Topics include: resilience, psychology, stress mindset, fear of failure, optimism and pessimism, Martin Seligman, Kelly McGonigal, Michael Easter, career change, consistency, personal growth, handling setbacks, life transitions, self-improvement, mindset.
The promised description link: https://unpackwithmehak.com/
For those of you who prefer to read, below is the article version:
You know what’s so amazing about human beings? Our ability to make plans. We make plans for everything. Maybe not the kind that goes into a planner or a to-do list, but they’re there. We imagine a future all the time. You imagine the career we will have, the city we will live in, the person we will end up with, even the small things.
You book a holiday, and you already imagine what the weather will be like, what you will wear, the photos you will take, how relaxed you will finally feel. Before even a thing has happened, your mind has already lived through it. It happens for the bad moments too.
You go through life thinking, uh, what if I have this conversation, and you already have a plan. I’ll say this, they will say that, and I will say this, then they will say that. And I just want to ask, does it go that way every time? At least for me, it doesn’t. Life usually does what life does. It rains, the flight gets cancelled. The other person says something so off script that I’m like, what are you even saying? And the bigger things: the relationship ends, you don’t get the job. Or even something a little different can happen.
Everything goes according to plan, and you realise that the plan doesn’t make you happy anymore. That’s something that nobody really prepares us for. Because when our plans fall apart, we don’t all respond the same way. Some adapt, some make a plan immediately. They look forward for another way. To get out of it. They still keep believing that things will work out. Other people tend to get stuck. They think, why does this always happen to me?
Maybe I’m just unlucky. Maybe this is how my life is always going to be. Same disappointment, completely different responses. So what is it that separates the 2 people? Why do some people keep going while others slowly stop believing that anything they do will make a difference? That’s the question I want to explore today?
Hi, I am Mehak Chhabra, your host, and this is Things We Never Say, a podcast about the conversations we avoid, the emotional patterns we repeat and the things we all feel, but rarely say out loud. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been reading psychology research trying to understand one thing. Not why some people are successful, but why some people keep going after life doesn’t go according to plan. While others give up on the version of life they once imagined.
I don’t think resilience is luck. I don’t think it’s something you are simply born with. I think it’s a lot more interesting than that. So where does this all actually begin? Stress? I think it begins with stress. Because whenever life does not go according to plan, stress is usually the 1st thing we experience. It could be our career, and you could be 28, and you would be earning a certain amount. And you are planned for something else. You thought that you would be earning much more than that. Or maybe you are close to the number that you had imagined. But everything around you seems to be doing even better, and suddenly your life starts to feel behind.
Maybe it could be the relationship where you thought that you would marry this person and live forever with and it ends. Or you get the job, you get the promotion, you get the relationship that you wanted to have, you reach the goal that you’ve been working towards, and then you realise, I thought getting here would make me happier than this. I think a lot of us have experienced some version of that. Either the plan changes. Or the plan works, and we change. In either of the scenarios, the 1st thing that a body does is it responds with stress.
Now I was listening to a psychologist, uh, who is Kelly McGonigal a few days ago. And she said something about stress that completely changed my view. She said that maybe stress itself is not the biggest problem. Maybe it is what we believe that the stress means. Simple right? We have grown up hearing that stress is terrible for us, that it damages our physical health, that we should avoid it whenever possible. But then researchers came and did something really interesting.
They asked a lot of people 2 questions. 1st one was simple. How much stress have you experienced over the last year? The 2nd question was a little more interesting. Do you believe that stress is harmful to your health? You’re probably nodding your head to this one. And uh, a lot of people did say that they did believe that. And they followed these people for years. And what they found really surprised me. The people who had experienced a lot of stress and believed that it was harming their health had a significantly higher risk of dying during this study period.
But the people who experienced just as much stress and didn’t believe stress itself was damaging them did not show the same increase in risk. I actually had to replay this part because I did not really believe that this was how it worked. I mean, stress affects us physically; it should affect all of us, right? Whatever our beliefs might be. So, um, the stress is not harmless.
But this research does suggest that the story we tell ourselves about stress changes the way our body responds to it. Researchers, we may even have tested this in the lab. Before putting people through really stressful situations like public speaking, in front of judges and with lights on their faces and the camera up close and the judges with like extremely disapproving looks and some difficult math, and after this public speaking debacle, they would send them to do a math test, and even then the examiner would completely discourage them throughout all of this.
