Why Change Doesn’t Always Last — And What Helps It Stick
- Kym Burls
- 22 hours ago
- 3 min read
Updated: 10 hours ago
My reframe of the four phases of change, and what's necessary for change to embed over time.
When you're stuck, it’s easy to assume it's because something is missing.
A better technique.
A deeper insight.
A more effective method.
So you decide to keep adding.
This is where breathwork often enters, as another addition. For a moment, it works. The breath changes, the body softens, the mind quietens. Something shifts.
And then, just as reliably, it doesn’t last.
This is often interpreted as user error. Not enough consistency. Not the right technique. Not going deep enough.
But nothing is actually failing here. What’s being misunderstood is the level at which change is taking place. Changing how you feel and changing how your system operates are not the same thing.
Breathwork is effective because it alters state quickly. Shift the breathing pattern and physiology follows. That’s real, immediate, and useful.
But state change is not structural change.
Without something more stable underneath it, the system reorganises into familiar patterns. It does this, not because they’re optimal, but because they are known — and in that sense, stabilising.
The nervous system is organised around prediction.
It’s constantly generating expectations about what is likely to happen next, comparing those expectations to incoming information, and adjusting based on the difference. The priority is not perfect accuracy, but minimising uncertainty. What is familiar is easier to predict, and what is easier to predict is more stable.
This is why unhelpful patterns persist. Not because they are good, but because they are predictable.
When a new pattern is introduced — slower breathing, reduced reactivity, a different internal state — it’s not immediately integrated. It’s registered as a deviation from what the system expects.
And deviation creates instability.
That instability is often experienced as restlessness, discomfort, or a pull back toward the previous pattern. The system is trying to restore coherence. At this point, many approaches misread the reaction. Discomfort is taken as failure, rather than evidence that something unfamiliar is being introduced.
From here, change becomes organised around removal.
Less stress. Less tension. Less overthinking. Less of whatever has been labelled as the problem.
Sometimes this helps, particularly when it increases a sense of safety. But removal alone does not reorganise a system. It creates space. And space, without something stable to replace it, is often filled by what was there before.
At a physiological level, whether something integrates depends on the system’s capacity to process it. This is often described as the window of tolerance — the range within which the nervous system can experience change without shifting into protection.
Outside that range, the system doesn’t adapt. It defends.
Too much activation overwhelms. Too much reduction destabilises. In both cases, learning is limited. Which means many attempts at change fail not because the method is wrong, but because the conditions for adaptation aren’t in place.
This is where breathwork becomes either useful or misleading.
It can produce strong experiences — emotional release, altered states, a sense of breakthrough. But intensity increases signal, not necessarily learning.
If the system cannot integrate what is happening, it does not update from it. And without updating, nothing structural changes.
What changes a system is far less dramatic; repeated exposure to manageable difference.
Small shifts that stay within the system’s capacity to process. Enough variation to challenge existing predictions, without triggering protection. Enough consistency for those predictions to gradually update.
Over time, what was unfamiliar becomes expected. And only then does behaviour begin to reorganise.
This reverses how change is usually approached.
The assumption is that change creates stability. But in practice, stability is what allows change to take hold. Without it, new patterns remain temporary. With it, they become part of how the system operates.
This is the role breathwork can play when it is applied properly.
Not as a way to chase better states.
Not as a tool for forcing release.
But as a way of shaping the conditions under which the system learns.
Sometimes that means calming.
Sometimes it means gradual exposure.
Often it means doing less than expected, more consistently.
The implication isn’t particularly appealing.
Change is slower than insight suggests. It is less dramatic than most methods promise. It depends less on effort than on whether the system has a reason to update its expectations.
But when those conditions are in place, something shifts.
Lasting change doesn’t come from doing more.
It comes from changing what your system expects — and giving it enough stability for that expectation to embed over time.
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If this resonates, there are a few ways we can work together.
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