Why Starting Over Doesn’t Work - And What Will Actually Help You Move Forward in 2026

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Why do intelligent, self-aware people still feel stuck - even when they’re motivated, capable, and trying hard to change?

In this episode, Dr Amen Kaur explores the science -  why “starting over” often backfires - and why real change isn’t a motivation or planning problem, but a nervous system and safety problem.

Using neuroscience, psychology, and lived experience, we break down how the brain responds to uncertainty. When the future feels unclear, the brain doesn’t default to wisdom or creativity - it defaults to prediction and threat reduction. This is why overthinking, overplanning, and constant problem-solving can actually increase stuckness instead of resolving it.

We unpack key scientific concepts including:

• Intolerance of uncertainty and how it drives anxiety, hesitation, and avoidance
• Threat perception (amygdala activation) and why change can feel dangerous even when it’s logical
• Rumination loops and why repetitive thinking narrows perception and options
• Reward prediction and why the brain can underestimate the benefits of change
• Why familiar stress can feel safer than unfamiliar peace

This episode explains why you can’t outthink a conditioned system - and why clarity doesn’t come from analysing more, but from restoring safety and regulation.

As the system settles, perception widens.
 When perception widens, new options become visible.
 And when the body feels safe enough, action stops feeling forced - and starts feeling obvious.

This is not a motivational reset or a “new year, new you” conversation.
 It’s a grounded, science-backed explanation of why you were never broken - and how embodiment, not effort, is what brings you back online.

If you’ve been trying to force clarity, restart your life, or plan your way into change - this episode offers a different path: one that meets the mind with logic, and the body with safety.

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It’s called “How to Reset Your Biology for Calm, Confident Success — Even If You’ve Faced Setbacks.”

You’ll learn how to release survival stress, regulate your nervous system, and grow from safety, not struggle.

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Because you can only grow as far as your body feels safe to go — and it’s time to start again from calm, clarity, and connection. 🌸

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Chapters

• 0:00 Why We Get Stuck
• 1:18 The Brain’s Prediction And Risk Math
• 3:19 The Lure And Cost Of “Starting Over”
• 6:23 Safety, Not Effort, Unlocks Change
• 9:29 Conditioning And Intolerance Of Uncertainty
• 13:06 Threat Signals, Body Cues, And Reward Drop
• 17:12 Why Logic Can’t Outrun Biology
• 20:35 Overthinking, Loops, And Rumination

