for him compared to the self that he had previously imagined was so beautiful, particularly when you bring in that concept of moral elevation. So yeah, maybe talk to me about Duane a little bit and, and tell us-

Dr. Maya Shankar 40:13 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 40:13 ... what we can learn from Duane's story.

Dr. Maya Shankar 40:16 Psychologists have this notion of possible selves, and they come in three forms. There are hoped-for selves, which reflect our dreams and aspirations. There are feared selves, which reflect our worries and anxieties. And then there are our expected selves, which reflect our expectations of what is likely to happen, good or bad.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 40:39 Mm.

Dr. Maya Shankar 40:39 So yes, maybe I want to be Taylor Swift one day, but more likely than not, Rangan, I'm gonna be a cognitive scientist in 10 years, okay? So I think so many of us can relate to the experience of an unexpected change coming our way and many doors closing that were once open to us. This is exactly what happened to Duane Betts. So when Duane was 16, he was sentenced to nine years in adult prison for a carjacking that he committed. He had had such a promising future. He was voted class treasurer. He was identified as talented and gifted. He was hoping to study engineering at Georgia Tech. He was such a devoted and loving son to his mother, and yet one evening, he was so eager to prove his strength and machismo to the boys in his neighborhood, and so he committed this horrible crime. As you can imagine, Duane experienced his world shrink in that moment, right? So all of these futures that he had once imagined for himself were no longer accessible, and Duane describes the fact that he wasn't just mourning the loss of those future selves. He was also so fearful of who he might become within the walls of prison. He worried for the first time, "Am I gonna develop a gambling addiction? Am I going to become an addict? Am I going to become violent? Am I gonna be able to protect myself from violence?" All of these thoughts were swirling around in his mind. And what research shows, Rangan, is that we can actually needlessly constrain ourselves when it comes to imagining what the future can hold for us, even in our newly constrained environments, and that's because we have all sorts of prejudices. We have all sorts of stereotypes that we attach to certain roles or labels in this world. So we might have limited, we might have a very limited understanding of the kinds of futures that are available to a high school dropout or a teen mom or a caregiver or someone with a chronic illness, or in Duane's case, someone who is incarcerated.And one of the ways that we can actually crack open our imagination of what we are capable of in our new environment is this concept of moral elevation. Moral elevation is the warm, fuzzy feeling we get in our chests when we witness someone else's extraordinary behaviors or actions.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 43:17 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Maya Shankar 43:18 So that might be their courage or kindness or self-sacrifice or wisdom or fortitude or resilience or ability to forgive others. Whatever outstanding character trait it is, this can inspire this warm feeling within ourselves. But really critically, moral elevation doesn't just make us feel good about humanity, it actually rewires our brains, and that's because in witnessing other people violate our expectations, our understanding of what humans are capable of in the best way possible, it actually cracks open our own imagination about what we are capable of. And so going back to Dwayne's story, it was actually an experience of moral elevation that completely changed the trajectory of Dwayne's life. Dwayne encountered a fellow prisoner named Bilal about a year or so into his time in prison, and Bilal, in Dwayne's mind, defied his understanding of what it meant to be a prisoner and how you had to be in order to survive prison. Dwayne had believed that you needed to be ruthlessly self-interested, that you had to keep all your cards close to the chest, that you had to be a certain way. But Bilal acted in ways that defied this. He went out of his way to protect the younger prisoners. He taught them how to box to protect themselves from the threat of violence in prison. He actively played a mentorship role for the younger boys. He woke up an hour or two before count time and did 250 pushups in his prison cell even be- before the guards came by. He would iron his prison uniform every single morning. He made sure that he was clean-shaven each and every day. Dwayne says that Bilal carried himself like a man in uniform, that he showed Dwayne what it meant to be lovely. And by the way, those words still [laughs] give me tingles when I hear them. Um, to Dwayne, Bilal showed him that maybe he didn't have to be a certain way just because he was a prisoner. Maybe there were other futures available to him.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 45:31 Yeah.

Dr. Maya Shankar 45:32 And so it was with this empowered mindset that when Dwayne encountered a book of poetry in his prison cell a couple weeks later and read one poem in particular that spoke to the experience of young boys of color in the prison system, Dwayne, for the first time, realized, "Hey, wait, maybe I could be a poet. I can't do what Bilal does for the younger boys in prison. I'm, I'm not strong. I don't know how to box. I can't protect them in that way, but I can dignify their experiences through writing," which was a gift that he knew he had. Fast-forward a few decades. Today, Dwayne is a graduate of Yale Law School. He's a MacArthur Genius Prize winner, and he writes some of the most beautiful, stirring poetry that I've ever read that dignifies the experiences of young men of color in the prison system. And he credits this entire transformation to that one experience of moral elevation that he had within the walls of prison, and I just find that to be such a beautiful, moving story because moral elevation is something that is available to all of us. It is actually all around us all the time if we are just intentional and we are observant-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 46:47 Mm

Dr. Maya Shankar 46:47 ... and we put our phones down and we just witness the world around us.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 46:51 It's such a beautiful story. I, I love it because it made me think that as well as helping someone like Dwayne or helping us navigate change, I think we can also flip it, Maya, and, and think about our- ourselves and go, "Well, the way we conduct ourselves is really, really important because-

Dr. Maya Shankar 47:10 Mm-hmm

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 47:10 ... you never know when someone's going to witness you doing an act of kindness, acting in alignment with your values, doing the right thing when it would be easy to do the wrong thing or the dishonest thing. Like, it's very, very inspiring. It makes me want to be a better person when I hear stories like that.

Dr. Maya Shankar 47:34 Me too. [laughs] Um, and I wanna share that one of my favorite aspects of moral elevation is that it does transcend circumstances and the specific thing you're trying to improve within yourself.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 47:47 Yeah.

