#68 Endings, Identity, and the Rituals We Forgot to Keep

This episode explores why life transitions—graduation, empty nesting, sobriety, loss, and reinvention—can feel disorienting, even when they’re positive. Through neuroscience, psychology, and cultural insight, we unpack how identity shifts happen, why we often self-sabotage during growth, and how reclaiming simple rituals can help us move through change with more clarity and connection.

What We Cover:

• Why endings disrupt identity (not just circumstances)
• The “identity lag” and how long change really takes
• Neuroplasticity and how the brain forms a new self-concept
• The “upper limit” problem and self-sabotage patterns
• Why modern society struggles with transitions
• The loss of rites of passage and its impact
• How technology fragments attention during key life moments
• Simple ways to create personal rituals for change

Key Takeaway:
Endings are not just something to get through—they are something to mark. When we intentionally acknowledge transitions, we help our brain and nervous system integrate the new identity more fully.

Call to Action:

Take 5 minutes today to create a simple ritual to honor something you’re letting go of.

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Transcript

Welcome And Why Endings Hit Hard

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey, welcome back, or welcome if it's your first time joining. I'm Sari Stone and I'm your host for Just Count Me In. And let's dive in. Today we're going to talk about endings. It seems like everywhere I look, the people I work with and the people I'm around are in some sort of transition, big transitions the past couple months, coming to a head in May or June. Not just the kind of endings that we expect, but the ones that really are reshaping who we are right now. And kids are graduating. People are figuring out life without the thing that was keeping them from being happy and it's unfamiliar. Parents are becoming empty nesters. Couples are becoming parents. Some people I know are navigating deep, close personal losses. Others are getting sober. People are getting married. Couples are breaking up right now. There are babies being born and people dying. There are people stepping into healthier relationships or completely redefining their work. And what do all these things have in common? When I think about it, they're all rites of passage and they create lasting change, not just external changes that we post on social media, change that goes really bone deep, right down to your identity. And on the surface, these all look like very different experiences. But underneath, they're all the same thing. They're actually identity endings. So we tend to think that endings are about circumstances. Neurologically, endings are about identity. When something ends, your brain loses a familiar pattern that it had. And the brain is wired for predictability. It prefers to be known. It prefers to be able to predict everything. It gives it some false sense of control, even if the known wasn't actually good for you. So when life changes, even when it's a positive change, your nervous system can register this as a threat. That's why some couples who finally have the house to themselves don't really feel quite the joy that they expected to feel. And the person who gets sober feels very ungrounded at first. The student who starts all of a sudden succeeding in school and realizes how intelligent they are feels almost a pressure, almost an anxiety instead of relief. Because the identity hasn't caught up to the reality yet. There's a gap. And this is something I'm calling identity lag. It's the space between who you were and who you're becoming or who you've become. And this space can feel uncomfortable and unfamiliar, even just plain wrong. But here's the truth discomfort is not always misalignment. I know, I always think to myself, okay, how does this feel? I check in with my heart, I check in with my gut, I consult the brain from time to time. And some and if it doesn't feel good, I'm thinking, okay, I must be out of alignment. And that's not always true. Sometimes when we're uncomfortable, it's expansion. We're doing exactly what we need to be doing, but we're growing and it's new and different. It's filling the gap that expansion initially creates as you evolve into more and more of yourself. So I'm gonna say that again. When you're uncomfortable and you're taking on a new identity, the discomfort just kind of rushes in and fills that space that occurs because you are expanding and you're evolving into more of yourself and who you came here to be. And your brain is literally rewiring through neuroplasticity. There's new habits, new behaviors, new people, new life stages, new outlooks, new environments. These form new neural pathways in your brain. But this doesn't happen overnight. Research shows that identity level change can take months or even longer. I think it can be quicker than months, but the research doesn't bear me out. So it requires evidence. So I think it depends on how much repeated evidence you're going to require to really feel this. You don't believe that you're a new version of yourself until you've seen yourself be that person enough times. And there's not a certain number for one person, like they say, mastery with musical instruments, it's 10,000 hours of practice. There is none of that with this. Everybody defines it as they go through it for themselves. This is where something really important comes in, and that's called the upper limit problem. This is something to watch for. It's the idea that we all have a subconscious set point for how much success, how much ease, how much happiness we allow. So what happens when life actually gets better? We unconsciously disrupt it. We can pick a fight. We start to overthink. We need to numb ourselves. We create stress because there wasn't any. I know that these things don't make logical sense because we don't want to fail. It's just the old way feels safer. So the person who's now in a healthy relationship might start to feel some anxiety instead of calm. The person who's sober