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

If you've been thinking about starting over in your life, changing your direction, I need to restart my life and I don't really know what it is I need to do. There's something really important you first need to understand. Most people don't get stuck because they lack motivation, discipline, intelligence, or luck. They get stuck because they keep applying effort to a system that was shaped by conditioning and not by choice. And no amount of trying harder can override that. In other words, you don't need a fresh start. You need to understand why the system that you're using right now isn't working for you and might be pulling you back. And here's the science piece that matters. When humans, when all of us, face uncertainty, the brain doesn't respond with wisdom and say, hey, everything's always changing, so please go ahead and take that step. It actually responds with prediction. What it does, it tries to reduce uncertainty and tries to reduce risk. So it calculates everything, like how much uncertainty is there, how much risk is there? And it tries to reduce what it can't control. So if it's something new, it's going to say, hey, we can't control that, or we don't know how to do that. So let's not do it. So a lot of what we call starting over is actually the brain trying to solve one thing. It's the discomfort of not knowing, being uncertain, it just doesn't feel comfortable with it. And in this episode, I want to explain using logic, science, and lived experience, why starting over often backfires and what actually allows us to really change and to become who we know we're meant to be. When life feels wrong or something isn't working for us, or something's unclear, heavy, or misaligned, or you just know, hey, what I'm doing isn't working for me. It just drains me. The mind looks for a reset, a new job, a new identity, a new relationship, a new version of myself. And it might be as we're coming up to 2026, you're thinking, yes, I need to create a new version of me. And starting over feels hopeful because it promises some sort of control. It promises like a clean state. I can let go of everything else that's happened, all the bad stuff that's happened to me. And it promises certainty to some degree that I'll actually be happy, I'll feel motivated, I feel excited about life again. If you listen carefully to the language people use, it's so revealing. You can really tell what's happening inside of their brain just from the language. Some people might say something like, I want to make a change in my life. And other people might say, I need to transform my life, I need to restart my life or start over. When we say things like restart or start over, it sounds like I'm back to zero. I've lost all this time, all this effort, I'm just gonna have to let all that go. And it takes years, and this will cost me so much effort. And this is something that keeps us in toxic relationships, toxic environments, because we feel like we've got to start over, and that means that we're gonna lose everything that we've invested in often the brain's way of describing something deeper. It's the perceived effort plus perceived risk. So if you were to do maths here, it's like there's a huge amount of perceived effort involved in starting over. If you think about it, you go back to zero. Plus the perceived risk. Well, I don't know if it's actually gonna even work. And here's the problem: the urge to start over usually isn't clarity, it's overwhelm. Initially, yeah, it's great, and then the overwhelm starts coming in. You feel excited, and then the overwhelm comes in, and it doesn't get resolved by effort. Sometimes you just feel fear and anxiety or shutdown. It gets resolved by safety. Because the system doesn't feel safe, it starts doing what it always does. You'll start to feel fear around moving forward, becoming that newer version of yourself. And that's why so many people have good intentions of what they're gonna do in 2026 or in their new year, and then they get to a block and feel, oh, I can't do this. Because of the way the brain functions, because it plans, it analyzes, it problem solves, and not because those things are bad things, you've got an amazing brain, but temporarily by not doing something, you reduce uncertainty. So it's the brain's way of keeping you safe. It's okay, we don't know if you're going to be able to do this, let's just reduce uncertainty. People associate the new with relief, right? We all feel like, oh, the new version of me, uh, you just feel this relief. And control feels calming because we know, okay, these this is the process, and I know what happens through this process, and we feel a sense of calm because we've done it before. And this creates a short-lived motivation, but that is always followed with collapse. So I'm bringing this up because I want you to succeed in 2026 massively. And so I'm telling you this: yes, you're gonna have this new version of you in 2026, and maybe you're starting over or you're restarting, but that language of restarting from zero, it implies that you're going back to square one even when it's not true, and you're not starting over. The real problem is you've got to let go, let go of the things that don't work. So starting over often is an attempt to escape discomfort, not to resolve that discomfort. Well, so we're going into fight, flight, freeze, or fawn mode, and we're trying to deal with it that way. But unfortunately, it doesn't work because we need to feel safe in that scenario to resolve that problem. That's what we really want is to resolve the problems that we got. So most of what drives our decisions isn't conscious choice, it's conditioning. So you might be thinking, actually, I do need to start over. I do need to reinvent my life and transform my whole life. That again is conditioning. You're coming from a space of there's so many things wrong in my life. That's not true. There's so many things that are right about you, there's so many great things that you've got. So you're not starting from over, you're starting from a position where you've got so much experience already, and you want to use everything that you've got, including the things that don't work for you, so that you