Dr. Maya Shankar 47:47 So you might witness an extraordinary act of forgiveness in someone else, and you might not be looking to forgive someone in your life, but maybe inspires you to expand your sense of empathy for others. Maybe it leads you to be a kinder person. Maybe it inspires you to be a more resilient person. And so the impact as far as it... the impact is, can be widespread when it comes to you and your life overall, and I love that because I might just be walking down the street, or I might be at the coffee shop, and I witness a barista's kindness to one of the-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 48:20 Yeah

Dr. Maya Shankar 48:20 ... patrons who's obviously having a bad day. And then maybe I go to work, and again, it's not necessarily kindness that this experience of moral elevation leads me to tap into, but it's some other character trait, um, that it leads me to tap into. And so the effect is profound, and I have really made it a point to try and welcome moral elevation into my life each and every day-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 48:45 Yeah

Dr. Maya Shankar 48:46 ... because I have found it to be omnipresent, and it is a wonderful counterforce to all the negativity that we experience when we turn on the news, when we read the newspaper, right?We just get bombarded by the worst of humanity-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 49:00 Yeah

Dr. Maya Shankar 49:01 ... sometimes when we engage in those experiences. And to know that we can reclaim some of our optimism and our hope and our joy about the future of humanity from these everyday moments, from these small, seemingly small moments in the life of someone else, but it has a profound outsize impact on the recipient, on the observer of that action, it, it-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 49:23 Yeah

Dr. Maya Shankar 49:23 ... it is profound. Um, it, it's beautiful.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 49:26 I guess what Duane, or one of the things Duane saw in Bilal was, even though I'm in prison, and even there's many people around me who are being aggressive and are not being nice and, you know, are adapting to try and survive in this situation, I don't have to end up like that. And the reason I know that is because Bilal hasn't ended up like that.

Dr. Maya Shankar 49:53 That's exactly right. Duane says at one point, "Bilal was saying, 'This is my identity.'" And what I love about that quote is it reminds us we actually each have agency in our new environments. We can choose who we want to be. We can reject the stereotypes, the cultural expectations of us, what society thinks we are destined to become. And we can carve our own path and say, "No, I'm resisting whatever norms might exist out there, whatever expectations might exist, and I'm deciding this is who I'm going to be right now." And I love that sense of empowerment so much, because while I would love to say that I wrote this book and on the other side I'm thinking, "I don't need control anymore in my life. I'm good. I've achieved a Buddhist-like state," of course, I still want to feel control. And at a minimum, what I'm hoping The Other Side of Change does is it c- allows people to reclaim the agency they still have in their new, their new circumstances. So yes, they can't change the cancer diagnosis. They can't change the loss of someone. They can't change the loss of a job. They can't change that, um, maybe there was a betrayal by a friend. But what I'm arguing is that they can change what's up in here through these science-backed strategies or reframes or perspective shifts-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 51:17 Yeah

Dr. Maya Shankar 51:17 ... or thought experiments.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 51:20 You shared in that chapter your own experience of moral elevation when, I think it was the shooting of Nadine Collier's mum, and-

Dr. Maya Shankar 51:29 Correct

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 51:30 ... you saw her, I think on television, say, I think to the killer, "You took something precious from me, but I forgive you." It was, it w- again, it was one of those where you, you stop reading and go, "Wow." It, it shows you, it inspires you to know what people are capable of. Her mother has been murdered, and yet still very soon after, she's able to forgive the killer, despite what has been done, right? So it's very, very inspiring. What do you think witnessing that act of moral elevation did for you?

Dr. Maya Shankar 52:11 Yes, this was in response to the horrific shooting at Mother Emanuel Church in South Carolina. Um, and as you mentioned, the daughter of one of the victims extended forgiveness to the racist killer in the courtroom. And I was so moved by Nadine's capacity for forgiveness. I mean, it was stunning to me. I mean, to, to this day reflecting on that experience I, I get chills through my spine and my brain almost struggles to assimilate that information. I feel like I have to... In fact, this is what moral elevation does. It, it forces you to update your mental models of what humans are capable of.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 52:56 Yeah.

Dr. Maya Shankar 52:57 And I would say that what Nadine did for me through her example is inspired me to think I am capable of so much more than I've currently given to humanity and to others. That whatever I believe my limits are when it comes to empathy or kindness or compassion or f- or forgiveness, raise the bar significantly, Maya [laughs] because that is what Nadine has shown you is possible. And so you carry that with you. And the thing about moral elevation is you don't know when it will play out. You don't know when that influence will r- will reveal itself. Um, but then as you live your life, you realize, oh, in this moment I'm being asked to show more compassion than I might be comfortable with, but I have Nadine now in the back of my head-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 53:50 Yeah

Dr. Maya Shankar 53:50 ... reminding me that I actually am capable of more compassion.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 53:54 Yeah.

Dr. Maya Shankar 53:54 Right? Or maybe I need to show more patience than I'm, I feel I'm capable of showing. I'm a fairly impatient person, and I think, "No, no, no, you actually are capable of more patience."

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 54:04 Yeah. I love that. In, in my last book, Maya, I sort of tried to examine what a hero really is to us, and one of the things I concluded is that when we see someone who we regard as a hero or someone who really, really inspires us, often it's because they reflect back to us something that we know we have within us.

Dr. Maya Shankar 54:29 Hmm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 54:29 So instead of worshiping the totality of who that person is, it's trying to go, what, what is it this person is reflecting back to me that I know if I can cultivate it, I can bring out of me as well? And it, it kind of reminds me a little, a little bit about that. Do, do you think, Maya, one of the reasons we like films so much as a society, right? And of course, there's different types of films, but often in films-There is an uplifting component. You know, the hero does something truly wonderful, right? They, they do the right thing, not the easy thing. Is that an example of moral elevation and why perhaps we're drawn to these feel-good films?

Dr. Maya Shankar 55:15 Yeah. It's so interesting you mention that because some of the research that I did for this book explores the role that fiction broadly plays in cracking open our imagination about what is possible for us. So it is sometimes hard to invite moral elevation into your life at exactly the moment you need it, right? And so I do advise people, reflect on the past, because you might actually have moments of moral elevation you've already experienced that could be helpful to you in this moment. But you can't exactly manufacture or you can't engineer that, the moment of, of inspiration that you need right now. And so what you can do, actually, is read fiction, or I think the same insight would apply to watching movies. Researchers call fiction an identity laboratory, and that's because when we read about other people, or in your case with the film, we watch other people, we effortlessly blend our self-identities with the character-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 56:13 Mm-hmm

Dr. Maya Shankar 56:13 ... that we're reading about. And what this allows us to do is cultivate a psychologically safe space in which we can embody new personality traits, we can make maybe more risky decisions than we would otherwise feel comfortable making in our everyday life. We can try on for size different ways of being and moving about in this world and see what it feels like via this character or via our own imagination. And so I think you're e- you're exactly, you're spot on. When we witness these beautiful acts in other people or when we just witness them making decisions that might not look like our own, it just pokes a little hole-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 56:53 Yeah

Dr. Maya Shankar 56:54 ... in our minds. It thinks, "Oh, wait a second, I kind of always thought that I would need to do X in circumstance Y. But maybe that's not the case. Maybe I could take a few more risks. Maybe I could make different decisions than I'm used to making, and actually it would lead to great returns." And so I encourage people to, in moments of inflection, actually just pick up a fiction book. [laughs]

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 57:17 Yeah.

