Better Isn't Free... And Maybe Not Better…
Transition stress and how to tell when a change is worth it
Change costs you something, even the good ones.
People often want change, but they don't consider the transition stress. They think about what they'll get (new software that saves time, losing weight, finally writing that book, a house painted a new color) and not what it takes to do it, like the hours, learning something new, the frustration and everything else that has to wait while they do it and get the results they want.
Transition stress is the cost and pain of making a change, separate from the cost of the thing you're changing to. It shows up during the switch, usually before the benefit does.
Think about the big moments of your life. Starting school. Learning to drive. Dating, then getting married. Bringing a baby home. Buying a house. Watching that baby pack the car and leave for college. Losing a parent.
Some of those are the best days you'll have and some are the worst, and your body and mind react to all of them the same basic way... something changed and now it has to adapt.
Happy changes count too
In 1967 two psychiatrists, Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe, asked people to rate how much readjustment different life events required. The result was the Social Readjustment Rating Scale, which scored happy events right alongside tragic ones (Holmes & Rahe, 1967).
Death of a spouse scored 100. Divorce scored 73. Marriage scored 50... higher than getting fired at 47. Retirement came in at 45, pregnancy at 40, and a son or daughter leaving home at 29. Outstanding personal achievement made the list at 28. A vacation scored 13, and Christmas scored 12.
The scale doesn't ask whether the change was good or bad, only how much you had to readjust. A wedding and a firing both change your schedule, your money, your relationships and the way you see yourself.
Hans Selye, the endocrinologist who brought the word "stress" into medicine, saw the same pattern in the lab. The body mounts a similar general response to very different demands (Selye, 1936). He later separated distress from eustress, the stress that comes with good things (Selye, 1974). Eustress is still stress, and your body reacts to a wedding with a lot of the same chemistry it uses for a crisis.
Neuroscientist Bruce McEwen described the long-run cost as allostatic load, the wear and tear of adapting over and over (McEwen, 1998). One change at a time is usually manageable. Several at once is where people (and businesses) often start to break down.
How you assess the change
Richard Lazarus and Susan Folkman showed that stress depends on how you appraise the change: is this a threat, and can I handle it? (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984).
That is very close to the model I use with people, whether that’s in therapy (event, then assessment, then emotion, then behavior) or in business or elsewhere. The event is the change, and how you assess it has a lot to do with how much it hurts.
OK, you ask, if stress is just change, why does a new car feel exciting and a new phone feel annoying? Expectation. You expect the car to feel new. You expect the phone to work like the old one, and when your thumb goes to the wrong corner of the screen for the fortieth time, your brain registers a small loss. There is a mismatch between expectation and results.
Here is what that looks like across a lifetime.
| Change | What you expected | What it actually cost |
|---|---|---|
| Starting school | New friends, learning | New rules, new schedule, being the new kid |
| Learning to drive | Freedom | Full attention on every mirror and merge for months |
| Getting married | Partnership | Two sets of habits, money, holidays, in-laws |
| First baby | Love | Sleep, money, identity, and a marriage that changes too |
| Kids leaving home | Free time | A quiet house and a role that ended (“who is the person I married?”) |
| Buying a house | Stability | Repairs, debt, a new commute, a new neighborhood |
| Moving | A fresh start | New doctor, new grocery store, finding where everything is |
| Switching phones | A better camera | Muscle memory, lost texts, apps that don't transfer |
| Switching to an electric car | No more gas stations | Planning trips around chargers and range |
| Retirement | Freedom | The structure is gone, and so is part of who you were |
| Death in the family | Nothing, it wasn't a choice | Every role and routine that person carried in your life |
If one of those was more significant than you thought it would, nothing is wrong with you. You were adapting, and adapting takes energy.
Some of those you choose and some you don't. When you choose a change, you can weigh what it will cost before you start.
Bigger fish to fry
A lot of change starts with frustration. Something annoys you every day, so you fix it, and fixing it feels like progress. Meanwhile, nobody is working on the biggest problem.