can then do a leap forward. See, conditioning is how the nervous system learns to survive through repetition, reinforcement, and adaptation. Your brain is designed to choose what's best. It's designed to choose what's familiar and safe. So it's going to try and tell you in your mind that that doesn't really work. But you start worrying about the uncertainty. And this is one of the most important concepts here, scientifically, is something called the intolerance of uncertainty. Intolerance of uncertainty is basically I can't tolerate not knowing what's going to happen. And it's really important, right? Because not everyone's brain is the same. And if you've had trauma, your intolerance to its uncertainty is going to be higher than someone that hasn't. So their brain is going to be different from yours. It's not the skills, it's not your potential, it's just that your brain is operating differently. So, intolerance of uncertainty is basically I can't tolerate not knowing what's going to happen. It's just too much for me. And if you've had trauma, you can't tolerate not knowing what's going to happen is going to be higher. It's not because there's something wrong with you or that you're not strong enough or anything like that. It's not a weakness, it's just science. And when someone has low tolerance for uncertainty, their brain does predictable things. It perceives more threat. It generates more caution signals and it predicts less reward from change. This is the hardest part. It's like you get less reward from changing. So here's what it looks like inside the brain in simple terms. Threat perception ramps up, so the amygdala, the part of the brain that detects risk and threat, becomes more reactive. And we know that. And that's one of the main problems around having more trauma. If you have been through a toxic environment or toxic relationships, or you've been around situations that have been really difficult, your amygdala is going to detect threat and risk more so than others, people's brains. So when you consider change or doing something new, your brain calculates higher danger. Like it's going to take more effort and you feel demotivated even before you start. You've lost your motivation for things that you used to be able to do. Things like, what if it goes wrong? What if I don't get what I want? And you don't feel the reward like you used to. The second thing is feeling signals become stronger. There's a region often associated with feeling, like your body sensations, the anterior insula. And in people who struggle with change, those signals can be more intense. So even when logic says, even if you lose three years to develop these new skills, it doesn't really matter because you're going to have the rest of your life. You're going to change the rest of your life, like 50 or 60 or 70 years of your life. It's going to be worth it. But yet your body is signaling, no, this feels dangerous. And you don't understand why. It's because your nervous system is being triggered and it's in conflict. Your mind is telling you one thing, but your body is saying no, but I still feel like I can't do it. And this happens a lot with trauma victims, where they feel like, I know I need to leave, I know I need to get out of this, and this is really difficult for me, but I don't know why. I feel more scared of leaving. That's basically the same thing. Your nervous system is triggered, it needs to be regulated before you can actually take that move. The third, the reward prediction drops. The brain begins to predict that the outcome won't be worth it. It's not worth me retraining or it's not worth me doing this work. So then you don't feel so motivated to do it because you don't think it's going to be worth it. Even if I do this, I might still not be happy. What if I just carry the unhappiness with me? I might as well just carry on and just I don't know if it's worth it. So now you have this combination. You feel a higher threat, stronger negative signals from your body, and lower predicted reward. And under those circumstances, it's not that you don't want to change, it's that your system is doing the math and coming to one conclusion. Don't bother or don't move or don't do it. It's not worth investing in yourself because nothing really works. It's not worth it. Which is why telling someone, or when people tell us just leave, or just start over, or just do this, or it doesn't work. Logic alone can't override the biology of change, depending on where your brain is. And this is the part that most people miss. Your brain chooses words that match this internal model of the situation that you're experiencing. So what you're using in terms of words is so precise, and what you're feeling is so precise, and it gives us an indication of where your brain's at. So when your system is in like threat and you use the word restart or I need to start over, or I need to completely transform my life, that makes complete sense. It feels like so much effort plus danger plus loss. You cannot outthink a conditioned system. You know, the system that you've got at the moment, it's been developed over a period of time. So let's summarize what we know. You've got a predictive brain model, your brain tries to reduce prediction, error, and uncertainty. It's natural and normal for each of us to do that before we do anything. Familiar stress can feel safer than unfamiliar peace. There's nothing wrong with you if you want to stay in the situation that you are, because peace is unfamiliar, we don't know it. And when we're analyzing and planning, we can be safety seeking, trying to gather and collect information to reduce uncertainty. And this is why people loop even when they know better, and they might be trying lots of different things, but they're not actually doing the very thing that they know they need to do, which is to really reconnect with themselves. So when people get stuck, they often respond in some ways, like they try harder, for instance. They start thinking, planning, analyzing, looking, trying new things, more self-improvement. And the reason this happens and it makes sense is when uncertainty goes up, the brain is trying to reduce it by trying to find something that will work. Plan it. And it does it in two ways: