What Science and Your Gut Already Know About Starting Over
New Chapters
Three months ago I closed a company I had built with everything I had. So much of my own money, eighteen months of my identity, and a clinical framework I genuinely believed in.
When the doors closed in January, I honestly did not know how to begin again.
What I discovered in the past few months is that, like most women over 50 I know, we are resilient.
By this time in life we’ve experienced multiple endings: a company, a marriage, a career, a relationship, a home, or simply a version of yourself you had invested in completely.
Today’s wellness industry, with the wisdom of 20-somethings, hands you a 30-day journal and tells you to practice gratitude.
The actual research says something far more interesting.
The Story You Tell
Psychologists who study how humans recover from significant loss have documented something that does not get nearly enough attention: recovery depends less on the scale of what was lost and more on the narrative you construct around it.
Martin Seligman, the father of positive psychology, spent decades studying what he called learned optimism, the practiced ability to see setbacks as temporary, specific, and external rather than permanent, pervasive, and personal.
A pessimist loses a marriage and concludes she is not someone who gets to have love.
An optimist loses a marriage and concludes that this particular relationship, at this particular time, with this particular set of circumstances, did not survive.
The difference between those two interpretations is not a personality trait you either have or you do not: It is a cognitive skill you can learn.
Intuition is Intelligence
A landmark study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, conducted by researchers at Harvard, Boston University, and the National Institute on Aging, tracked over 159,000 women across racial and ethnic groups and found that the most optimistic women lived an average of 5.4 percent longer than the least optimistic.
They were also significantly more likely to survive past 90. Lifestyle factors like diet, exercise, and body weight accounted for only 25 percent of that association. The remaining 75 percent came down to the way women perceived the future.
Joy, purpose, and believing that good things happen are the most powerful biomarkers.
Warren Buffett makes major financial decisions by feel first and validates them with data second.
Antonio Damasio, the neuroscientist whose somatic marker hypothesis changed how we understand human decision-making, proved why that works.
His work found that what we experience as intuition is the body’s archive of accumulated experience, compressed into a signal.
When something feels right, and a direction feels alive, it’s not some woo-woo mystical thing.
It’s your nervous system processing pattern recognition at a speed your conscious mind cannot match!
Small Habits Compound
NIH research on habit formation shows that small behaviors practiced consistently in a stable context migrate from the prefrontal cortex, where willpower lives and depletes, into the basal ganglia, where they run automatically and without effort.
James Clear calls this casting votes for the identity you are building in Atomic Habits. A published review in the British Journal of General Practice found that participants in a small habit based behavior change program who practiced consistently over 32 weeks reported that their new behaviors had become automatic, second nature, something they felt strange without doing.
What all this means is you do not rebuild all at once: you rebuild by doing one small thing every day until it is second nature, and then you add a new thing.
Tim Ferriss often quotes Admiral William McRaven on the act of making your bed each morning: completing one task creates a small sense of pride, which creates the next task, which creates the next, until by the end of the day that one small act has turned into many.
He calls winning the morning winning the day.
Tips To Start Over
Take Time to Grieve
The research on identity reconstruction after significant loss is clear that you need time to understand what actually happened before you can build something new or “move on.” This is a necessary precondition for a beginning. If you skip this step, and rebound into anything new right away, the old patterns might creep in.
Honor the Wisdom
Marriage, career, companies are containers. What you built inside them including the knowledge, experience and resilience stays a part of you. One of the most consistent findings about resilience speaks to separating the shitty experience from your value as a human being. Honor the experience and the wisdom. Trust that the pain helps you become the beautiful luminous being you are meant to be.
Trust What Feels Alive
Your gut is not being irrational when it pulls you toward something. It is being efficient, drawing on every experience you have accumulated and delivering the conclusion faster than conscious analysis can. When something feels like the right next step, interrogate it carefully and then act on it with intention.
A NEW Story
New Beginnings Are Formed by Design
Three months after closing my company, I am building again, and all the lessons learned from the last startup are paving the foundation.
This one is all mine, built for me, my friends, and all the women in their most radiant chapter who want to feel fully alive.
It’s built on the science of small things done consistently. But, in true fashion to all I believe it considers the intelligence of natural rhythms.
Your gut knows that every ending was helping you enter the greatest of all beginnings.
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