How Your Brain Resists Change – and How to Train it to Adapt

We, as humans, are creatures of habit. It’s a mindset embedded within us from our days as hunter gatherers (and probably well before that). Habits and routines are good for us, as we operate more efficiently on ‘autopilot’, with our prefrontal cortex not having to work overtime making every single decision we make on a daily basis. It also keeps us safe. Being predictable, always collecting the same tried and tested wild fungi that didn’t kill us, taking the same hunting routes where we didn’t encounter something bigger and badder than us mere homo-sapiens kept our species alive and thriving. This is why we resist change; it puts us into an unfamiliar position that could be risky.

The Real Problem

In 2025, we don’t need that primal survival reluctance to change. Many people find themselves living life comfortably, content with their work, their relationships and their health. They don’t feel the need to change, but even if they did, their brains would continue to opt for the path of least resistance and fall back into safe, well-practised habits. It’s seen all over the place; whether it’s the yo-yo dieters, the gym joiners as their New Year’s resolution only to stop going by March, or the businessperson who feels unhappy in their job, but it pays well enough, and they just live for the weekend. We, as a species, are still reluctant to change.

The issue comes as change is the catalyst for growth, learning and resilience. Whether it’s in the world of aviation, sport or business, everyone I’ve worked with so far want to see growth in some respect. While I’ll focus on training adaptation in a post for The Machine next week, growth in athletic performance predominantly comes from progressive overload, where we control change. We need change to grow; even our mental resilience ‘muscles’ need training, and we do that through stepping outside of our comfort zones and changing stimuli in whatever area of our lives we’re working on.

ADAPTing to Change

When trying to make any changes to our routines or behaviours, we often talk about habit formation. As a side note here, if you haven’t read James Clear’s Atomic Habits yet, then I’d highly recommend it! He goes into a lot of depth about habit formation, including practical steps to making habits stick.

I’m not James Clear, but my ADAPT framework should help improve mental resilience and adaptive performance. It is a handrail to embrace change, step outside of your comfort zone and build sustainable new habits. I’ve written in detail about the framework, but here’s an overview.

To properly train ourselves to be more comfortable with change, we first need to assess why we feel the resistance. What’s making us feel discomfort when we’re trying to change something. Then it’s important to define what we want to do. If you’ve heard of SMART goals, this is what I’m getting at here. We need to be specific with what the behaviour is we are going to adopt. ‘Getting fitter’ isn’t a goal that will set you up for success. ‘Running 5k twice a week’ is. Now we act; small exposures to discomfort on a regular basis helps to build our resilience over time. It’s not about making drastic changes (those yo-yo diets) but making a small sustainable change and repeating. Pausing then helps us to reflect upon the small changes we’ve made, why they’ve worked (or not) and how we found the discomfort. This honest reflection really helps to establish the new behaviours. And finally, tethering your new behaviours to existing habits really is a key to success. James Clear talks about this, but if you already have strong routines, adding something new alongside them makes the change more palatable, rather than threatening your primal resistance.

Change happens around us more often than we sometimes appreciate. Without training your mind to be more comfortable with change, you could find yourself dragging behind. Many of us strive to improve in some aspect of our lives, and being okay with changes and building new habits is integral to this self-improvement. So, think about when you last pushed yourself outside of your comfort zone. If you haven’t, then take the ADAPT framework for a spin and try something new. Then try something new again. And again. And don’t stop growing.