This morning I was having a shower when my brain, which apparently doesn’t believe showers should be used exclusively for washing, went back to something that happened yesterday. I had a click. I don’t really know what else to call it.

Nothing happened around me. There was no big event, no conversation, no new piece of information. I simply looked at something I have been struggling to move away from for a while and, for the first time, instead of thinking about how difficult it was to keep moving forward, I thought: why would I want to go backwards when I feel so much better now?

It was such a simple thought that I almost laughed. Because none of the information was new. I already knew what hadn’t been good for me. I already knew why I had needed to change things. I had spent months understanding it, talking about it, getting help, reading, thinking and doing the work. And yet knowing all of that hadn’t stopped change from being incredibly difficult.

Yesterday, something was different. I wasn’t trying to convince myself of anything. I wasn’t reminding myself why I had made certain decisions. For a moment, I genuinely couldn’t understand why going backwards had ever seemed so tempting. So, obviously, this morning my brain wanted to know why.

What actually happens when we change? Why can we know perfectly well that something isn’t good for us and still find it incredibly difficult to move away from it? Why can doing something differently feel so uncomfortable at the beginning, even when we believe it is better for us? And how do we eventually reach that strange point where something that required so much effort begins to look completely different?

While I was standing there thinking about it, I realised something else: this wasn’t the first time I had experienced that feeling. When I was younger, I went through an eating disorder. At another point in my life, I had to deal with an addiction. There have also been other, less dramatic things that I have had to change over the years.

Obviously these experiences are very different from one another, but there is one part of the process that I recognise: every time, there was a period in which I knew something needed to change long before changing it actually became easy.

And I want to be very clear about this, because I don’t believe that meaningful change happens because one morning you wake up, announce that you’re changing your life and suddenly become a different person. At least, that has never been my experience.

The big changes in my life have involved work. I have read, studied, asked questions, gone through psychotherapy, looked for information, tried to understand what was underneath certain behaviours and learned different ways of responding to things. Sometimes I have needed professional help. Sometimes I have had to keep doing the work while feeling as though absolutely nothing was changing.

And then, eventually, I’ve had these moments. Click. Not the beginning of the change. Not even necessarily the end of it. Just a moment somewhere along the way when I suddenly realise that I’m looking at the old thing from a different place. That was the part that fascinated me this morning, so I wanted to know whether there was actually something behind it.

I started looking. And look what I found!

First, I discovered something called status quo bias. In very simple terms, we have a tendency to favour what already exists over changing it. There are several possible reasons for this, including uncertainty, the perceived cost of change and the fact that potential losses can weigh heavily when we make decisions.

That immediately made me think about something I had been wondering in the shower. Maybe sometimes we aren’t attached to unhappiness itself. Maybe what has such a strong hold on us is familiarity. There is an enormous difference between those two ideas.

Then I started reading about habits and automaticity. Our brains don’t make every decision completely from scratch every time we encounter a situation. Through repetition, behaviours can become associated with particular contexts and gradually require less conscious thought.

That doesn’t mean complicated experiences like addiction or eating disorders can simply be explained as habits — they can’t — but it helped me understand something much more general: knowing that a behaviour isn’t helping us doesn’t automatically switch off all the processes that keep us repeating it. In other words, understanding that something needs to change and actually being able to live differently are not the same thing.

And then I found the part that really got me: the new can become familiar too.

When we repeatedly do something differently, the new behaviour or new way of responding doesn’t necessarily remain as difficult and unfamiliar as it felt at the beginning. Research into habit formation shows that repetition can increase automaticity over time.

There isn’t a magical number of days, and the process varies enormously depending on the person and the behaviour, but the basic idea fascinated me: what initially requires deliberate effort can gradually require less of it.

Suddenly the click made much more sense to me. Perhaps there is a point during some changes when we have accumulated enough experience of doing things differently that the new is no longer completely new. We aren’t necessarily standing between “familiar” and “unknown” anymore. We may be standing between two things we now know. And that changes the question.

At the beginning of a change, we may know exactly what the old thing costs us, but we don’t yet know what life without it feels like. We can understand intellectually that something else might be better and still have no lived evidence of it. So we do the work, repeat different choices, learn, get help, fall over, try again and slowly accumulate experience. Then perhaps one day we notice that the balance has shifted.

I don’t think the click means the work is finished. Yesterday certainly didn’t feel like some magical final destination, and I don’t think human beings work that neatly. I think it was simply a moment when I became conscious of something that may have been changing gradually for quite a while. And maybe that’s why it felt so familiar: I’ve been here before.

I’ve experienced changes that once seemed incredibly difficult and that, years later, no longer feel like things I have to fight myself not to return to. Somewhere between those two points, something changed. Not because I simply decided harder, but because I worked on what was underneath, learned, practised, experienced life differently and gave the unfamiliar enough time to become known.

Yesterday, I think I caught one of those moments happening. And this morning, while washing my hair, I got curious about it. So I went looking.

And look what I found.