Making life changes requires overcoming the discomfort of not knowing what will happen. Facing uncertainty, we make long mental lists of things that might go wrong and use these as the reasons why we must stay on our current path. Learning to have a healthy distrust of this impulse and knowing that even if things go wrong, we might discover things

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If you keep hearing some vague descriptions about how much better some change in life is, but you don’t really “get it,” maybe that’s a sign it’s something you should explore rather than shy away from.

What all of these examples have in common is that the former require less activation energy, feel good immediately, and feel crappy later on. The latter require more work up front, feel not so great immediately, and feel wonderful later on.