And, I mean, if you are anything like me, you are going to feel stressed, right? But before putting these people through these situations, they told one group something very simple. When your heart starts racing, when your palms get sweaty, when your breathing changes and you feel like you are stressed, your body is not failing you. It is preparing you. It’s giving you the energy you need to deal with what’s about to happen. And the other group did not get to hear anything.
So both groups felt stressed. Their hearts did beat fast. There was one remarkable difference. The people who saw stress as their body helping them did not show the same constriction in their blood vessels that’s typically associated with the harmful stress response. The stress was still there, but the relationship had changed, which, I think, is miraculous- like, it’s so wild how the human body works.
The way we explain things to ourselves can change how they impact our lives. That is insane. And it directly leads us to Martin selling men. Now I wanted to think about something for a 2nd. When something goes wrong in life. What’s the 1st sentence your mind creates? The very 1st one, not the one that you have after you’ve calmed down, but when something does not go according to plan, and you are just getting to know about it.
Because Martin Seligman, one of the founders of positive psychology, spent years, I’m studying something called explanatory style, which is really just a fancy way of asking one question. How do you explain the events in your life to yourself? Because this explanation matters much more than we think. Imagine you have been looking forward to a holiday for months. Imagine the beach, the sunshine, the food. The same holiday from the introduction.
You have pictured yourself relaxing, the outfits and everything. And then you get there, and it rains for 4 days straight. One person looks outside and says: This always happens to me; I cannot even catch a break all day. And there is one more person that looks outside and says, well, you know, that’s disappointing. Let’s see what we can do instead.
Same weather, completely different explanation. Seligman found that people who tend to recover more quickly from setbacks don’t necessarily have easier lives. They just explain those setbacks differently. When something bad happens, they don’t assume it’s permanent. They don’t immediately jump to this is my life now, or this has always been my life. They see it as temporary. As one event. Not an entire story.
And it doesn’t stop there. The same thing happens when good things happen. Imagine the same holiday: you are on it, and the forecast probably said that it’s going to be rainy, and you go there and you reach and you see that the weather is sunny and it’s amazing and it’s beautiful and you are so excited about it. And you end up thinking, I am so lucky. I’ve always, always been so lucky in my life that I get to experience such great things. Or there is someone else who can explain the experience by saying this is just the weather.
This is the, this is climate change, and this was just a lucky break that I caught. So when you, uh, explain the same event again, there are different explanations for the same event. And over years, these explanations can become something much more than sentences. They become expectations. They shape whether you keep trying or stop believing your efforts matter. This was something I kept thinking about when I was deciding whether to leave my job. Every day there was a new what if: what if this does not work? What if this is not good? What if I spent 2 years building this and then I realised I don’t even enjoy it anymore.
The questions never really went away, but there was one answer that stayed the same. I will figure it out. And that sentence did not come from confidence. It came from evidence because when I started writing, I did not have a business; uh, I never imagined that I would have a podcast. I just wanted to write for 5 months; almost nothing happened. For the 6th month, when the 6th month started, I got around 5000 subscribers in one month alone.
And then in the next month, I was at 25,000 subscribers. At the end of month 5, if you had looked at the numbers, which were approximately around 200, you would have told me to stop. There were days when I asked myself to stop. I was genuinely exhausted during the time, and every evening I would come home and write anyway. There wasn’t a single piece of evidence that suggested this was going to become my career- none.
But there was one thing that kept changing. Me. Every week I became a slightly better writer. Every week, I understood my readers a little more. Every week I learned something new about storytelling, headlines, psychology, marketing, or simply how to show up consistently. And I still am, every day, learning something new. From the outside, it looked like nothing was happening; from the inside, however, everything was.
And there might be some people who looked at my 6th month or 7th month and thought, wow, that happened so quickly, but it did not. It took 6 months. The 6th month only existed because of the 5 that came before it. Those 5 months were not empty. They were just invisible. We forget that sometimes. We judge our progress by visible results.
