Why the Changes You Resist Can Feel So Uncomfortable at First

What if the thing you hate about change isn’t the thing that changed?

There was a time when almost any change to something I already knew how to use annoyed me.

A website would update its interface and I would immediately want the old one back. If a piece of software released a new version and there was a button that said “use legacy version,” I was probably clicking it.

Then some new technology would come along and instead of thinking, I wonder what this can do, my first thought would be, Great. Now I have to learn something else.

Maybe you know that feeling.

Something changes and before you even know whether the new way is better, you already don’t want it. You liked where the buttons were, the old process worked, and you knew what to expect.

You already spent time figuring out how to do things this way, and now somebody has decided you need to do them differently.

For a long time, that reaction felt pretty self-explanatory to me: I hated the change because the change was annoying.

But if you’ve ever wondered, why do I hate change so much?, I’m starting to think the first burst of irritation doesn’t always tell us what we’re actually resisting.

Sometimes it’s the extra work. Sometimes it’s the uncomfortable feeling of not knowing what we’re doing anymore. Sometimes it’s uncertainty, or the loss of control that comes with having the familiar way taken out of our hands.

And sometimes, as I’ve learned more than once, we decide we hate a change before we’ve even given ourselves enough time to find out what the change is actually like.

Why Change Feels Like More Work Than It’s Worth 

One of the biggest thoughts behind my resistance has been:

This is going to be more work.

New technology means I have to learn it. A new system means I have to figure it out. And when something I already know changes, I temporarily lose the ease that came from doing it the same way over and over again.

Ease is hard to give up voluntarily.

I had gotten so comfortable with familiar technology that familiarity itself started feeling like a reason to keep using it.

The problem was that this wasn’t always harmless.

There were times when my unwillingness to embrace new tools was actually making it harder for me to create and share my work. I wasn’t always choosing the best tool. A lot of the time, I was choosing the one that required the least adjustment from me.

Those aren’t always the same thing.

And the irony is that avoiding the work of learning something new can create its own kind of work.

The longer I avoided learning something new, the bigger the learning seemed to require.

Something I probably could have figured out fairly quickly became this giant task in my mind because I had been thinking about learning it for months.

I’ve had things sit on my to-do list for an embarrassing amount of time simply because I hadn’t bothered to search for the answer. Then I finally look it up and think:

That’s it?

Sometimes what I hate about change isn’t even the change.

It’s the version of the change I’ve created in my head.

But hassle didn’t explain all of it. Sometimes I knew a new thing probably wouldn’t be that difficult, and I still didn’t want to touch it.

Why Change Is So Hard When You’re Used to Feeling Capable 

Something Diana Hill, Ph.D. writes about resistance to change really stood out to me: change can require us to tolerate feeling incompetent.

I hadn’t thought about it quite that way.

When I’m using something I already know, I get to feel capable. I know where everything is and what happens next. There’s no need to stop and Google instructions or click around trying to figure out what somebody moved.

A new system can suddenly turn me from someone who knows exactly what she’s doing into someone staring at a screen thinking, Where did they put that button?

That temporary beginner stage can feel surprisingly uncomfortable.

Hill suggests intentionally becoming willing to be a beginner—to “choose incompetence,” in the sense of allowing yourself to fumble while you learn instead of expecting immediate mastery.

That idea feels relevant far beyond technology.

How many things do we avoid simply because we don’t want to be bad at them first?

It’s easy to enjoy being competent. Willingly going back to square one is harder.

And I think this explains something that “I just don’t like change” misses. Familiarity doesn’t only make life easier. It lets us keep being the person who already knows what to do.

A change can take that identity away from us for a little while.

Why I Hate Change Before I Even Know What It’s Like 

My son’s school changed its drop-off process.

Previously, parents could walk their children inside. With the new process, parents stayed in their cars and staff members helped the children get out.

My immediate reaction was basically:

Ugh. Why can’t we just walk them in like we always have?

The old way worked, I knew it, and I liked it.

Almost immediately, my brain started developing a workaround.

I could park farther away. Then technically my son would be a walker instead of a car rider, which meant I could still walk him to the door.

There wasn’t some major problem with the new process. I had barely experienced it.

And I was already figuring out how not to participate.

That’s how automatic resistance can be.

