This article is part of an ongoing series on behavioural psychology, exploring personality, scarcity, social dynamics and the ways our environments shape behaviour.

Why deep psychological change may happen much faster than we think

Years ago, in Amsterdam, my ex-wife smoked some extraordinarily strong cannabis and had what I can only describe as a psychological crisis.

I knew at the time that something fairly serious had happened, but I did not really understand the extent of it until later. She told me that at one point she had been standing at a third-floor window thinking about jumping.

I have thought about that moment a lot since. Not because I think cannabis is a treatment for anything, or because nearly jumping out of a window contains some useful therapeutic lesson. It plainly doesn’t. What interests me is that for a short period something that had previously seemed incredibly stable in her appeared to become completely unstable.

Whatever normally held her model of herself and the world together stopped working.

That has increasingly made me question an assumption I think most of us make about psychological change: that deep patterns must change slowly because they took a long time to form.

I am not sure they do.

I remember reading Richard Dawkins years ago and being struck by the distinction between evolution being gradual and evolution necessarily happening at a constant speed. The underlying process can be incremental while the visible change is anything but. A system can remain relatively stable for a long time, then the environment changes and suddenly the adaptations that worked before no longer work particularly well.

Psychology feels as though it may sometimes behave in much the same way.

We build models of the world because they help us survive it. If resources repeatedly disappear, holding onto things makes sense. If people prove unreliable, trusting them less makes sense. If vulnerability gets punished, control begins to look sensible. Do that for long enough and eventually it stops feeling like a strategy you adopted. It becomes how the world is.

That is one of the reasons I have become so interested in scarcity. A lot of behaviour that looks bizarre when viewed from outside becomes considerably easier to understand if the person is operating from the assumption that there will never quite be enough. Enough money, love, attention, reassurance, status or control.

Once that assumption is embedded, evidence against it does not necessarily help because the evidence gets interpreted through the same model. Generosity can contain a hidden motive. Affection might disappear tomorrow. Somebody else’s success might leave less for you. Giving up control might expose you to something you cannot recover from.

The model becomes extraordinarily good at preserving itself, right up until something happens that it cannot explain.

Crisis affects change

I have a phrase I keep coming back to: crisis affects change.

Not necessarily good change. That bit matters. People can experience catastrophe and become considerably more frightened, controlling or defensive afterwards. A business can nearly fail through reckless expansion and respond by spending the next decade unable to take a sensible risk. Somebody betrayed badly can decide that trusting people was the mistake.

Crisis does not tell you what to learn. What it does rather effectively is destabilise what you thought you already knew.

I know this from my own life in less dramatic ways. Cancer changed things in me quickly that ordinary reflection probably would have taken years to shift. There were assumptions about work, responsibility, time and what actually mattered that had survived an enormous amount of evidence because, fundamentally, the existing arrangement was still functioning. Then suddenly it wasn’t.

You can spend years negotiating with yourself while your life continues to confirm that the current system is survivable. When it stops being survivable, the negotiation changes very quickly.

That is why the Amsterdam incident still interests me. For a period my ex-wife seemed to reach a point where whatever normally protected her psychologically had failed, and the old equilibrium was gone. I sometimes wonder what happens in that gap, not specifically what I could have done differently, because that road becomes counterfactual very quickly, but what determines whether somebody reconstructs the same system afterwards or builds something different.

If scarcity created the original adaptation, crisis by itself may simply produce more scarcity. Lose control catastrophically and the lesson might be that you should never surrender control again. Trust somebody and get hurt, and perhaps you decide you were foolish to trust. Nearly lose everything and you may spend the rest of your life defending whatever remains.

In that case the original behaviour comes back stronger because the crisis appears to prove that it was necessary all along.

But there is another possibility. The old assumption fails and what happens immediately afterwards provides evidence that another assumption is survivable.

You admit you were wrong and discover that you are still respected. You stop controlling somebody and they do not leave. You give another person credit and discover that their success does not reduce yours. You lose something you thought you could not live without and, rather inconveniently for the old model, continue living.

Those experiences probably have much less power while the existing system is stable because they can be explained away. During a period when the system is already moving, I wonder whether they become disproportionately important.

That would explain something about change that has always seemed slightly strange to me. People can talk about the same problem for years and barely move, then something happens and within months they appear to have reorganised significant parts of themselves. Perhaps the missing variable was never time so much as instability.

What happens next

There is a temptation here to turn crisis into something heroic, which I don’t think is right either. Crisis can destroy people. It can reinforce exactly the adaptation that caused the problem in the first place, and deliberately trying to break somebody psychologically in the hope that they reconstruct themselves better would be both grotesque and spectacularly unreliable.

Life produces enough destabilisation on its own. The useful question is what happens when it does.

We tend to concentrate on the event because the event is dramatic: the breakdown, the diagnosis, the redundancy, the divorce, the business failure. I increasingly suspect the quieter period immediately afterwards may matter more, because the old model has taken a hit and the person is trying, consciously or otherwise, to work out what replaces it.

That is where the environment comes back in. If everybody around you confirms that the world is hostile, perhaps you rebuild the walls. If somebody exploits you while you are exposed, vulnerability becomes even more dangerous. If an organisation responds to a failure by punishing everyone associated with it, the next generation learns to hide mistakes rather than expose them early.

The reverse can also happen. If the experience immediately afterwards provides evidence that another way of behaving is survivable, there may briefly be room for a different adaptation to take hold. Not because somebody has suddenly become a different person, but because the old explanation of the world has stopped feeling inevitable.

This is still a hypothesis. I am not pretending I have found a neat mechanism that explains psychological transformation, and my ex-wife standing beside a window in Amsterdam certainly does not prove one. It simply forced me to look at change differently.

I used to assume that if somebody had behaved in a particular way for thirty or forty years, changing it would probably require some proportionate amount of time. Now I think that may confuse the age of the structure with its stability.

Some structures take decades to build and can become unstable very quickly. What matters then is not simply that the old model has failed, but what evidence arrives while the replacement is still being formed.

Scarcity may create the adaptation. Crisis may destabilise it. What comes next determines whether we rebuild the same thing or discover that another way of living is possible.

Which leaves one final question. If abundance can provide the alternative, what does abundance actually look like when it shows up in a person? I explore that next in Social Gravity.