How to Handle Life When It Falls Apart: Rewire Your Beliefs, Calm Your Mind, Stop Ruminating & Move Forward With Confidence: Dr Maya Shankar #635

What It Covers

Dr Maya Shankar, cognitive scientist and author of *The Other Side of Change*, examines why unexpected change destabilises identity, how hidden belief systems get revealed during life disruptions, and what science-backed strategies — including moral elevation, mental time travel, and affect labelling — help people stop ruminating and reconstruct a more resilient sense of self.

Key Questions Answered

• •Uncertainty vs. certainty preference: Research shows people report higher stress when told they have a 50% chance of receiving an electric shock than when told the probability is 100%. The brain actively prefers a guaranteed negative outcome over ambiguity. Recognising this wiring helps explain why unexpected change triggers disproportionate anxiety — and why building tolerance for uncertainty, like a muscle through repeated exposure, is a trainable skill rather than a fixed personality trait.
• •End of History Illusion: People consistently acknowledge they have changed dramatically in the past but simultaneously assume their current self is the finished product. This cognitive bias — documented by researchers — causes people to underestimate how much they will continue to evolve. During unwanted change, this illusion is particularly damaging because it prevents people from recognising that the person who emerges on the other side will have new capabilities, perspectives, and strengths unavailable to them today.
• •Change as belief revelation: Unwanted change functions as an involuntary audit of belief systems. Many beliefs form in childhood before the brain is fully developed, shaped by caregivers, culture, and media, and are never consciously examined. Dr Maya Shankar recommends using disruption as a deliberate prompt to interrogate specific beliefs — asking whether each one is credible, evidence-based, and still serving you — then selectively discarding those built on faulty or outdated foundations without dismantling the entire belief structure.
• •Anchoring identity to "why" not "what": When Dr Maya Shankar lost her violin career to a hand injury, she discovered that anchoring identity to a role — violinist, lawyer, parent — makes self-concept fragile because roles can be removed instantly. The more durable approach is identifying the underlying motivation: what need the activity fulfilled. For her, it was human connection. Defining yourself by that core drive rather than its current vehicle means life changes cannot fully erase who you are.
• •Moral elevation rewires imagination: Witnessing another person's courage, kindness, or resilience produces a warm physical sensation in the chest that psychologists call moral elevation. Crucially, this experience does not just generate positive feeling — it neurologically expands the observer's own sense of what is possible. Duane Betts, sentenced to nine years in adult prison at 16, witnessed a fellow prisoner's dignified conduct and subsequently reimagined his own future, eventually graduating from Yale Law School and winning a MacArthur Genius Prize.
• •Rumination interruption techniques: Rumination creates the illusion of problem-solving while actually reinforcing negative emotion with no forward progress. Three evidence-based interruptions work across different situations. Mental time travel — asking how significant this problem will feel in five hours, five days, or five years — creates psychological distance. Affect labelling — naming the specific emotion (envy, grief, resentment) — shifts the brain from embodying the feeling to observing it. Third-person self-coaching ("Maya, get a grip") activates self-compassion and reduces the intensity of self-criticism.
• •Self-affirmation exercise for resilience: On the night of her second miscarriage, Dr Maya Shankar's husband prompted her to list things she felt grateful for. What followed was an unplanned self-affirmation exercise — a documented psychological tool that involves writing down all parts of life and identity that carry meaning and are not threatened by the current change. Research shows this reduces denial, increases willingness to absorb difficult realities, and measurably boosts long-term resilience. The exercise takes approximately five minutes and can be done immediately after any significant disruption.