2026 May 12 Surviving change!

Hi, this is Jim Cranston from 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com, the podcast and website about reimagining your life. Thanks for joining me to talk about some more mind-body topics. Let's get started. If you like what you hear today, please leave a like, subscribe, tell your friends, and send me a message.

This week we're going to be talking a little more about the body and mind working together as a team — three little vignettes into the subject of mind-body interaction.

The first is about someone I follow who is just an amazing presenter and an expert in her field of building essentially unshakable self-confidence. She's totally unflustered by anything in any situation. Her name is Dr. Shadé Zahrai, and yet in a recent podcast episode with Mel Robbins, she totally psyched herself out, was quite nervous, and while the episode was still amazing and great, she was operating at a fraction of her potential.

Now, why do I bring this up? It's not to criticize Dr. Zahrai in any way at all. It's an example of the power of our brain to both protect us and to undermine us in the name of keeping us safe. She had absolutely no reason to be concerned, but some little doubt hidden somewhere built up a story that her brain just ran with — and turned an interview with a supportive host into what the brain perceived as an imminent danger to be protected from.

If this can happen to an expert talking in her own field with someone who genuinely wants to hear what she has to say, imagine how this plays out in our own minds when something unexpected happens. Say you're older and already feeling a little cautious about life. Every time you look online, turn on the TV, or listen to a comedian, they're laughing about how old you've become, how useless you are. Then you start noticing how younger people seem to learn things faster than you — which isn't really true, but that's what you start to believe because it's what you keep hearing from the world around you.

It's called confirmation bias, combined with selective attention. Just like seeing nothing but bright red cars after you buy a bright red car, your brain starts proving you right by interpreting everything as evidence that what you've been hearing must be true. Then something happens — you get laid off, or you voluntarily retire — and if you've been defining yourself by your work, suddenly that reference point is gone. Now what do you do? You internally freak out and lose confidence, because your brain has tricked you into believing something that isn't true, all while it's trying to protect you from a situation that has changed.

In reality, you are exactly who you were before. A single circumstance changed — your job. But by not framing it in that limited context, it can feel like everything in your whole world has changed.

Think back to Dr. Zahrai. She was, and still is, an absolute expert in her field — in presentation, in self-confidence, in performing well under very difficult circumstances. And even with that rock-solid foundation, her brain was able to trick her into feeling incapable. Now think about yourself. You're already feeling unconfident because of ageism and incorrect common knowledge. Is it any wonder you feel lost and frustrated?

What Dr. Zahrai did was take that experience and use it — not only as a learning opportunity for herself, but as a teaching opportunity for others. She wrote a newsletter and long-form content on LinkedIn all about it. Talk about "if you can't hide it, flaunt it." She has over five million followers across social media platforms, and she walked through how one small hint of self-doubt totally disrupted her own flow. But by talking it all out, she exposed what happened and found ways to avoid it in the future.

So there are a few big lessons here. First, don't be too hard on yourself if a sudden change throws you off balance. It happens even to experts who essentially do this for a living, all the time. Your brain really does create your reality, and if it gets its signals crossed, it will put you off course — no matter how capable you truly are. Second, when that happens, look for the lesson in it and actually learn from it. One of the best ways to learn, of course, is to teach. You might even try asking your friends whether they've experienced unsettling feelings when their lives changed, and talk it through if you feel comfortable doing so — or at the very least, be supportive and speak from a place of experience.

The second story on the same topic involves a neighbor of mine. She's another capable, accomplished professional — worked at the same company for over two decades, well-respected for her knowledge and skills, and everything was going well until the company got bought and she felt she had to leave. It was a similar situation to retiring or being laid off later in life, except she was in her late forties to early fifties — still very much in the prime of her working years.

Even with the support of friends and family, it took her months to get over that sudden change in apparent value to the world and to businesses. Note I said apparent — because she was still just as skilled, just as dedicated, and still had every quality people had associated with her. Those were her qualities. They were never really the job's qualities. Finally, she came to recognize that only the job had changed, and she was still who she had always been.

She also recognized that most of her work friends were really friends by circumstance. Most didn't follow up with her after she left. They went back to their own lives, and while they were pleasant acquaintances in that context, they weren't true friends in the deeper sense. Again, many of the feelings associated with retirement or being laid off are a function of a change in circumstances — not a function of aging, of getting old, or of becoming useless. We tend to get comfortable in familiar situations, and when circumstances change, our brains become naturally cautious — because that's what brains do. They don't like change.