Dr. Maya Shankar 57:17 And what a delight, 'cause a lot of people love reading fiction. It turns out that there's huge cognitive science benefits to doing that, um, because again, we get to explore new sides of ourselves without the risk that we might endure in everyday life.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 57:29 Yeah. It makes me think that moral elevation or witnessing these acts of courage and just, frankly, exquisite moral beauty can impact us in a, in a, in, in a couple of different ways. You, you write about it in the book as a way of helping us deal with change. So Dwayne is struggling with his new scenario in life that he's in prison, and witnessing this helps him navigate his change better. But as you were just talking then I thought, "Yeah, but it works the other way as well, doesn't it?" We may not be looking for change. We may just be going about our day-to-day life and existing, and witnessing moral elevation can actually inspire us to change.

Dr. Maya Shankar 58:13 [laughs] Exactly.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 58:14 So it can help us deal with unwanted change, but it can also inspire us to, I guess, choose a different path of change for us. So it's, it's quite interesting to explore, isn't it, how, how it affects us on multiple different levels.

Dr. Maya Shankar 58:31 Yes, the bidirectional impact. I, I love that you've just said this, Rangan, because one of my secret hopes for this book was that, yes, it would help people who are navigating unexpected change, but I really wanted it to help people who are resistant to change or are maybe just a little too-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 58:46 Yeah

Dr. Maya Shankar 58:46 ... comfortable with the status quo, aren't looking for any big shifts. I've, I'm in that current phase in my life. I'm like, "Please, nothing. I would just like to [laughs] maintain, uh, business as usual, thank you very much, universe." And yet we would actually benefit from inspiring a change in our own life, and we just need a little bit of that kick in the butt in order to make it happen. And it's been a joy, actually, to hear from readers of the book who said, "I wasn't looking to inspire any change, but then I read Dwayne's story," or, "I read Tara's story," or, "I read Ingrid's story, and they actually inspired me to initiate-"

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 59:24 Yeah

Dr. Maya Shankar 59:24 ... "a new change in my life." That maybe that was changing a job or changing the relationship they're in or, um, revisiting parts of their past that they never thought to revisit that they felt were holding them back. I actually just heard from... Oh my God, I, I just got this, this, um, essay from a, a reader last night. Um, he had unexpectedly lost his wife just 18 months ago, and reading the book led him to write who, wr- reflect on who he's become on the other side of change. And what was so beautiful about the essay that he wrote was that he didn't simply say, "This is how I'm rethinking my relationship with my grief or this experience," but he had all of these goals for who he wanted to become moving forward. New d- and one of them was about, like, career shifts and how this might inform his next business ventures and his relationships with his kids and-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:00:17 Yeah

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:00:18 ... I, I just found that so, uh, such a beautiful expression, again, and one of my secret hopes for the book, and I was hoping to achieve that, but I, I was, you know, obviously very humble about it. [laughs] I didn't know whether it would have that effect. So yeah, I just-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:00:29 Oh

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:00:29 ... I just love your observation.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:00:30 That's, that's wonderful to hear that it's already having such an impact on people. One of the biggest changes I've made over the past few months is to start each day using The Way, and I absolutely love it. Meditation has so many benefits for our physical health and our mental wellbeing, but only if we actually do it, and that's one of the reasons I love this app so much. It makes it really easy to establish a meditation practice that sticks.One of the most unique things about The Way is that it is a meditation app with no choice. They understand that too much choice is stressful and can lead to procrastination and indecision. So with The Way, you only ever have one choice, which makes things really easy. Just open the app, follow the path, and your transformation will unfold. Now, there's no question that for me, using The Way every morning has helped me feel calmer, more relaxed, and it's also broadened my perspective on life and what is truly important. The creator of the app is Henry Shukman, a Zen master who has the most wonderful and relaxing voice. So if you think 2026 is finally going to be the year where you start and stick to a meditation practice, I'd highly encourage you to check out The Way. And to give you a little extra motivation, The Way is offering my listeners 30 free sessions to get you started with your practice. That is a fantastic offer. What have you got to lose? To take advantage, either scan the QR code on screen or go to thewayapp.com/livemore and begin your journey towards peace, calm, and purpose. I wanna talk about rumination in just a moment because I think that's something that people really, really struggle with and often go to-

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:02:32 Oh my gosh, yes

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:02:32 ... when dealing with an unexpected change. But before we go there, though, I just wanna revisit the topic of death for a moment because this idea that our beliefs have a huge impact on how we deal with change was really brought home to me early on in my career as a family practice doctor, so as a GP. I remember so well, one morning, this young couple came in, um, for their appointment, and their baby boy had died over the weekend.

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:03:09 Oh my God.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:03:10 At, you know, I think it was two or three months old. I, I, I can't remember the exact details now. But the thing I remember from that consultation is that they had very strict religious beliefs, and they said to me ... They were clearly upset. They were tearful. But they said to me this was God's will.

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:03:39 Hmm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:03:41 Now, to me at the time it was, it was quite confronting to hear that, I guess. You know, I, I, I've reflected on it a lot since then, Maya, and I, I thought about it again whilst reading your book because I thought, I think their belief, their strong belief in something greater than their existence helped them navigate arguably one of the most harrowing human experiences.

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:04:10 Hmm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:04:10 Because I, I saw them a few times over the, the, over the next few months and years and, and, and I, I guess the question I have for you is what role do you think having a belief in something greater, whether that's religion or spirituality or, you know, something else, what role do you think that plays in our ability to navigate change?

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:04:38 I think irrespective of whether we are religious or not or spiritual or not, we are natural-born storytellers. We want to create narratives-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:04:51 Yeah

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:04:52 ... out of our experiences because it can just be mentally devastating to really confront the idea that the universe can be so indiscriminately cruel and callous towards people who simply don't deserve it.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:05:08 Hmm.

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:05:08 You know, there's a psych- psychological concept called belief in a just world, and I think we all gravitate towards that belief, or most of us do, because it is so uncomfortable to think that the universe is kind of indifferent towards whether we're good people or bad people, right? It's so comforting to think that good things will happen to good people and bad things will happen to bad people, or that there is a larger plan. There is some way of explaining away injustice. And so I think each person has a different way of explaining away the injustice. For me personally, um, I fall back on the science of the mind and human psychology to try to figure out, well, I don't believe things happen for a reason personally, um, but that doesn't mean that I don't want to extract as much meaning and value as there is to extract from the hardest moments of my life. And so I still engage in that narrative making, you know?