Eventually, I decided not to create my little parking workaround and just followed the new process.

And now?

I love it.

I sit in my car while someone helps my son get out, and then I drive away.

It is easier.

There are mornings when I especially appreciate that I don’t even have to think quite as much about how presentable I am for walking into the school because…I’m not walking into the school.

The thing I was preparing to avoid became a convenience I would have missed if I had gotten my way.

That bothered me a little, because it meant I couldn’t even claim I was reacting to a bad experience. I had formed an opinion before I had enough information to have one.

That experience made me wonder how often I decide that I hate change before I actually know what the change will be like.

And if I’m not reacting to the actual experience yet, what exactly am I reacting to?

Why Change Feels Hard When You Don’t Know What Comes Next 

Hill also describes avoiding uncertainty as one reason people resist change.

That one makes sense to me too.

Even when the familiar thing isn’t perfect, at least it’s familiar. You know its problems and how to navigate them.

Change removes that predictability.

The new thing could be easier. It could also be annoying. You don’t know yet.

And sometimes knowing what I dislike feels more comfortable than not knowing what comes next.

The school drop-off change had another layer too. I wasn’t only trying to avoid something unfamiliar. I was trying to stay in charge of how it happened.

I think that’s also why trying to control change can be so tempting.

My school drop-off workaround was really an attempt to preserve control.

I didn’t make the rule, but I could figure out a loophole and keep doing things my way.

Except I would have been creating extra work for myself to avoid a process that eventually made my life easier.

There’s something almost funny about that now.

I was willing to park farther away and walk farther just to avoid the inconvenience of…remaining comfortably seated in my car.

That may be one of the stranger things about resistance: sometimes we’ll choose a familiar inconvenience over an unfamiliar convenience.

At least the familiar inconvenience was ours. We knew how it worked.

What Helps When You Feel Like You Hate Change 

I’m definitely not someone who now sees every new update and gets excited.

There are still moments when something changes and my first thought is, Please put it back.

What’s changed is that I’m trying not to treat that first reaction as my final opinion.

I don’t think the goal has to be becoming someone who loves change. If your first response is still, I don’t want this, that doesn’t mean you’ve failed at becoming more adaptable. For me, the more useful shift has been getting curious about what that reaction is protecting me from before I decide the change itself is the problem.

That distinction has helped more than trying to convince myself I should like change.

One thing that helps me, especially with technology, is learning just enough to make the unknown smaller.

Instead of looking at a new tool and thinking about everything I’ll need to understand, I can ask one question, watch one demonstration, or figure out the one thing I need to do right now.

So many things become less intimidating once I know how they work.

I’ve also been thinking about Hill’s suggestion to loosen our grip on control.

For me, that doesn’t mean suddenly loving uncertainty. It’s more about noticing when I am spending extra energy trying to preserve the old way simply because it is the old way.

Sometimes I can let the new process happen before deciding whether I need to fight it.

That feels like a much smaller ask than telling myself I need to become someone who loves change.

I did hear author Michael Neill talk about the idea of “falling in love with change,” and I like the spirit of that.

I don’t take that to mean every change is good. Some changes aren’t.

And sometimes the old version really was better. Sometimes the button really did belong where it was.

The point, at least for me, isn’t to assume change deserves my enthusiasm. It’s to stop assuming my discomfort deserves the final vote.

What I’m realizing is that change also brings possibilities that staying exactly where I am cannot.

And I can’t always know which possibility I’m rejecting when I automatically insist on keeping things the same.

That applies to bigger parts of life too. A new process, a different role, an unfamiliar way of doing something, a situation where I’m no longer the person who already knows the answer—any of those can trigger the same impulse to retreat toward what I know.

The useful question may not be, How do I make myself like this? It may simply be, Do I actually dislike this, or do I just dislike not knowing it yet?

I still understand the part of me that says, I don’t want change.

She doesn’t want unnecessary work, she doesn’t want to feel incompetent, and she likes knowing what to expect.

She would also really prefer if everyone would stop moving the buttons around.

But I’m becoming a little less convinced that discomfort means something has gone wrong.

Sometimes it just means I’m not familiar with the new thing yet.

And sometimes, on the other side of that unfamiliarity, someone is opening my car door, helping my child out, and making my morning easier while I wonder why I was ever planning to park three blocks away.