Review of Master of Change

Book Link: https://smile.amazon.com/Master-Change-Everything-Changing-Including-ebook/dp/B0BQMY2PT5

This was my first Brad Stulberg book which I picked up after finishing Steve Magness's Do Hard Things (which I loved!). This is very much written in the same approachable style that centers itself on fitness and health, both phsyical and mental, but provides anecdotes and evidence from a broad range of topics and scenarios. A bunch of this was reinforcement of the balance I try to practice from a mental and physical health perspective but it also introduced new (to me) connections to Buddhism, the concept of allostasis, and my new favorite definition of happiness: "a function of our reality minus our expectations". If you liked Do Hard Things, I would definitely suggest reading this one as well and probably subscribe to the Growth Equation newsletter that is written by both Steve Magness and Brad Stulberg :-)

Some highlights from my reading:

1. Research shows that, on average,1 people experience thirty-six disorder events in the course of their adulthood—or about one every eighteen months.
2. rugged flexibility is foundational to sustainable excellence: doing good and feeling good in a way that supports our long-term goals. Equally important is that skillfully working with change makes for kinder and wiser people—something the world desperately needs.
3. The latest findings from psychology, biology, sociology, philosophy, and cutting-edge neuroscience all demonstrate that change itself is neutral. It becomes negative or positive based on how we view it and, more importantly, what we do with it.
4. Following disorder, living systems crave stability, but they achieve that stability somewhere new. Peter Sterling (the neuroscientist) and Joseph Eyer (the biologist) coined the term allostasis to describe this process. Allostasis comes from the Greek allo, which means “variable,” and stasis, which, as you learned earlier, means “standing.” Sterling and Eyer defined allostasis as “stability through change.”
5. Whereas homeostasis describes a pattern of order, disorder, order, allostasis describes a pattern of order, disorder, reorder.
6. Homeostasis is largely a misnomer. Everything is changing always, including us. We are constantly somewhere in the cycle of order, disorder, reorder. Our stability results from our being able to navigate this cycle, or as Sterling and Eyer put it, “We achieve stability through change.” I interpret this phrase to have a double meaning: the way to stay stable through the process of change is by changing, at least to some extent.
7. Non-dual thinking recognizes that the world is complex, that much is nuanced, and that truth is often found in paradox: not this or that, but this and that.
8. Rugged flexibility recognizes that after disorder there is no going back to the way things were—no more order, only reorder. The goal of rugged flexibility is to get to a favorable reorder; to maintain a strong core identity, but at the same time, to adapt, evolve, and grow. Unlike old ways of approaching change, rugged flexibility conceives of change not as an acute event that happens to you, but rather as a constant of life, a cycle in which you are an ongoing participant. Via this transformative shift, you come to view change and disorder as something you are in conversation with, an ongoing dance between you and your environment.
9. A road is linear and aims to get you from here to there with as much haste and as little effort as possible. A road resists the landscape; instead of working with its environment it plows over whatever is in its way. When you are traveling on a road, you know your destination. If you get knocked off, it is an unambiguously bad thing; you get back on and assume smooth travel again. Interesting opportunities may be calling you from the sides, but when you are on a road, the goal is to stay on the road, to get where you are going as fast as you can. A path, on the other hand, is quite different. It works in harmony with its surroundings. When you are traveling on a path you may have a general sense of where you are going, but you are open to navigating, perhaps even making use of, whatever detours arise. A path is not separate from its environment but rather part of it. If you get knocked off a road, it can be traumatizing and disorienting. But there is no getting knocked off a path, since it is always unfolding and revealing itself to you.
10. when you chronically fight change, your body releases the stress hormone cortisol, which is associated with metabolic syndrome, insomnia, inflammation, muscle wasting, and countless other ailments.
11. Toward the end of To Have or To Be?,16 Fromm writes that true joy is “what we experience in the process of growing nearer to the goal of becoming ourselves.”
12. happiness in any given moment is a function of our reality minus our expectations.
13. allostasis has an anticipatory component. Whereas homeostasis is agnostic to expectations,2 allostasis states that if you expect something to happen you will suffer less distress during the ensuing period of disorder.
14. consciousness is not solely our experience of reality; it is our experience of reality filtered and modulated by our expectations for it.
15. The psychological equation that says “happiness equals reality minus expectations” essentially represents the accuracy of our biological—that is, our brains’—predictions.