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:06:05 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:06:05 I still engage in trying to construct meaning out of things. And, um, I respect any way that a person is able to achieve that end goal, you know? Um-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:06:17 Yeah

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:06:17 ... but it just looks different for each, for every one of us.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:06:20 Yeah. I, I think what that situation taught me is that everyone's entitled to navigate the world in whichever way they see fit. You know, if that helps someone navigate adversity, who am I to say that's good or bad? In fact, I wasn't trying to do that. It was just very interesting for me to observe it and go, "Wow, that is amazing." Maybe-

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:06:46 Yeah, absolutely. [laughs]

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:06:47 Maybe one of the reasons that in Western society we struggle so much today at dealing with change is because we've become more secular and less religious.

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:07:02 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:07:02 Right? And, and I'm, I'm just-Again, I'm not trying to come down on either side, say one's better than the other. Not at all. It's just simply when you do have a strong belief system, it probably helps you navigate [laughs]

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:07:14 Oh, absolutely. I mean, my uncle and aunt, for example, in India are deeply religious, and I can see, um, how differently they engage with trauma o- and, and negative events. They really do believe that it is part of a bigger plan for them and that it is God's will. And they... Whereas I'm, you know, I'm engaging in all of this stress and anxiety around it, they... I, I feel like my uncle and aunt are able to reach acceptance so much more quickly.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:07:47 Yeah.

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:07:48 Um, radical acceptance that remains elusive to me, um, to this day. Um, and so absolutely, I mean, I witness it all the time-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:07:57 Yeah

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:07:57 ... just within my own family.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:07:58 It's interesting 'cause you say that. The book is full of these science-backed strategies, and we're, we're gonna get to some of them shortly, right? So you, you, you've, you've done a lot of the research. You show what the research has demonstrated and how we can apply it in our lives. But I guess what I think about is the moments when you wrote about your own father, and there's two points in your life-

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:08:21 Hmm

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:08:21 ... I think before you went to college, after you've had to give up the dream of being a professional concert violinist, where he gives you some quite sage advice that was perhaps not based on science, but based on-

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:08:33 Totally

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:08:33 ... his wisdom, but that also massively helped you. Like that moment when he took you to the cemetery.

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:08:39 Yeah. It's so funny 'cause when I was reflecting just now, um, on my life as a cognitive scientist, right? Undergrad, PhD, post-doc. I was trained in empirical methods, right? And so in some sense, the academic community in that sphere would say, "Oh, why are we talking about stories? Why are we talking about narrative? That's diluting the strength of the recommendation." And I have totally changed my tune on that front. So when I first started my podcast, A Slight Change of Plans, back in 2021, I w- it was like being hit by a freight train in terms of the power of marrying science and storytelling to help us extract the most value, the most benefit, um, when it comes to navigating change. And so I'm such a firm believer that is the intersection of these two spheres-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:09:35 Hmm

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:09:36 ... that leads to maximum insight. And for that reason, when I was even thinking about writing this book, I wanted it to be narrative first. I really believe that it is in people's... it is in reading people's stories that we feel truly transformed. And yes, the science is really nice, and I wanted to give people some structure so that, you know, as you know, at the end of the book, I give people a, quote, "change survival kit."

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:10:03 Yeah.

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:10:03 I want them to have a guide when they're navigating change in their own life. But importantly, I really wanted them to internalize these lessons. And I felt that myself. You know, I'm, I'm aware of the concepts, the scientific concepts I write about in the book, but it was only in going on the journey with Olivia, with Dwayne, with Ingrid, with Matt, that I started to truly practice [laughs] some of the science in my own life. So I think the narrative component is so, so important. I wanted to share a little bit more about the violin experience because I feel like I did learn some really valuable insights from that experience, some of it only recently, and then, like you said, from my dad. So from the time I was six, my life really centered around the violin. Um, my mom went up to our attic and brought down my grandmother's violin that she had played as a young girl living in India and in Burma. And I was so close to my grandmother. Um, when we would go to India, uh, over the summers, she and I were just inseparable. You know, I'd sleep next to her on the linoleum floor. We would f-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:11:12 Yeah

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:11:12 ... we would fold up sari cloth that would serve as our pillows. I would sit next to her in the prayer room as she prayed for hours and hours, and I would try to simulate her rocking motions and her prayer position. I would stand next to her and tug at her sari when she was cooking delicious Indian food. Um, and so I think that when my mom brought down this violin and my three older siblings rejected it, I, because I felt so close to my Pati, to my maternal grandmother, said, "Yes, I wanna play this instrument." And the connection was instant, Rangan. So even though I was so little, my parents never had to really tell me to practice, which was kind of extraordinary. I mean, I mean, they had to tell me to do all sorts of other things, but my love of music was, was really visceral. And when I was nine, I auditioned for the Juilliard School of Music in New York, and I started going there every weekend from Connecticut to New York. So I would get up at 4:30 in the morning, take a train to New York. I would have 10 hours of classes, come home at night, and I started to develop big dreams of becoming a professional. And then when I was a teenager, the renowned violinist, Itzhak Perlman, invited me to be his private violin student, and that was really the vote of confidence I felt I needed to believe that I could actually make it in this-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:12:28 Hmm

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:12:28 ... fiercely competitive world. You know, as you can imagine, I had a lot of imposter syndrome [laughs] operating in this very elite circle, and I, I never really knew if, if I had what it, what it took. Um, and so everything was going according to plan until I had my slight change of plans. Um, I overstretched my pinky finger playing a, a note in a very challenging piece, and I damaged tendons in my hand. And despite months and then years of resistance and denial and stubbornness and experimental treatments and surgeries and physical therapy and cortisone injections and anti-inflammatories-I was unable to heal, and so doctors finally told me, "Look, your dream is over. You really need to stop playing." And there was something so curious about my grief, which was that of course I was grieving the loss of the instrument, but I really felt like I was grieving the loss of myself in this more foundational way. It felt like in losing the vi- violin, I had lost Maya.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:13:39 Mm.

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:13:39 And I think sometimes in our lives we don't realize how much something has come to define us until we lose it.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:13:45 Mm.