might feel restless instead of proud of themselves. The couple that's finally got their kids off to school or they're finally moving out of the house might feel some disconnection and ungroundedness because they're free, but they are not used to this, and their nervous system hasn't normalized that this is safe yet. Here's something I don't think we talk about enough as a society, and I had studied, gosh, about 15 years ago, this book called Transitions. It's a great book to read. And in it, he says that we've lost our rituals for transitions. There used to be clear markers, and some religious groups and cultures still celebrate that. There's coming of age ceremonies, there's religious milestones, there's community acknowledgments of change, moments where you were seen leaving one identity and stepping into another one. Today, for the most part, in America, what I see is we just keep on going. We just keep on swimming. We just move on. Graduate, next. Job change, next. Loss, keep going. Maybe take a week off work, maybe be sad on the anniversary of the death or their birth, but basically keep on going. Don't miss a beat. And without those markers, your brain actually is not getting the proper closure, which means it doesn't fully encode the transition. This is where it gets even more interesting. When we don't have intentional rites of passage, we often end up creating unconscious ones, like some drastic changes just to show on the outside what we're feeling on the inside. Sometimes we make some really impulsive decisions, and sometimes people use things like tattoos or piercings just to indicate their identity or their new identity. Because there is a basic human need that we don't talk about too much to mark transformation and transition. Some of it is external. I mean, you go through puberty, you turn into a teenager, you turn into a young adult, you turn into an older person. But also a lot of it is just internal. At the same time, we're also living in a world where, on top of it, our attention is constantly pulled away. Even having your phone on the dinner table, research shows that you're having a conversation over a cup of coffee with somebody, it reduces your cognitive presence. That's why a lot of school districts are saying there's phone-free classrooms now, because it actually reduces, even if it's turned off face down, your ability to be present because you know what it's capable of and you know that there's something going on in there. So imagine that it's hard for us to process this identity shift while we can't even be fully present with it. We are skipping the moment that actually creates our new identity. So here's the reframe: what if endings aren't something to rush through, but something to honor? Like you don't need a formal ceremony, or you can have one. Your brain needs a marker. This can be pretty simple. You can have a dinner, have like a family dinner to celebrate certain things, certain transitions. You can journal if you need to do it privately, or just speak about it. You can go for walks, but try to do these things if possible without your phone so that you are really, really present. You can have a conversation that acknowledges this big shift that you're going through. Or you can rebrand your business physically on the outside, or rebrand yourself. And a ritual is simply a moment of intentional awareness. I remember when I was teaching in Douglas County and we went from traditional to year-round and to year-round schools, and my principal actually had a wake, like a formal ceremony where somebody built this fake coffin, and we threw our summers into that because teachers were no longer going to have the whole summer off, and wrote all the things that we were giving up to embrace this new change, which at the time we thought was going to be better for kids. And I like it that he had a symbolic ceremony for that ending. What that felt like neurologically was it helped our brains encode: hey, this mattered, this is changing, this is real. So think about that couple adjusting to the empty house. And I've been that couple. And what if instead of expecting it to feel like a honeymoon all of a sudden, they just honored the version of themselves that they just completed? They had their ending. They thought about the years that they put in raising their kids, the identity of being needed, or the person who's sober now in sobriety. What if they recognize that they're not just removing something, they're becoming someone new, they're adding a lot. Or the student who's now succeeding, and I see that a lot because I'm a tutor. What if they just allow themselves to be that identity instead of questioning it to just practice feeling successful? Or the person who's now in a healthy relationship, what if they just took their heightened sensitivity and awareness right now and turned it into appreciation for how great things actually are? Or a couple who's getting divorced and they have no idea who they're going to be without that person. What if they took the time to actually look inside, look within, take a year off, heal, maybe not a year off work, but definitely some time off before you redefine yourself by getting into another relationship, which is very distracting. So this was a lot, and but there is a lot going on right now, and I speak to it. So if you're in a transition right now, whether it's big or small, I would advise you to pause before you rush into what's next and ask yourself, what's the ending here? Who have I been that I need to acknowledge? And maybe tonight, just take a few minutes while you're doing this, without any phones or any kind of distractions, just take a mindful moment to check in and make the shift. Because when you honor the ending, you make space for the beginning to actually land. Again, thank you so much for joining me. I know there's a million ways you could spend your time, and I really appreciate you. Please, please hit subscribe, like, and share this episode. If there's anyone that you know that's going through or recently has gone through a transition, thank you so much for counting me in. Have a great week.