16. tragic optimism is the ability to maintain hope and find meaning in life despite its inescapable pain, loss, and suffering. It is about acknowledging, accepting, and expecting that life will contain hardship, that sometimes impermanence hurts, and then trudging forward with a positive attitude nonetheless.
17. Wise hope and wise action ask that you accept and see a situation clearly for what it is, and then, with the hopeful attitude necessary, say, Well, this is what is happening now, so I will focus on what I can control, try not to obsess over what I can’t, and do the best I can. I’ve faced other challenges and other seasons of doubt and despair, and I’ve come out the other side.
18. Action is essentially impossible without hope; for there would be no reason to do anything absent at least some belief that it might yield fruitful outcomes.
19. When people ask what Enneagram number or Myers-Briggs personality type you are, the most accurate answer is probably some version of “it depends”: on where you are, who you are with, whether or not you are hungry, how well you slept the previous night, whether you exercised that morning, and a variety of other factors.
20. it’s useful to be a generalist, or at the very least, to go broad before you go narrow. Play multiple sports growing up and you are more likely to make it to the pros as an adult. Try different styles of art and you’re more likely to create a masterpiece. Study diverse topics and you’re more likely to stumble upon a scientific breakthrough or new way of solving a business or management problem.
21. Nothing can take your values away from you. They provide a rudder to steer you into the unknown, guiding how you differentiate and integrate over time. Yes, core values can, and sometimes do, change; but even then, it is prioritizing and acting on your previous core values that lead you to your new ones.
22. Individuals who were instructed to reflect deeply on their core values prior to being presented with these scenarios showed heightened neural activity in a part of the brain (the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, or VMPFC for short) associated with “positive valuation,” or viewing threats as just manageable challenges. Instead of shutting down or resisting a potentially hard change, their brains were moving them toward engaging with it. Those who were not told to reflect on their core values showed no increased neural activity in their VMPFC. These effects were not confined solely to the lab. The individuals who reflected on their core values3 went on to successfully work through big changes in the real world at a much greater rate than the control group.
23. Your core values hold your differentiated and integrated, independent and interdependent, and conventional and ultimate selves together, creating a coherent, complex, and enduring whole. They help you to make tough decisions, serving as the boundaries within which you evolve and grow over time,
24. Ruggedness without flexibility is rigidity; flexibility without ruggedness is instability. Put the two together, however, and you emerge with the supple strength needed to persist and thrive over the long haul—a
25. “I always try to question the difference between what is truly tradition and core and what is merely habit. A lot of stuff we think is core is truly just habits.
26. Even (and perhaps especially) if we don’t know where the path ahead is going, we’d be wise to adopt an attitude of simply doing the next right (i.e., values-driven) thing. This gives us the best chance of getting where we ought to go.
27. “Early plasticity, later rigidity” means that values-driven actions are particularly important during periods of change and disorder; they have outsize impact in shaping the future.
28. when we react, we panic and pummel ahead; when we respond, we pause, process, plan, and only then proceed.
29. Our psychological immune systems help us to filter and make sense of our lives. “If we were to experience the world exactly as it is, we’d be too depressed to get out of bed in the morning, but if we were to experience the world exactly as we want it to be, we’d be too delusional to find our slippers,” writes Gilbert. When life doesn’t go our way, our psychological immune systems are there to aid us in coping, healing, and moving on.
30. All of the study participants who were dropped by the SCAD rated the ride as a ten out of ten on the fear scale. Immediately after they landed, Eagleman asked each participant how long their free-fall lasted. On average, participants reported it took 36 percent longer than it actually did. But when Eagleman asked participants5 to watch other people ride the SCAD and estimate how long those falls took, their estimates were strikingly accurate.
31. the roots of massive redwood trees—towering two hundred feet above ground with trunks more than ten feet in diameter—run only six to twelve feet deep. Instead of growing downward, they grow outward, extending hundreds of feet laterally, wrapping themselves around the roots of their neighbors. When rough weather comes, it is this expansive network of closely intertwined roots that supports the trees’ ability to stand strong as individuals. We are the same.
32. the vast majority of people tend to overlook the option to subtract parts. Instead, participants immediately assume15 the best way forward is to add, even when subtracting is clearly a better option. When I asked Klotz about why this is the case, he told me that “such a large part of our culture is to have more, do more, and be more, so people kind of assume more is always the answer, but it’s not.”