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:13:45 But so much of who I was was entangled with the violin. My sense of meaning and purpose, my sense of self-confidence and value, my sense of belonging. You know, I was one of a few Brown kids in a predominantly Caucasian community, and, um, I was bullied by the girls in my neighborhood, but when I was at music school, which was more international, I felt warmly embraced.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:14:10 Yeah.

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:14:10 I felt like my peers loved me and, and appreciated me and valued me. And so it was a more devastating loss than I think I could have imagined, um, if you had told me earlier that you once... you might one day lose the violin. And it's taken me now decades to learn the lesson I'm about to share, but I really hope it's, it's helpful to, to listeners of your podcast. It can be quite precarious for us to anchor our self-identity to what we do, and that's because life can take away that what in an instant, as I experienced myself, right? I went from being a violinist to not being a violinist just like that. And instead, I have learned to anchor my self-identity t- to, to why I do something. So what do I mean by this? I asked myself, what is it that I loved about playing the violin? And I realized that at its core was a deep need for human connection. That is what made me tick. I loved feeling close to my fellow musicians, to members of my audience, to everyone that was in my musical orbit, and music was this beautiful vehicle through which I could achieve that deep emotional connection with other people. And just because I lost the violin did not mean that I lost what led me to love it in the first place. That part of Maya was actually still very much intact, and it could serve as a compass of sorts to help guide me towards my next steps. I mean, at the time I wasn't aware. I wasn't thinking about, you know, why versus what and how that might constitute my self-identity, but it turns out that I naturally gravitated towards pursuits that fed this deep part of me.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:15:59 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:15:59 I, in, in starting my podcast, A Slight Change of Plans, it was all about forging deep emotional connections with humans from my closet in my apartment building, you know? But talking with people about their incredible stories of change all over the world. And then writing The Other Side of Change, in which I interviewed people over the course of years. You know, dozens and dozens of hours probing their life stories and narratives. That was also feeding this deep desire for emotional connection. And so I now see myself as the kind of person who thrives when in conversation with others, who loves the feeling of being deeply connected to other people, and life can't actually take that passion away from me. And so when I think about my self-identity now, it feels more resilient to change. It feels more durable and long-lasting-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:16:52 Mm

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:16:52 ... and, and that even if life takes away my ability to be a writer, to be a podcaster, there will still be other outlets through which I can express this part of myself. And so I would encourage people who are listening to ask themselves, what is their why? What makes them love doing the things they love? Maybe it's a love of service or a love of learning, or seeing themselves improve at a craft, or maybe it's having a creative outlet. If you can define yourself in that way, then you have this durable, robust self-identity that will persist even if you're navigating a big change.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:17:33 Yeah. It's a great way of looking at things. You know, what you, what you do, it's just a role that you play. It's not who you are.

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:17:44 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:17:44 Right? And I've heard you once say that you don't like it when adults ask children the question, "What do you want to do when you grow up?" Uh, did I get that right?

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:17:59 [laughs]

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:17:59 You're not a fan of that question?

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:18:00 Yeah. I just think that we are re-emphasizing that the what is what is, is-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:18:05 Yeah

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:18:05 ... what's gonna last and be important, when I w- I wanna also ask kids, "Who do you wanna be when you grow up? What kind of person? What are your values? What's gonna matter to you? Do you wanna give back to others? Do you want a life in which you're constantly intellectually stimulated? Do you wanna be an adventurer?" I want people to think about personality and character traits and how they might cultivate those.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:18:28 Yeah.

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:18:28 And if you don't mind me asking, I'm, I'm curious to know, when it comes to this brilliant podcast that you have, what is your why? What do you think motivates you, such that if I, if I were to tell you, "I'm so sorry, Rangan, but the podcast is gonna go away tomorrow," what that why would be and, and other outlets through which you might feed that passion?

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:18:51 That's a great question. It's not one I've thought about before. Um, I would say what this podcast does for me is feeds what I consider to be a core value of mine, which is curiosity.

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:19:10 Mm. I love that.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:19:11 So I-I'm a very curious person. I think I've always been. Frankly, I think everyone actually is. Uh, but I think it sometimes gets schooled out of us. But I certainly believe myself to be a very curious person, and I feel that this podcast allows me to explore that curiosity in the most wonderful way. And I have thought long and hard over the last eight years as to how and why I pick guests.

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:19:40 Hmm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:19:40 As podcasting's become more and more popular and people are starting podcasts as good business ventures, and they have teams who, you know, monitor algorithms and choose guests who are gonna perform, I'm aware of all of that, and I, I rebel against it and go, "That's great for other podcasters who wanna play that game. It's not the game I want to play." I choose every single guest on this show. I research the guest myself. It is my way of exploring my own curiosity. Not only do I think that contributes to the quality of the conversation, I think it also contributes to longevity and, and, and why I still love doing this eight years on.

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:20:26 Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:20:26 'Cause I'm not doing it for an external metric. I'm doing it for an internal metric, which is my own curiosity. So the next part of your question is, um, you know, if, if it disappeared overnight, how would I still feed that value? And it's, it's a great question. I, I would miss it, sure.

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:20:50 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:20:50 Right?

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:20:50 Of course.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:20:51 Um, or if AI takes over and nobody ever needs-

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:20:54 [laughs]

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:20:54 ... now real podcasts anymore, and I, I know, you know, you've got a wonderful podcast yourself. Um, there's many ways I can do it. You know, I'm curious-

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:21:02 Oh

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:21:02 ... with my children when they come back from school. I'm, I'm... You know, I love reading books, you know? I read books to explore curiosity. In fact, I would argue that one of the best things about this show for me is that it forces me to read all these great books. Because if I wasn't interviewing you today, Maya, I might have bought it, and it might have sat alongside a few other books that I've meant to read-

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:21:28 [laughs] Sure

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:21:28 ... on the shelf. But I'm like, no, Maya's given me some time to talk. You need to get through the book. So I feel very lucky that this kind of structure almost encourages me to sort of feed that curiosity even more. So maybe a slightly waffled answer there, but that's my-

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:21:46 No, that's-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:21:46 ... my initial answer to your question.

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:21:48 Absolutely. And I'm so delighted to see someone like you, who I think is in this, quote, "for the right reasons," not to quote The Bachelor. Um, [laughs] but you really are. You're doing this for the right reasons. And to see that rewarded and for it to pay off, and you have this extremely loyal listener base, like, it, it makes me feel so hopeful-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:22:07 Mm-hmm

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:22:07 ... about the future of podcasting.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:22:08 Yeah. Well, thank you for the kind words. And I, I think for me, it really ties in with the message you're t- you're, you're trying to share with your story about, you know, what was it that you got out of playing the violin beyond just the violin, okay? It was community, connection. It was these other things that you can still nourish without the violin.

