Deep down, most of us are afraid of change. We all know people who are set in their ways – they’ve had the same job for years, their taste in music goes back to when vinyl was the only option, they eat the same food, live in the same house. The list goes on.

Sure, there’s a cliche that familiarity breeds contempt but for most of us that’s simply not true.

Familiarity is our own, built in, Linus blanket that we hold on to in the hope that it will protect us against change.

The problem is, that’s simply not the case.

Our world moves fast and recent events have caused it to move even faster.

The pace of change is incredible.

Which is maybe why so many of us hate the idea of things changing.

It’s a lot easier to hold on to the familiar in the hope that things will go back to the way they used to be.

But that just won’t happen, especially as we tend to view the past with rose tinted spectacles, so the good old days were almost certainly less good than the filters in our memory tell us.

We tend to like old things and get upset when, for instance, there’s a fire at Notre Dame and the cathedral was almost razed to the ground.

We like a sense of history – if you’ve ever been to the pyramids in Egypt or similar ancient places, you’ve almost certainly experienced a sense of awe at being somewhere that hasn’t much changed in an almost incomprehensible length of time.

We quietly ignore all the changes for the better that we live with, day in, day out.

I doubt many of us would want to go back to the old style telephone system where you had to wind the dial round to send the numbers.

And, if you’re like most people I know, there’s a sense of panic if the internet goes down even for a few minutes. But it’s not that long ago most didn’t have the internet available at home, let alone permanently with us in a handheld device that would have been laughed off the screen if it had been introduced when Star Trek first aired.

So we can – and do – embrace change.

But only when it suits us.

Other times, we resist it with all the force we can muster.

Because our deep down primal instinct for some reason sets off a trigger in our mind that says change is bad.

Some of this fear is our body protecting us.

We learn to be afraid very fast – it’s one of the survival instincts that has allowed us to progress as a species.

And being afraid of change is a very natural process.

After all, if you were coming back to your cave after a (hopefully productive) day’s hunting and something was out of place on the route, there’s a good chance that wouldn’t be something good that had happened.

So being scared of change had kept humans alive for thousands of years by adding an extra layer of protection.

That still works to our benefit – whether it’s something not quite right that has happened at home or we see someone on the street who we don’t recognise and who – somehow – doesn’t seem to be acting normally.

It’s a hunch, a gut reaction, a sixth sense maybe.

And, weirdly, it’s often right. Or, probably more correctly, we remember the times we were right and forget the times when nothing out of the ordinary happened.

And, of course, there’s the memory of all those frustrating hours you’ve spent when some software engineer thinks we’d all like a change in the software on our phone or an app we rely on. All those menu options that have changed position or hidden themselves and we have to resort to Google to find out where they’ve been buried.

Those changes are annoying to say the least and they’re forced on us when we blithely tick yes to accepting the small print of the terms and conditions.

Not that we really have a choice…

Which is, again, why we hate change so much.

So often it’s forced on us, whether we’re willing or not.

And our instincts kick in and rebel against changes in our lives, whether they’re for the better (fancy going back to a handful of TV channels?) or worse (long delays in traffic) or anything else that crops up in life that’s different from how it was a while ago,

What can you do about that?

The glib answer is to accept or even embrace change.

Which is great if you’re perfect and unflappable.

The longer answer is to start to train your mind to accept change at least a bit more often.

But how can you do that?

The easiest way is to enlist the power of your subconscious mind – that part of us that does almost every background task in our lives.

And the easiest way to change your subconscious mind is to let a hypnosis MP3 do all the heavy lifting.

Simply by listening to the track a few times, you can let your fear subside and melt away. Which means you can get back to enjoying life, including all those changes that you actually like!