In business that looks like an owner who spends a month moving everything to new software while nobody is marketing and no new clients are coming in. The software may well be better, but with nobody marketing and no new clients coming in, the business is still shrinking.
| The change that felt urgent | What actually needed attention |
|---|---|
| New software or CRM | Marketing, with no new clients coming in |
| Redesigning the website | Following up with the leads you already have |
| Changing the store hours | Calling the customers who stopped coming |
| Reorganizing the garage | The project with a deadline next week |
| A new planner or productivity app | The work already on your list |
| Repainting the house | A budget that doesn't balance |
Before you take on the transition stress of a change, ask whether it fixes the biggest problem you have. If it doesn't, it can probably wait.
One at a time
Habits are one of the most common places this happens. You want to lose weight, get more fit, manage your time better, write a book and start a hobby. Every one of those is worth doing.
Many people try to start several at once, and the transition stress of all of them together is too much. Then you feel guilty for not keeping up with all of them.
Start with acceptance. You can't do all of those things at once. Pick one, get it running, then add the next. Someone who wants to quit smoking and lose weight is usually better off picking one first, even though both will save your life (but your life won’t get saved if you don’t do either!)
The story goes that Warren Buffett once had his pilot, Mike Flint, write down his top 25 career goals and circle the five that mattered most. Then Buffett told him, "Everything you didn't circle just became your Avoid-At-All-Cost list." James Clear tells the story secondhand as a way to keep your focus on a few priorities (Clear, n.d.).
The other 20 can be good goals too, but working on them takes time and energy from the five.
McEwen (1998) found the same thing: adapting over and over adds up, and several changes at once wear you down faster than one at a time.
The same stress at work
Your business is run by the same body, and it reacts the same way. The difference is that in business we choose most of our changes (sometimes after watching a demo).
| Category | Change | I wanted… | I got… |
|---|---|---|---|
| Systems | New CRM | Better features, cleaner reports | The twenty small things the old one did that nobody listed, found after the old one is gone |
| Systems | New billing company | 1% lower fees | Credit cards don’t transfer, some payments fail, and staff spend time on calls. Clients are mad at you if it makes a mistake. A 1% improvement for a 500% headache |
| Systems | New phone or texting vendor | Lower cost, better app | Lost history, new numbers to learn, messages that land differently |
| Systems | New website | A fresh look | Broken links, lost rankings, a team that can't find the forms |
| Process | New curriculum or training method | Better results | Staff relearning what they already taught well, customers asking why it changed |
| Process | New schedule | A cleaner week | Every family and employee rebuilding their routine |
| Process | Price change | More revenue | Questions, objections, and the staff who have to answer them |
| People | New manager | Fresh energy | Everyone learning a new boss, and the boss learning everyone |
| People | Replacing a long-time front desk person | A stronger hire | Years of "they just knew that" walking out the door because of lack of systems. |
| Place | Moving locations | Better space, better traffic | Every customer's commute, every vendor's address, and a few customers who don't make the trip |
Why we underestimate it
Let’s take an example case: You look for a new system with a list of what's wrong with the old one. The demo shows everything on your list. The demo never shows the small things your old system did that you never thought about, because you never had to think about them. You find those a month or two in, after the data is migrated and the team is already tired.
This is a really common problem because people get excited about this bright shiny object of a new software system. Or a new curriculum or a new product that can sell, but there’s transition consequences and long-term consequences… I can’t tell you how many times I had people change CRM and then they go back to the original one or they flip to another one…
Michael Fullan found that performance and confidence drop when something new starts, before they improve (Fullan, 2001). Most new systems make you worse for a while before they make you better. The question is how much stress the change brings and how long it lasts.
Frustration with the old system climbs for months while the excitement you once had for it slides, then drops to almost nothing after the demo. Excitement for the new system peaks right at the switch. In the first stretch after the switch, frustration with the new system spikes and excitement fades. If the switch was a good choice, frustration drops and excitement climbs back. If it was a bad choice, frustration stays high and excitement keeps falling.
Two forces pull in opposite directions here. People keep the current option more often than the numbers justify (Samuelson & Zeckhauser, 1988), partly because losses weigh more than equal gains (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979). That keeps us from choosing a new option when change is the right call.
The other force is the bright shiny object. I often talk about how Vulcans couldn't exist because "emotion and rationalization is almost always in front of logic. I WANT something so I come up with the 'logical' reasons to justify/rationalize it."
You see the demo, you want the new thing, and then you make a pro and con list that has mostly pros for the new system. When you're afraid of losing what you have, you stay in a system that isn't working. When you're excited about the demo, you can talk yourself into a switch you didn't need (and the pro and con list comes after the wanting). The way out is the same either way... look at the data and results.