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:22:37 Yes.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:22:37 And I guess that's a nice lesson for all of us because things do change in life, you know?

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:22:42 Yes.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:22:42 Our kids will leave home at some point. You know, we will not be in the same job at some point, whether that's through retirement or AI [laughs] or whatever it might be.

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:22:53 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:22:53 And it's really useful for us to examine, well, what was it that we liked about it, and how can I get that somewhere else?

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:23:02 Another helpful thought experiment can be when you're in a moment of disruption or inflection, who else can this person be? So times, sometimes we forget in the face of a hard pivot that we haven't actually lost everything. All of the skills we've built, all the knowledge we've accrued, all the wisdom we've gained, all the perspectives we've built, maybe by traveling to different countries or having new experiences, those can all be purposed to serve you in your next steps, in your next pursuits. And when I think about the violin, for example, it is true that the technical skills I've built as a violinist are not useful to me, right? Um, however, the grit that I built, the resilience in the face of failure, overcoming some of my stage fright and getting comfortable performing in front of audiences, having or cultivating my creative spirit, these are all things that have been so helpful to me-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:24:04 Mm

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:24:04 ... in my role as a cognitive scientist and being a podcaster and writing this book. And so I would urge people to reflect on the entirety of who they've become as a result of their life experiences, and to imagine that they're reading that person's life CV on a piece of paper.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:24:24 Yeah.

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:24:24 Not simply their academic accolades or job experiences, but the entirety of who they are, and just to have this distanced thought experiment. Like, if I was reading about this person for the first time, what might they be capable of?

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:24:37 Yeah.

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:24:38 Surely there are so many opportunities for this incredible person that I'm reading about. And I just wanted to share one other anecdote that I think relates to, to this conversation. So I'd heard from a guy named Scott, and Scott went to Harvard for law school. Um, he is a human rights lawyer, or I guess you guys would say barrister. Is that right? [laughs]

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:24:58 Yes.

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:24:58 And-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:24:58 But it's okay

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:24:59 ... um, what happened is that he received a devastating long COVID diagnosis. He suffers from vertigo, nausea, severe brain fog. Um, he has had to quit his job as a lawyer. And as you can imagine, he experienced profound grief, um, for quite some time.But then he asked himself, "Well, why did I love being a human rights lawyer?" And for him, his passion came from a deep satisfaction in representing underrepresented communities, communities that needed a voice. That's why he wanted to be a human rights lawyer in the first place. And then Scott realized that while he couldn't do that in the context of being a lawyer, he could do that as a long COVID advocate.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:25:49 Mm.

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:25:50 And so now, even though he faces profound physical cognitive limitations, he is an outspoken advocate for those in his community.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:26:02 Yeah.

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:26:02 He's helped draft legislation. He's part of clinical trials. He's speaking to these voices that need to be heard about the devastating aftermath of a long COVID diagnosis. And so, um, yeah, I'm just so grateful to-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:26:19 Yeah

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:26:19 ... Scott for sharing that with me.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:26:20 Yeah, it's a lovely story, and very inspiring for us to think about in our own lives if we've come across something that has unfortunately changed what we thought we were gonna do for whatever reason, like of course you and the violin. Can I just ask you on that, when was the last time you picked up a violin?

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:26:43 Oh, yeah. Well, so my story's a little bit more complicated, and it actually intersects with the UK, so I'll share it here. Um, what I, what I didn't write about in the book is that I was actually diagnosed with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis when I was 17. So my hand wasn't healing. I was getting a lot of inflammation.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:27:00 Mm.

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:27:00 And doctors thought that maybe it was actually a systemic degenerative disease. And so I started taking immunosuppressants and anti-inflammatories to treat rheumatoid, um, when I was 17, and it was actually only in the UK when I saw a specialist at Oxford that it was made clear that it was actually a misdiagnosis. So I actually have [laughs] this UK doctor to thank. I wrote to him a couple years ago just saying, "Thank you for changing my life and revealing that, that it was a misdiagnosis." So when I found out that I did not have rheumatoid arthritis, I actually had a little bit of a comeback year. So I was invited to perform with Joshua Bell in South Africa. I played on NPR, which in, um, which in the US I'd played on a couple times in my childhood. They were having a 10th anniversary celebration.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:27:52 Wow.

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:27:52 And it was a wonderful reunion with the violin. I actually couldn't play long-term because I, I had developed so much scar tissue in my hand from the initial injury and also from, um, surgery that I had done. Um, so it wasn't, it wasn't a long-term thing, but to be able to, to play the violin again after all that time away and to have become a different person in those intervening seven or so years, I felt that my emotional affection for the instrument had only grown, and that despite having barely practiced for these performances, I delivered what I felt was my most beautiful performance.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:28:35 Yeah. I said earlier on that we're gonna talk about rumination, and I must come back to it because I know this is something that so many people struggle with. You have a whole chapter on it called Mental Spirals. What is rumination? You know, why do we do it, and what are some of your best strategies to help us deal with it?

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:28:58 So I should first say that I basically have a personal PhD in rumination. I'm an expert [laughs] in getting up at 3:00 in the morning and letting myself spiral. And so there's a reason I devoted a whole chapter to it, which is that, um, rumination gets us all. Um, if, if, if you haven't experienced rumination, consider yourself one of the lucky ones, 'cause I think most people have in some form or another. But, you know, we are thinking and problem-solving machines, so typically when we confront a problem, we wanna figure out a solution, and that usually serves us very well. The problem happens when it turns into rumination. So rumination by definition is when we are trying to solve a problem, but we're actually running in circles, and we're making no progress at all on the problem. We have the illusion that we're making progress, so we think to ourselves, "Well, if I just replay that interaction that was so awkward with my coworker one more time, maybe I'll feel better about it. Maybe I'll figure out what went wrong. Maybe I'll be able to go back in the past and change my reaction and make it better." We can kind of engage in magical thinking, but we actually are making no progress at all.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:30:06 Mm.

