Why is change so hard for us?

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I thought the remodel at my workplace would be exciting, generally I actually find change to be exciting. But for some reason it's making me super anxious.

Personally, I think it has more to do with the fact that there is a ton to process and to consider. Changes aren't automatically good or bad, but with our typically slower and more thorough processing, it can be more of a challenge. And without processing it, it can be hard to know if the changes are a threat or not.

After I've figured out what works I'm resistant to change...because even if I can work out how to be successful with whatever is new it is a distraction to figure it out, and I know what I had worked and I don't know whether whatever is new will work.

Why mess with something that isn't broken?

I may quantify a few reasons;


Intolerance to uncertainty.

The typical rigidity model and symptom/hyperfocus.

Persistent ways of staying at one state.

'Autistic inertia'.

Quantity of processes, regardless of quality and context and Slow/conscious processing/unconscious processing unreliable.

Many factors like stress and not knowing the contrast; may or may not be related to alexithymia.

'Issues with prediction'; 'meta cognition'.

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I think it often takes me a lot of work to assemble a plan to cope with a particular set of circumstances, and if the circumstances then get changed, it's then hard to make modifications quickly and effectively. There's often something quite delicately-balanced and complex about my coping plans, something very static and rigid. Neurotypicals don't plan so much, they're more likely to wing it, and their minds are more flexible so they can more easily adapt to changes.

I remember when I was tasked with synthesising a protein at work (science research job). It was quite a complicated task and I knew I was going to have to perform it many times. There was no clear, detailed set of instructions around that I could have immediately understood and followed, so I set about writing my own instructions. They were much clearer and way more detailed and specific to the actual steps of what was done, and it took me several days to complete and perfect them. It was a very long document but it was possible to just start at the beginning, carry out the steps like a robot, and get the result with hardly any other thinking at all. I couldn't understand why they hadn't given me those instructions in that form in the first place. But nobody else thought it should be necessary.

But then, changes started to happen. Somebody moved a few of the materials to different storage places. The rules about how and when to book a communal machine changed. My method soon became out of date, and I was quite annoyed. It took a long time to update the guide, and as fast as I updated it, along came another change to throw it out of kilter again.

I'm always creating verbose step-by-step guides like that for myself. It's almost as if I'm expecting myself to wake up tomorrow incapable of remembering or deducing anything "on the hoof," so I write these robotic instructions to make sure I can still function. A lot of them are about computer tasks, which can get very complicated and clever, and if I don't do a particular task for a couple of weeks, it's like a blur when I do have to perform it again. In practice I tend to do rather better than I expect myself to do in the absence of those step-by-step guides once I've got over the initial shock and confusion, but sometimes I find I can't repeat what I was good at only a few days ago. And if I have to use a different computer, or the operating system or whatever gets updated or modified so that the conditions I'd depended on to be fixed have become different, that too can throw a spanner into my works.

So I think the change problem has a lot to do with rigid thinking styles and certain differences in the way our memory works.

I tend to live a very structured life. Change can be both GOOD and BAD. I can sometimes see the end result and endure the pain of what it takes to get to that conclusion.

Change doesn't make me too anxious. Only some change does, like societal changes. I can be very conservative when it comes to political change and I can get on one of my soapbox rants and not know when to stop (which often unintentionally offends people online so I have to have more self-control, although it's not fair that some of us can't voice our opinions but that's a different topic and I don't want to derail this topic on to my insecurities).

I used to dislike change more than I do these days. When I was in my early 20s I went through a phase of becoming frightened of anything that might resemble change to the family, such as a loved one going on a date or another loved one getting pregnant. Babies make a huge change to your lives, especially when you're close to the parents of the baby, so it may take me longer than normal to accept this change.

But these days change isn't much of an ordeal any more. I get bored of sameness all the time and do like a change, as long as it's a good change of course (nobody likes bad changes).


I've always been quite anxious about working overtime at work. Whenever my boss asked me if I fancied working on my day off I went into panic mode and had to say no. It made me look selfish and lazy, but that was before I got diagnosed with ADHD. Since I've known more about ADHD and been diagnosed, I feel that work with days off being too far apart can be stressful for ADHD people if we're prone to getting bored at work due to the job being too repetitive and having to force ourselves to stay focused when our minds (and bodies) often wander off-task. A day off can help me be free, even if it still means going out and socialising, but if the day doesn't involve many tasks to have to do at a certain time or to remember much or rush about or anything then that to me is a relief.

All people's brains try to focus on things that have changed rather than noticing every detail in a place every time.

Apparently autistic people have very strong ideas about what the world is like, and we notice much smaller changes than other people, and are much more distressed by equivalent changes.

^
Yes, some strange difficulty in distinguishing what's important at the time from what's not important, so that we tend to process everything instead of just the bits that matter. It's hard to neglect things, even when they're negligible.

I still don't like to approximate when I weigh out flour for breadmaking, so 999 grams doesn't feel quite good enough when the recipe says 1000 grams. But it's negligible, 0.1% really can't matter. Don't know whether that quirk arises from exactly the same brain-wiring thing or not.

I had uploaded a video back in 2021 when I explained why is it so difficult for some autistic individuals to cope with change.

Can a love one that died be more hard on us?