When change is worth the transition stress
Before you switch anything, here are five questions to ask...
| Question | Worth it if… | Not worth it (shiny object) |
|---|---|---|
| Does it remove a real bottleneck? | Fixes the thing that costs you the most | Adds features you didn't ask for |
| Is the gain bigger than the current cost + transition cost/stress? | A large, measurable improvement in a key area | Small savings, big headache |
| How much is the transition stress? | Is it much less than the long term benefit/savings? | Customers and staff (and you) find out the hard way |
| What else is changing right now? | No or limited changes now. | Third new system this year… we’re changing 27 things at once |
| Does it pay back inside 90 days? | Payback is realistic (and even worst case) | "Eventually it’ll help" |
DON'T say: "This new system has everything. We'll switch next month."
SAY: "This fixes our biggest problem. Here's what we'll lose, who it affects, and how long until we get the benefit."
Which one would you rather hear from your manager?
If the change passes these tests, then great! I am a big fan of improving if it’s going to be a big benefit (increased income, savings, less headaches). One of the goals for my business clients is “high net income, low brain damage”. For all of us that could be read as “Big net benefit, low brain damage!”
Transition stress comes in sizes, from silly to serious.
| Size | Change | The transition stress |
|---|---|---|
| Silly | Moving the silverware to a new drawer | A week of reaching for forks in the wrong place |
| Small | A new phone | Muscle memory and a few lost settings |
| Small | New software at work | Relearning tasks you used to do without thinking |
| Medium | A child starting a new school | New schedule, new drive, new teachers and new friends |
| Medium | Moving houses | New routines, new neighbors and unpacked boxes for months |
| Medium | Changing jobs | New people, new rules and proving yourself again |
| Higher | Moving to another city | Friends, doctors, schools and every routine at once |
| Serious | Getting divorced | Home, money, family (and custody, if there are kids), identity and the plans you made for the future |
If you've made a switch and regretted it, that does not mean you made a dumb decision. You were sold the features, and the transition stress usually isn't part of the demo.
Frequently asked questions
What is transition stress?
How long does the stress of a change last?
Why do people stick with a system that isn't working?
In the end
| Idea | What it means for you |
|---|---|
| Transition stress | The cost and pain of making a change, separate from the cost of the thing |
| Bigger fish to fry | Fix the problem that matters most before the one that annoys you most |
| One at a time | Pick one habit or change, get it running, then add the next |
| Good change is still stress | Marriage (50) outscored getting fired (47) on the Holmes-Rahe scale |
| Appraisal drives the cost | The same change hurts more when it breaks what you expected |
| The stress after a change | Performance drops for a while before it improves |
| Hidden losses | You find what the old system did after it's gone |
| Stacking | Several changes at once multiply the load |
| The test | Bottleneck, gain vs. total cost, size of the transition stress, what else is changing, 90-day payback |
Before your next change, at home or at work figure out the gain you expect, how many weeks the pain will last, and the payback date. You’ll have to decide what the balance is but for example, if the payback is more than 90 days out and nothing is broken, the old system may be doing just fine. If you want a second set of eyes on a change you're weighing, you can always reach out to me!
References
Clear, J. (n.d.). Warren Buffett's "2 list" strategy: How to maximize your focus and master your priorities. James Clear. https://jamesclear.com/buffett-focus
Fullan, M. (2001). Leading in a culture of change. Jossey-Bass.
Holmes, T. H., & Rahe, R. H. (1967). The social readjustment rating scale. Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 11(2), 213–218. https://doi.org/10.1016/0022-3999(67)90010-4
Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect theory: An analysis of decision under risk. Econometrica, 47(2), 263–291. https://doi.org/10.2307/1914185
Lazarus, R. S., & Folkman, S. (1984). Stress, appraisal, and coping. Springer.
McEwen, B. S. (1998). Protective and damaging effects of stress mediators. New England Journal of Medicine, 338(3), 171–179. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJM199801153380307
Samuelson, W., & Zeckhauser, R. (1988). Status quo bias in decision making. Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 1(1), 7–59. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00055564
Selye, H. (1936). A syndrome produced by diverse nocuous agents. Nature, 138(3479), 32. https://doi.org/10.1038/138032a0
Selye, H. (1974). Stress without distress. Lippincott.