avoidance, doing nothing because wrong feels dangerous. I don't want to get anything wrong, or you try and do too much, like you try lots of different projects because you're trying to control the situation by collecting information, over planning, overthinking, trying to guarantee an outcome. And this is the brain trying to reduce the predictive error. It wants the gap between what you expect and what happens to be zero. So you know exactly what's going to happen. But here's the trap: the more you overthink and overplan to reduce uncertainty, the more you train your system to believe uncertainty is intolerable. So the strategy that feels like it should help, and it's very addictive to just go down that route, and I've been there so many times, it actually strengthens the very thing keeping you stuck. So you keep doing more, but you're not getting anywhere. And that's what we see in multiple ways. There's so much research around rumination, repetitive loops of thoughts, showing that rumination is the foundational mental process that predicts anxiety, depression, and it's not just a diagnosis, it's a mechanism, it's a system that you're using. Which is why some research suggests that when you target rumination directly, symptoms actually improve, even without addressing everything else first, like the problem that you were trying to solve. So when you say I'm stuck, for instance, or I don't know what to do, I don't know how to move forward, one of the most honest translations is I'm in a loop. This is an old conditioned pattern. And I may be going round and round in circles. So that is a pattern that I'm going through. But effort doesn't create clarity. So the more you do doesn't create clarity. It just means you go deeper into the loop. It actually increases the work that you're doing, but the outcome doesn't increase. That process that going around in the loop narrows perception. You're just going deeper into that. It narrows options, it narrows creativity, it narrows access to new information. Which is why you can be intelligent, self-aware, and still feel like nothing is working for you. Your brain isn't failing, it's protecting. This is why this was never a planning problem for you. You're probably brilliant at analysing. It's always been a safety problem. The real change doesn't come from becoming someone new and trying to reinvent yourself. It comes from removing what isn't you. Restarting isn't about effort. It's really about deconditioning. And scientifically, here's a reframe. If intolerance of uncertainty and rumination keep you stuck, then the path forward isn't more certainty. The path forward is increasing your tolerance to uncertainty. Because when you are okay with uncertainty, you will thrive. Because uncertainty isn't something to survive, it's where you get curious, you get your life force energy back, you start enjoying life again. And exploration is how you gather real data, not theoretical data, not imagined outcomes that cause anxiety, but real experience. There's also a concept sometimes that's discussed, which is as premature closure. When people commit early to a path without really exploring, and then they feel trapped later because they never got enough data about what they actually like. This happens a lot in relationships, this happens in jobs, this happens in so many different areas of your life. You don't need to commit. You can just gather enough data. And this is why I say if you have been in a difficult situation and you feel like you need completion, you get completion through data, like how people are treating you. If they're gaslighting you or if they're being mean to you, that's completion. You've got the data. So you're not starting over, you're collecting missing information that clarity actually needs. And when the system settles, your perception starts to widen. And when perception widens, action becomes obvious. It's like, oh I get completion here, I see who they really are, and now I want this instead. It's not forced, it's not pushed, it's obvious. And here's another important reframe: restarting your life doesn't mean starting from zero. Your brain may tell you it does, but you carry so many skills, so many experiences, your insight, your resilience. And when you really find what it is that you're meant to do, like your soul has been telling you what to do, every single thing you've done is moving you in the direction of what it is that you're meant to. Doing is like you're motivated, you don't even think about it, you start doing it. That's why uncertainty is where discovery really happens. That's where you find the greatest things that you do. And this has happened time and time again where the greatest of people that have found things in science, art, literature, they're allowing themselves to be creative. So uncertainty is really opening the door to creativity. You don't need to start over. You need to get your system back online without the conditioning. And when that happens, change doesn't feel like effort. It feels like truth is catching up with you. And that's where real movement begins. And if you've been trying to force clarity by thinking harder, planning more, problem solving every possible outcome, I want you to consider this. What if the next level of your life doesn't require more certainty? It requires more tolerance to uncertainty. Not reckless, not impulsive, but regulated enough to step into what you can't fully predict yet so you can be curious and creative and come back online to be your genius mode. Because that's where exploration happens, that's where excitement happens, that's where you get your motivation and your passion, and that's how you find what actually fits with you. And if that is something that you're looking to do, if you're looking for something that really aligns with what it is that you're meant to do rather than just working harder and trying loads of different types of strategies, then please do look in the show notes and you'll see that there's a free masterclass available for you. So we can look at the biology of success so that you can start moving forward in 2026 and have the best year of your life and really make it happen and make the change. I'm sending you so much love. Till next time.