Great Minds: Hamish and Kyle - Time for a change

In this web series, psychotherapist Kyle MacDonald and Nutters Club co-host Hamish Williams look at mental health and how to navigate some of the more challenging parts of modern life. Today they look at how to deal with change.

I hate change. I know people will tell me it's a constant and I should embrace it blah blah blah but I like things the way they are. It's reassuring to know where things are, when places open and close and who does what around the place.

So when I come home and find that my wife has once again rearranged the house I can tend to feel a bit put out. What was wrong with the couches how they were? Why the great need to do things differently when they were fine in the first place?

The answer to this question, as I've learned, is that we make change because we need to.

"Change is hard because we all tend to naturally rely on stability and predictability to feel safe," says psychotherapist Kyle MacDonald. "Change can be exciting, but if it's imposed upon us it can also be hard work."

When we shut our borders, confined ourselves to our homes and limited our social contact, we made that change because we needed to.

In the same vein that mandates surrounding masks and managed isolation periods have disappeared, this has been, at least to my thinking, because we needed to. And with that, for some, comes the discomfort from change.

"Generally, it helps to work on fostering attachment. To move towards acceptance we also have to feel what we feel, and allow the feelings to come and go, so we can process them," says MacDonald. "Adjustment to change is primarily an emotional task. And of course, talking about it helps."

Speaking of change, this is our final piece for this Great Minds series and I hope in some small way that you might have been able to find positive change for yourself.

Maybe it was as simple as understanding a symptom or mental health issue a little clearer. Or perhaps it was feeling comforted in the knowledge that none of us are alone in the experiences of dealing with our mental health; we're all a little nuts so may as well get used to it.

More than any of this though, I want to think about the biggest piece of change we have all experienced in the past two years. Collectively we have faced challenging situations that were out of our control and we have had to find a way forward through it all.

If you're reading this then you survived and to do that you most likely had to change in some way. That's awesome.

So maybe I shouldn't hate change. Change has given us all an opportunity to build our resilience and learn more about ourselves.

If only to realise what it is that we don't want in life, rather than what we do, then I say change has given us the gift for all of us to truly grow and develop great minds.