The Best Ways to Begin Again

Feeling depressed, anxious, or bored? Looking for new friends? Coping with loss, healing from a breakup or searching for your life’s purpose? Look for solutions to these disparate problems and you’re likely to see one suggestion appear again and again: Try something new.

There’s good reason for this. Psychology and neuroscience both make it clear that novel experiences help us stay sharp, adapt to change, manage stress, connect with others—the list goes on. The human brain is a dynamic, powerful organ, primed to respond to novelty; indeed, regular exposure to new things is a known driver of neuroplasticity, the brain’s capacity to grow and evolve over the lifespan.

But starting something totally new, even if it’s ultimately rewarding, is often easier said than done. Being a beginner usually means making mistakes, asking dumb questions, even failing outright—all big asks in a culture that venerates wunderkinds and overnight success stories. And that’s to say nothing of the time, energy, and patience that most new endeavors require but that many of us struggle to maintain.

These challenges aren’t insubstantial, but they’re often much more easily conquered than we fear—especially if we do our best to embrace the uncertainty and treat setbacks and false starts as useful data rather than personal failings. If you’re ready to leave your comfort zone and finally pick up whatever you’ve been putting off, start here.

When Yuliya Vladkovska left her corporate IT career at age 45 and enrolled at Accademia Carrara in Bergamo, Italy, to pursue an MFA in painting, she surprised everyone—including herself. Yet the decision wasn’t as impulsive as it appeared.

She’d thrived in a corporate environment centered around logic and precision, but “I’d always felt like there was something inside of me that wasn’t really being explored.” Her career necessitated frequent moves—and when she landed in Italy, ready for another new adventure, everything converged. “At some point, you realize you’re in the right place at the right time, and you have to do the right thing.”

She’d always had an artistic streak, sketching and coloring in her free time. But at the Accademia, Vladkovska found herself surrounded by pupils half her age but seemingly light-years ahead in knowledge and skill. “I had to give up my old identity and go back to being a total beginner,” she says. Sometimes, that meant publicly failing—not just in front of her classmates but her three teen sons. Yet the latter was surprisingly rewarding. “My children were used to seeing me in a specific role,” she says. “I want to show them you can change whenever you want—and you might feel much better when you do. I hope that’s been liberating for them.”

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How to Be a Better Beginner

You get to live this phase only once. Approaching it deliberately and with an “experimenter’s mindset” can help make sure you enjoy it.

By Alice Boyes, Ph.D.

Jan is ready for a new challenge.

She recently moved from a bustling city to a small town famed for its outdoorsy culture, and she wants to take advantage of the new terrain and start mountain running. She’s already been practicing on a treadmill and even found a local running group that advertises itself as “beginner friendly.” She’s excited to start—yet at the same time overwhelmed, nervous, and deeply unsure of herself.

Many people view being a beginner only through a lens of discomfort, fixating on the confusion, frustration, anxiety, and self-doubt that, yes, they’ll likely experience. Too often, though, they forget that being a beginner at any experiential pursuit—training for a new career, taking up a new skill, or even starting a new relationship—is a uniquely rich phase, one often characterized by “newbie gains” and joyous self-discovery.

We only get to experience the beginner phase once—so rather than rush through it, we might as well learn to enjoy it. These six tips could help.

1. Don’t Try to Be Invisible. Beginners often seek not to stand out. They want to make their newbie mistakes quietly, unnoticed. However, this approach can hinder actual progress, both because it makes them less likely to take risks and because it robs them of the benefits of social support.

Other people make learning easier. Letting go of a desire to be invisible allows you to seek out people you can ask questions of when you’re stuck or look to role models who can help give you a realistic perception of what to expect. When you go under the radar, you cut yourself off from these supports.

Value progress more than you value hiding your mistakes. Beginners by nature can’t avoid asking questions, or trying things that will seem silly in retrospect, because they don’t yet know what they don’t know.

2. Enjoy Your “Newbie Gains." Weight lifters coined the term “newbie gains” to describe the rapid increase in both muscle and strength that novice lifters tend to experience. In strength training, newbie gains are physiological and observable—but newbie gains can happen in other pursuits, too, even if they’re not always as readily noticeable.

We think we’ll always remember what being a beginner felt like, but inevitably, we don’t. Being able to look back on it has value, so preserve it. Keep a few notes. Record a few videos talking about your inner experiences, achievements, and struggles. Narrate the journey, if only for the future you.

Today’s struggles become tomorrow’s stories. Imagine yourself at a more accomplished stage, looking back on where you are now. In retrospect, you’ll be proud of the version of you who muddled through your clueless phase. What feels messy now will feel impressive later.

3. Embrace the Abundance of Resources Aimed at Beginners. Search for tips on almost any skill and you’ll find far more aimed at beginners than at any other stage. When you’re farther along, this can be frustrating—but at this stage, it’s a powerful advantage. More-experienced people often delight in sharing their knowledge and passion with newcomers, giving you a wealth of resources to draw from.