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:30:07 And we're actually just doubling down on our negative emotions. And so I think one of the reasons why we ruminate is because, again, we like certainty. We like clarity. We like definitive answers. And so when we are faced with a lot of uncertainty or anxiety, in an effort to quell those emotions, we out-- we try to outthink the problem space, when in actuality there are no definitive answers to be found. So I talk in the book, for example, about a woman named Florence who's navigating the aftermath of an unexpected divorce. She's a science journalist. She thinks that she can kind of hack her heartbreak and find her way out of it, and so she commits herself to doing a deep dive. She thinks, "Okay, if I can just figure out what led our marriage to end, then I'll feel better. If I can just figure out why he stopped loving me, then I'll make sure I never get in this situation again."

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:31:01 Mm.

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:31:01 "If I can just figure out what I did wrong, then I will avoid a future breakup." These are all illusory guarantees, right? There's no such thing as getting such clarity that you can insulate yourself from any future risks. And so in that particular chapter, I actually have several portraits of people who areIn these mental spirals for many different reasons. So one of them has a panic attack on air as a journalist-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:31:28 Yeah

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:31:28 ... and has to contend with a career that is now under threat. Another person is dealing with an unknown medical diagnosis. Another person is dealing with heartbreak. Another person's dealing with eco anxiety. And yet they're all having to, to our, an earlier conversation we had, contending with the same anxieties and worries and ruminative spirals, and are trying to find ways to break out of the mental prisons they constructed and to actually emerge to see their situation from new perspectives or with greater clarity.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:32:01 Yeah, it's such a common issue that keeps many people stuck. You do have in your survival kit at the back and in that chapter all kinds of, uh, practical strategies to help, psychological distancing, cognitive reappraisal, mental time travel, or effective labeling, distraction. Are there any one of those strategies or a couple of them that you'd like to talk about?

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:32:28 Oh, sure, yeah. And, and I should also, um, share that I encourage readers to be really experimental with the tools that I've given them. Some tools will work in certain situations and not in others. They'll work for one change, but not another. They'll work for certain people, but not another person. And so it's really important to have an experimental mindset when it comes to engaging with these tools. There's a couple that I use regularly. The first is mental time travel. So our brains have the remarkable ability to go backwards and forwards in time, and we can actually use this to our advantage when we are stuck in these mental spirals. We can travel into the past to remind ourselves of moments in which we surprised ourselves with our resilience, our ability to overcome any kind of adversity.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:33:16 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:33:17 We can also travel into the future to remind ourselves that our current problem is in fact transient. So let's say you did have a very uncomfortable or negative interaction with a coworker, right? You find yourself up at 3:00 AM replaying that incident over and over again. You don't know how to break out of this negative spiral that you're in. You can ask yourself in that moment, how am I gonna feel about this situation five hours from now, five days from now, five years from now, 15 years from now? What that does is it breeds psychological distance between you and your current preoccupations. Because as you likely know, Rangan, when you're in it, you're in it.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:33:57 Yeah.

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:33:57 You feel subsumed by these, [laughs] by these negative emotions, and you're, the ap- like your camera lens is so zoomed in on this problem, it's hard to imagine any other problem in your life because you're solely focused on this. And so you zoom out the lens and you start to see, oh, wait a second, well, probably either maybe I found a resolution with this coworker, and five days from now, or even if I haven't, I mean, in five years from now, this person might not even be my coworker anymore.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:34:24 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:34:24 And so it's just an gentle nudge to your brain that you might feel this problem is less significant to you in the future. There's also a technique called affect labeling. We can often feel a flurry of negative emotions in the aftermath of change, and what research shows is that simply giving a label to one of these emotions, so identifying what you're feeling as envy or grief or frustration or anger or resentment, can help you shift your focus away from being the emotion, embodying the emotion, to simply having the emotion. That's another way of breeding-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:34:59 Mm-hmm

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:34:59 ... this kind of psychological distance. And then I think, and again, there's, there's like a dozen or so of these strategies, but I think one that's been very helpful to me is to try to take a third party view on the problem you're facing. So when we are in that first person perspective, we have a very limited, narrow vantage point on the challenge that we're up against, and we have a certain narrative that we told ourselves about what actually led to the problem. And the goal when you're in a negative mental spiral is to actually poke holes in your narrative, to actually see the situation from new angles, from new perspectives. In some sense, you actually did this with your daughter, right? When your daughter was like, "What if I'm not in the same class as my friends?" You actually gave her a new perspective with which to look at this challenge. Well, if you're not, guess what? You might have new experiences.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:35:49 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:35:49 You might make new friends who you never would've met otherwise, right?

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:35:52 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:35:52 So you were poking a hole in this negative narrative that she had built for herself. If you don't have a friend who can serve in this cognitive role of saying, "Well, are you sure that that's what they meant when they said that?" Or, "Are you sure when you said this, you meant this and not that?" Or-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:36:08 Mm-hmm

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:36:08 ... "Are you sure that the narrative you're telling about yourself is accurate? I think you're not really giving yourself enough credit," you can actually play the role of that fly on the wall, of that neutral arbiter-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:36:19 Yeah

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:36:19 ... by imagining that you are observing the situation from afar. So you can imagine you replay the interaction with you and your coworker, but this time you literally imagine yourself as the fly on the wall observing it from both angles, trying to see things from multiple perspectives rather than your own. And then there's one s- like little tweak in framing that can sound silly, but has been proven enormously effective across a range of circumstances and across a range of negative emotions, which is to simply coach yourself in the third person. So rather than saying in the throes of a heated moment, "Oh my God, I need to get a grip," which is what I might say to myself, I would instead say, "Maya, you need to get a grip."

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:37:02 Yeah.

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:37:02 What this does is thatIt tells your brain you're actually coaching a friend right now. That breeds that psychological distance. It gives you a bit more objectivity on your problem.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:37:14 Mm.

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:37:14 And then importantly, it helps cultivate more self-compassion. Because we often reserve the least amount of compassion for ourselves. We have plenty on reserve for others, but we self-berate, you know, we, we replay the same situation over and over again in horror. Like, "Oh, I can't believe I said that. I can't believe I did that. I'll never forgive myself."

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:37:34 Yeah.

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:37:34 But you would never talk like that to a friend. And so when you coach yourself in the third person, you empathize more with yourself. You start to see, oh, actually, it's okay that you erred in this way. All humans make mistakes.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:37:47 Yeah. I love that. Uh, a, a real quick whistle stop tour, practical things we can do to deal with rumination. One thing you make really clear in that chapter, which I think is really important, is this idea that loneliness and rumination often mutually reinforce each other, creating a vicious cycle. And I guess the take home is, you know, get around with other people. You know, don't stay isolated in that moment, and it will make it worse. Maya, listen, it, it's been such a joy talking to you. I think we've barely scratched the surface-

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:38:18 Scratched the surface, yeah [laughs]

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:38:19 ... of what's in your book. The book is called The Other Side of Change: Who We Become When Life Makes Other Plans. Just to finish off, Maya, your final chapter is very, very personal. You, you open up about your own struggle with trying to become a mum and starting a family with your partner. Having written this book, having examined change for so long, what does your relationship with starting a family look like today?