Life often rewards invisible efforts first. If I had stopped at month 5 because there wasn’t enough evidence that it was going to work, there never would have been a month 6. I would have gone back to the life I had planned when I was 15, a perfectly reasonable life, a stable life. But not a life that felt like mine. That’s something that the fear of failure really steals from us. It doesn’t just stop us from succeeding. It stops us before we have stayed long enough to find out what’s possible. Talking about fear, I came across another idea that
I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. I was reading The Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter, and he talks about research on the evolutionary origins of fear. When you think about the lives our ancestors lived, fear made a lot of sense; there were predators, venomous snakes, hostile drives, etc.
So over thousands of years, our brains became very good at noticing anything that looked like danger.
That’s why, even today, we’re naturally alert to things like heights, strangers, sudden movements, or something rustling in the bushes.
Our brains evolved to keep us alive.
The interesting part is that while our world has changed dramatically, our brains haven’t changed nearly as quickly.
Today, most of us aren’t running away from predators.
We’re running away from embarrassment.
From rejection.
From criticism.
From failing publicly.
From someone thinking we weren’t good enough.
And our bodies often react as though those two things carry the same weight.
I know that because I feel it too.
Even recording this podcast, there’s a part of me wondering,
“What if people don’t like it?”
“What if I get something wrong?”
“What if this isn’t good enough?”
Those thoughts still show up.
The difference is that I’ve slowly realised something.
Just because my brain labels something as dangerous doesn’t mean it actually is.
Michael Easter writes about someone called Elliot who said something I loved.
He said that most of us are living inside a much smaller circle than our actual potential.
Imagine your potential is this huge circle.
Most of us spend our lives somewhere near the middle of it.
Not because that’s all we’re capable of.
But because we rarely go close to the edge.
We don’t apply for the job.
We don’t start the business.
We don’t speak up.
We don’t ask someone out.
We don’t publish the thing we’ve been working on.
Not because we know we’ll fail.
But because we’re trying so hard to avoid finding out.
And if we never get close to the edge of what we’re capable of…
we never actually discover who we could have become.
I think that’s one of the saddest possibilities.
Not failing.
Never giving yourself the chance to find out what you were capable of in the first place.
So if resilience can actually be built, the obvious question is…
How?
One of the most interesting ideas I came across was something called a Misogi, which Michael Easter writes about in The Comfort Crisis.
The idea is surprisingly simple.
Once every year, do one thing that feels almost impossibly difficult.
There are only two rules.
The first is that it has to be really hard.
The second is that you can’t die.
That’s it.
Now, how do you know if something is hard enough?
Easter gives an example.
Let’s say your Misogi is running twenty-five miles.
If you’re already training by running twenty miles at a time and logging thirty or forty miles every week, that’s probably not your Misogi anymore. You’re almost certain to finish.
But if the furthest you’ve ever run is ten miles, you think maybe you could push yourself to fifteen, and you’re honestly not sure if twenty is even possible…
then twenty-five miles probably is.
The goal isn’t certainty.
The goal is choosing something where, even if you do everything right, you only have about a fifty percent chance of succeeding.
When I first read that, I thought,
“Why would anyone intentionally put themselves in a situation where they might fail?”
But then I realised that’s exactly the point.
The point isn’t to finish the twenty-five miles.
The point is to become the kind of person who’s willing to find out what they’re capable of.
Because even if you don’t finish…
maybe you run twenty.
That’s still twice as far as you’ve ever gone before.
Your brain now has evidence that your limits weren’t where you thought they were.
And I think that’s something we forget.
Resilience isn’t built by succeeding over and over again.
It’s built by repeatedly discovering that you can survive things you once believed were beyond you.
Michael Easter shares another analogy that I really liked.
Imagine someone who has spent years swimming.
Then one day they decide to go for a run.
Even though they’ve never trained specifically for running, they’re often capable of running much farther than someone who has never exercised at all.
Why?
Because swimming built their cardiovascular capacity.
The strength transfers.
Resilience works in a similar way.
When you deliberately choose difficult things, you’re not just getting better at that one thing.
You’re teaching your brain something much bigger.
You’re teaching it,
“I’ve done difficult things before.”
“I’ve been uncomfortable before.”
“I’ve thought I couldn’t do something… and then I surprised myself.”
So when life inevitably throws something difficult at you—a career change, a breakup, losing someone you love, starting over—your brain isn’t facing difficulty for the very first time.
It already has evidence.
Evidence that you’ve survived uncertainty before.
Evidence that you can adapt.
Evidence that discomfort isn’t the end of the story.