Be mindful, though, that these resources can create the impression that your learning journey is less aesthetic or streamlined than it should be. Try to let these worries go as best you can. We like to be efficient—but efficiency can only come after skill-building, a process that is clumsy and repetitive by design.

4. Remember: You’re Not a Beginner at Learning. Even during an honest-to-god first attempt, you’re never truly a blank slate. You know what the learning cycle feels like, what it feels like to pass through the various stages, and what it feels like to finally succeed. Whatever you’re trying now might not even be close to the hardest thing you’ve ever accomplished.

Putting this new journey in the context of all those you’ve completed, then, can be an endless source of self-knowledge. Which learning methods work for you, even if they’re challenging? Where do you typically get stuck? Do you have a tendency to self-sabotage? Tracking patterns and using personalized methods that have worked for you in the past don’t just help you avoid likely pitfalls; they help reinforce the idea that success is possible—after all, you’ve done it before.

5. Limit Low-Quality Learning. In the age of short-form video, it’s tempting to think we can learn well from passively consuming slick content. But while those resources can help orient us to what we will have to learn, they rarely build the deep knowledge, skills, or experience we desire.

Learning that feels easy is often a sign that nothing is going into your brain. Low-quality learning can distort our perception of our progress in two opposite ways. It can make us think our knowledge is deeper than it is. Watching charismatic instructors who excel at explanation, or repetitive passive viewing, can make us confuse following along with understanding. Conversely, since we can put a lot of time into passive learning without achieving much, this can lead to wrongly perceiving ourselves as not having the aptitude to achieve a deeper understanding.

6. Cultivate an Experimenter’s Mindset. We all know someone who looks at everything as an opportunity to experiment. Some experiments work, and some don’t, but these people never seem to get discouraged. They just try again.

That unfazed quality is central to what I call an experimenter’s mindset—and it’s a valuable prerequisite for trying anything new. Once you develop it, it spreads to other areas of your life, becomes a source of resilience, and helps keep you mentally agile. Try these tips if you’d like to improve your own experimenter’s mindset:

• Engage with a community of experimenters: Most people don’t operate with an experimenter’s mindset. To learn from others’ thinking patterns and receive encouragement, join an experimentation-oriented community that interests you.
• Desensitize yourself to missing a reward: We’ve all heard the stories of inventors who made hundreds of unsuccessful attempts at an invention before their breakthrough. An experimenter’s mindset requires being relatively unbothered when experiments don’t work. If that’s not your natural response, it’s a skill you’ll need to build, at least to an extent.
• Try things you expect not to work: We often have biases that prevent us from attempting new approaches, particularly those that seem like long shots. True experimenters try things they fully expect not to work—because sometimes they do.
• Poke at a goal repeatedly until you succeed: We often unconsciously expect to succeed right away, and we get discouraged when we don’t. But not being able to crack that nut quickly doesn’t mean you never will—and each time you revisit a goal, your odds of success increase exponentially.'
• Test the part that’s most unknown first. Say you want to create something technical: Some aspects of that project might be very familiar from your having done similar things before. Don’t build those parts before you test the parts you’re unsure about. The same applies outside of tech: Say you’re considering meal prepping for the week: If the biggest unknown isn’t about efficiency but whether your family will actually want to eat the meal-prepped food, test that first.
• Experiment regularly: An experimenter’s mindset isn’t something you can switch on and off when it’s convenient. If you want it to be available, you have to use it regularly. The mental attitude of “I wonder if that might work” or “I wonder how that works” and similar curious questioning, once turned on, will tend to permeate your life.
• Try things without proof that they worked for others. In an age of video tutorials and internet reviews, some folks are unwilling to try anything they don’t already know works. Needing this type of certainty undercuts an experimenter’s mindset.

If you’re comfortable in your life, you might consider an experimenter’s mindset as merely a “nice to have,” but it’s more than that; it’s a source of resilience. There will likely be times in your life when you need an experimenter’s mindset to get out of a jam. For example, if your industry is changing quickly and you need to adapt, or you need to cope with a stressor, like a job loss. Or, perhaps you need to help your child navigate a challenging time they’re experiencing, or navigate a challenging time you’re experiencing yourself. An experimenter’s mindset can help you stay flexible and keep trying instead of feeling stuck.

Remember: The beginner phase for any activity happens only once. Instead of rushing it, treat it as a unique experience. Imagine looking back: How do you want to remember how you met today’s challenges? How can you create a narrative that helps you feel proud of yourself now and doesn’t demand being manicured or optimized? What do you hope to learn about yourself? Relish the richness of being a beginner instead of wishing your newness away

Alice Boyes, Ph.D., is the author of The Anxiety Toolkit and The Healthy Mind Toolkit.

Until his early 40s, Jon Kaye lived and breathed finance—first as an accountant, then as an investment banker, then as the head of his own private equity firm. “I was so single-minded,” says Kaye, who lives in London. “I missed time with family, with friends. I missed big occasions.” He wasn’t miserable—but he wasn’t exactly fulfilled, either. “It was a lot of drudgery—spreadsheets and budgets and long hours.” What he needed, he thought, was a dose of creativity to break up the monotony.