Now, one last example — and this one is on the health side, since our body's health greatly affects our brain's perspective.

Another person I've connected with via LinkedIn is Dr. Tim Patel, located in Coogee, Western Australia. Dr. Patel is an ER doctor, and his profile tagline is: "I see the diseases modern life is building in your children before they arrive in my department." He looks at the health problems people develop and watches them show up in the ER as people get older. I would expand that to say those diseases are building in every one of us — not just children — who isn't actively working to avoid them.

He's well known on LinkedIn for his excellent summary diagrams and figures. And by the way, if you're not on LinkedIn, I'd really encourage you to go there. I've often said it's kind of like Facebook, but for grown-ups. There's a lot of excellent material there, and because it's a slightly more professional platform, almost everything you read comes with supporting references. It's not just somebody saying, "If you eat nothing but figs, you'll be healthy" with nothing to back it up. One person I follow will sometimes have ten, fifteen, twenty or more references supporting his points. If you want real perspectives on health and life — with references you can actually follow up on — LinkedIn is worth your time.

Back to Dr. Patel. He recently shared one of his diagrams on the benefits of walking. Not running, not aerobics — just walking. He broke it down into separate blocks, each showing the length of time you walked and the direct health benefits it provides. Here's the especially relevant part for older adults: the first block was walking for just two minutes — to the mailbox and back, to the end of the hallway and back. In other words, attainable in one form or another to almost anyone.

He has other posts addressing other muscle groups and the overall benefit of movement on health. And if for some reason you're in a situation where you can't walk at all, he has content to address that too. What's really neat about his whole approach is that all of his diagrams go through how different systems interact with each other — with your body, with your cardiovascular system, with your brain — and it's laid out in very simple terms. And it almost always scales progressively. You hear a lot of people say, "If you want to be healthy, you have to work out for thirty minutes a day" — and you think, "Well, where do I even start? I can't start at thirty minutes a day." Dr. Patel builds it up in very gradual, accessible steps.

So let's take these three examples together.

Brain health begins with body health — and body health begins with movement. Your brain won't be happy if your body isn't happy, and using your body is what makes your body happy. When you move and stay active to any degree, you tend to produce hormones and other chemicals that stimulate tissue repair, and you also release chemicals that improve mood and keep your brain healthy.

Next, when you have a big change in your life — especially when you're older, but really at any age — it's going to affect you. That's independent of age. But when we're older, we tend to interpret those feelings as happening because we are old, which isn't quite right. They happen because there was a big change. Uncertainty and adjustment after change are normal at every age. And the more invested you are in something, the bigger the change will feel, because you think, "I've lost all that time." You haven't. You can apply everything you've built somewhere new.

So remember that you are still you. Give yourself some grace. Work through the changes, take them as a lesson, and move confidently into the next stage knowing that you are still worthwhile and completely whole.

Finally, when a change happens and your mind starts to trick you into unexpected thoughts, remember — even experts in the field of self-confidence can be fooled by their own brains when the conditions are right. We all have times when things just don't seem to make sense and our brains are saying silly things. That's usually because our brains are trying to keep us safe, and since they don't yet have a clear understanding of what's happening, they reach for anything to get you back to familiar ground. Don't be upset — but do be confident that things will become clear, and remember that it happens to almost everybody, even extremely confident people.

So that's it for this week. No homework tonight, because we're still doing basics — but stay confident and know that more exciting things are to come. And everything we talked about — the changes, the feelings, all of it — those things happen at any age. They're not a function or a cause of aging. They happen because our brains don't like change.

As always, please remember: one of the best ways to care for yourself is to care for others. We have two wonderful organizations to share with you — UKR7.com, which supports the people of Ukraine, and WCK.org, World Central Kitchen, which works around the world at disaster sites. Local charities are always looking for help too, and if you're not in a situation where you can give right now, even something as simple as a smile can change someone's day in ways you can't even imagine.

Thank you for stopping by. If you found something interesting or useful, please pass it along, subscribe, and hit that like button. If not, drop me a comment and let me know what you'd like to hear.

Have a great week. Remember to live the life that you dreamed of — because that's the path to true contentment.

Love and encouragement to everyone. See you next week on 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com.