And what’s fascinating is that the research seems to support this.
One study followed around twenty-five hundred people from across the United States and found something that sounds almost counterintuitive.
The people who had experienced some adversity in life actually reported better psychological well-being than people who had been completely sheltered from hardship.
They were more satisfied with their lives.
They had fewer psychological and physical symptoms.
They used fewer healthcare services.
They were less likely to describe themselves as disabled.
Notice the word some.
Not overwhelming trauma.
Not constant suffering.
The researchers weren’t saying that endless hardship is good for us.
They were saying that never being challenged isn’t good for us either.
There’s a middle ground.
A place where we experience enough discomfort to discover that we’re stronger than we thought.
And maybe that’s what resilience really is.
Not avoiding difficult experiences.
But collecting enough evidence that difficult experiences don’t have the final say.
Looking back, I think I eventually found my own Misogi.
It wasn’t resigning from architecture.
That was one decision.
The real challenge was everything that came before
It was waking up every day and continuing to build something that gave me almost no evidence it was going to work.
For months, nothing happened.
And every single day I had to answer the same question.
“Am I going to keep going?”
Looking back now, I realise something.
Resilience isn’t built on the day everything works out.
It’s built on the ordinary days when nothing seems to be working…
and you decide to continue anyway.
I think that’s what all of this research has been trying to say.
Resilience isn’t about never failing.
It’s not about pretending setbacks don’t hurt.
It’s not about positive thinking.
It’s about refusing to let one moment become your identity.
There’s a huge difference between saying,
“I failed.”
and
“I’m a failure.”
One describes an event.
The other describes a person.
One can change.
The other traps you.
And that’s what Martin Seligman spent years studying.
The people who kept going weren’t the people with easier lives.
They weren’t the people who never experienced disappointment.
They were the people who refused to explain one difficult chapter as the entire story of who they were.
So if you’re listening to this today and it feels like your life hasn’t gone according to plan…
I’d like you to do something.
Look back over your life.
Not to look for proof that everything has always worked out.
Because it hasn’t.
Look for proof that you’ve handled things you once believed you couldn’t.
Think about the exam you thought you’d never pass.
The heartbreak you thought you’d never recover from.
The city you thought you’d never adjust to.
The conversation you thought you’d never have.
The version of yourself you thought you’d never become.
You’ve already survived more uncertainty than your mind gives you credit for.
And maybe that’s the evidence you need.
Not evidence that life will always work out.
None of us can promise that.
But evidence that whatever happens next…
you’ll probably find a way through it, just like you have before.
Before we end this episode, I would like you to try something with me.
So after reading all of this research, I don’t think resilient people are fearless. I don’t think they’re luckier. And I don’t think they have easier lives. I think they do four things differently. They explain setbacks differently. They don’t see stress as proof that something is wrong. They deliberately do difficult things. And over time, they collect evidence that they can survive uncertainty.
So here’s something I’d love for you to try.
Think about the last thing that you would call a failure.
For just a few minutes, don’t think about it emotionally.
Think about it analytically.
Almost like you’re a researcher looking at someone else’s life.
Ask yourself,
What actually happened?
Just the facts.
No opinions.
No labels.
What was I trying to do?
What part of it worked?
What part of it didn’t?
If you had to put a percentage on it, how much of it was actually successful and how much of it didn’t go the way you wanted?
Now comes the important part.
Imagine this wasn’t your story.
Imagine it happened to someone you care about.
How would you explain what happened?
Would it be the same way that you explain it to yourself?
And then I’d ask you one final question.
What’s one thing you would do differently the next time?
So see what you can learn from it and try to understand that failure isn’t what your life is, it is a part of your life.
If you’ve been listening to this episode and realised that you’re carrying a story about yourself that’s become heavier than the event that created it, that’s exactly the kind of work I do in Unpack with Mehak.Sometimes what keeps us stuck isn’t the event itself.
It’s the explanation we’ve quietly repeated ever since.
That’s the work we do together
If that feels like the kind of conversation you need right now, you’ll find all the details through the link in the description.
Thank you so much for spending this time with me.
And remember…
Maybe resilience isn’t believing that life will go according to plan.
Maybe it’s trusting yourself enough that when it doesn’t…
you’ll build another one.
I’ll see you in the next episode of Things We Never Say.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit unpackwithmehak.substack.com