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:38:57 It's been such a deeply personal and profound experience for me to write this book. I mean, it was truly, it was truly life-changing. I don't see the world in the same way anymore, having had the, the deep honor of interviewing people for this book. But more importantly, it's changed my life because I was able to, in real time, integrate their wisdom, their advice, their knowledge into my own experience of navigating unexpected change, and I transformed in ways that I wasn't expecting. And I should say, by the way, you know, coming from a scientific background, I'm as skeptical as the next person, right? So when I started to observe, wow, there is this silver lining to unexpected change. People are feeling so much gratitude. I was like, really? [laughs] Is that just what you're telling yourself to make yourself feel better? You know, I, I, I like to say I'm allergic to two things, um, soy and platitudes. [laughs] And so, um, I wasn't really sure what to make of it, but then I witnessed this extraordinary evolution within myself that really made me believe the thesis of the book. And there have been many parts to this journey, but I just want to share one anecdote. So, um, I remember on the night of the second miscarriage when we had found out we lost identical twins, and it was such a roller coaster of a day, Rangan, because just a few hours earlier, we had seen healthy beating hearts on ultrasound. And so to go from the highest high to the lowest of lows was so jarring for my nervous system. I, I, I just... I could barely piece together reality. You know, my... It was like my brain was constantly having to catch up to the latest information we were getting. And I still remember that night as we were winding down and I was, you know, struggling to think, am I even gonna sleep tonight? My husband Jimmy comes into the room and he said, "Maya," Maya is his pet name for me. He goes, "Maya, let's just say a couple things that we're grateful for." And I remember in this moment being like, "Dude, no. You take your toxic positivity into the corner. You do the gratitude exercise. Okay? I'm staying under the sheets feeling badly about my life and myself." And yet, um, when I looked up at Jimmy, there was something just so sweet and earnest about this request, you know? And, and I was reminded that I was always also looking at the person that I was most grateful for in this world. And so I thought to myself, "Okay, Maya, just do this hard thing. Like, go through the gratitude exercise. At a minimum, you'll get Jimmy off your back." And so I start with my list. I say, "Well, first of all, Jimmy, I'm so grateful for you. And you know, this experience could have driven us apart, and I'm so grateful that it's brought us closer together. I'm also so grateful that I'm an aunt to my six nieces and nephews. They fill my life with so much joy. Um, I, I'm grateful for the, the radiant sunshine in California and, and the fact that I get to work with the same people at my job that I've worked with for over 10 years. What a joy to work alongside my friends." And this list just poured out of me. I mean, I wasn't expecting to feel overcome by gratitude, but I, I just kept having item after item after item after item. And I swear something magical happened in that moment because I felt myself zoom out on my life, and I realized that i- in my effort to achieve this goal of becoming a parent, I had actually developed tunnel vision. I had become so single-mindedly focused on this goal-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:42:47 Mm

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:42:47 ... that I had lost sight of how otherwise rich and multidimensional my life was, that there were so many parts of my identity that I found so much meaning and value in that were still so very much intact. And that was a transformative moment for me becauseIt was a reminder that when we go through a big change, it really can make us feel like everything in our life is gone. Everything has been threatened. But there's often-- that's often a fiction. And so did I go to bed that night feeling amazing and happy? Of course not. Still felt horrible.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:43:30 Yeah.

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:43:31 But I did go to bed that night feeling more whole. And what Jimmy didn't know, he's a software engineer, is that he was actually engaging me in what's called a self-affirmation exercise. And anyone can do this exercise. It can take you five minutes. You could do it right after listening to this podcast. But all it involves is just writing down all of the parts of your life and your identity that bring you a sense of meaning and purpose and fulfillment. And importantly, you wanna focus on the parts of your life that are not threatened by the change you're going through. So if you're experiencing a rough patch in your relationship, you might focus on your spiritual life. Or if you're having a rough go of it, go of it at work, you might focus on, uh, the fact that you're part of this wonderful pickleball community that you just joined, and that, like, it's really fun to meet everyone on Thursdays and to have a drink right after. And what a self-affirmation exercise can do is not only decrease denial because you realize, "Oh, my entire identity is not under threat," and so therefore you're more willing to absorb reality versus reject it, but it can massively boost your resilience and wellbeing in the longer term. Okay, so that's one part of the story. And then if you don't mind, I just wanna share that I'm in such a different place today than I ever thought I would be, and I think that's the power of change. Um, if you had asked me on that night, "Will there ever be a silver lining to this?" I would have said no. "Maya, will you ever feel happy and fulfilled in the absence of children?" I would have said no. I really felt like there was nothing redemptive about this situation whatsoever. And yet, here I am many years later, still child free, and I am the happiest, most hopeful, most liberated version of myself that I've ever been. And I, I really tru-truly mean this. I never saw that coming. I wasn't expecting to have this personal evolution, and it has been one of the greatest gifts of the experience of writing The Other Side of Change because to feel like I have become a new person on the other side, even though I didn't achieve this lifelong dream-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:45:55 Mm.

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:45:56 ... that there was still so much happiness and richness to be found. I hope that's-- I hope there's something meaningful for that-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:46:04 Yeah

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:46:05 ... in someone who's listening who cannot see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:46:09 It's a beautiful message. It's a hopeful message. As you say towards the end of your book, "Change does not have to limit us. It can actually expand us. Stay curious when life makes other plans. Change can transform us in unexpected ways. We simply don't know how until we get there." Maya, it's been such a joy talking to you. I think the book is fantastic. It's The Other Side of Change: Who We Become When Life Makes Other Plans. And, uh, yeah, I've thoroughly enjoyed reading it. I've thoroughly enjoyed talking to you, and I hope we get to meet in person at some point in the future.

Dr. Maya Shankar 1:46:46 Thank you so much for having me, Rangan. It's really an honor. [upbeat music]

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:46:49 If you enjoyed that conversation, then I think you are really going to enjoy this one.

Guest 1:46:54 Most things that adults are doing that is counterproductive have a logic, a certain logic, a twisted logic you might say, that dates back to their early childhood where that behavior made a certain sort of sense.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:47:07 Yeah