Kaye dabbled in different pursuits—craft beer, sports psychology—until the pandemic brought a new calling. “Other people were baking bread,” he says. “I was devouring a music production course, hours and hours of it. It opened up a whole new world.” He’d played piano in his youth, well but never seriously. Suddenly, he was making music daily, not just for himself but for friends, family, even clients—including a just-launched radio station, whose founders were so taken with his work that they asked him to host a talk show, too.

“I used to pride myself on being able to say no,” Kaye says. “I was so firm about it: ‘No, I’m not going to the pub, I’m tired’ or ‘No, I’m not doing that project, it’s going to fail.’” Postpandemic, he’s started just saying yes: Yes he’ll host the show, yes he’ll help with your startup, yes he’ll meet for coffee. “I realized that most of the time, whatever downside I was worried about was actually so small,” he says. “Maybe some day I’ll get too far out of my comfort zone, and it will come back to bite me—but right now, I just don’t care.”

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The Case for Going “All In”

Worrying how a new relationship might end feels protective, but often just fuels regret. For love without limits, embrace authenticity and risk instead.

By Randi Gunther, Ph.D.

Everything ends at some time. There is no true security. Anything can be torn from us no matter how hard we try to hold on. This is the reality we must face when we begin any new relationship—and particularly a romantic one.

Accepting it means making a choice: Should we love this person as deeply as we can until they’re gone or invest as little of ourselves as possible to make the inevitable loss easier to bear?

As a relationship therapist for five decades, I’ve seen the same pattern repeatedly: Those who choose to go “all in” live their relationship fully and without regrets, no matter whether it ends or thrives. Those with the deepest regrets, by contrast, realize that suppressing crucial parts of themselves kept true intimacy and connection forever out of their reach.

Why, then, do so many choose the latter path—often more than once? In my work, these themes arise again and again:

• They fear the unknown. Everyone suffers the conflict between the need for security and the risk of taking chances with unknown outcomes. Choosing the former may bring temporary comfort but will sabotage the possibility of transformation, which every relationship needs to remain vibrant.
• Old wounds may be reopened. Many people put guardrails around what they share, often suppressing past pain or trauma so as not to upend a new relationship. Yet in doing so, they foreclose the possibility of real connection and rob their partner of the chance to prove themselves worthy of trust.
• What’s shared cannot be unshared. Too many people fixate on the possibility, no matter how remote, that any vulnerabilities they reveal will be used against them later. But authenticity is rewarding precisely because it is risky, not in spite of it. If we want to be truly seen, we must be brave enough to relinquish our need for control.
• They worry they’ll be less valuable. Many people hide whatever aspects of themselves that they fear will push their partners away. The irony is that those hidden traits, left to fester in the dark, can never be satisfactorily managed—and, if they’re always fighting to find expression, are likely to come out in unexpected and often maladaptive ways.
• They’re trapped by anticipatory grief. Clients often confess, “I’m afraid to invest more in this relationship because then it will hurt more when I lose it.” Yet this fear, while not wholly illogical, often stops them from living wholly in the present moment—and paradoxically makes the loss they fear all the more likely.

Had my clients decided from the beginning to take the risk of being more authentic, more “all in,” their relationships might still have failed. But they at least would have lived them fully, and there are few greater rewards than that

This essay is adapted from a piece originally published in March 2025. The author, Randi Gunther, Ph.D., was a clinical psychologist and marriage counselor in Southern California until her death in August 2025.

Laura Bustamante first tried pole dancing at 46, after her mother’s long battle with Alzheimer’s came to an end. “During her decline, she couldn’t really understand her limitations,” Bustamante says. Falls were frequent, even when Bustamante was doing everything in her power to keep her mother safe: “No matter how much I tried to control the environment, there was always risk.”

After her mother passed away, Bustamante felt compelled to preserve her own strength, both physical and cognitive. A Mexican folk dancing background made pole seem a natural next step. “At first, I was so, so bad at it. You’re engaging all these weird parts of your body that you don’t even know exist. You’re upside down, and the teacher says, ‘Move your right leg,’ but you don’t even know which limb is which.” And she fell—a lot. “But I was determined, so I kept showing up.”

Just when Bustamante felt strong and fit, she was diagnosed with endometrial cancer. Treatment required major surgery, and she struggled with weight gain during recovery. Climbing back on the pole, “I felt as if I was back at square one,” she says. Yet each skill she regains brings a spark of joy. “There are still things that I can’t do that I wish I could, but I’m reinventing myself and relearning what it means to be in my body. It’s actually been just what I needed.”

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Why We Avoid Skilled Activities

Challenge and effort make tasks more enjoyable, not less. So why do we act as if the opposite were true?

By Max Alberhasky, Ph.D.

If you spend most of your free time watching TV or scrolling social media, you’ve got company: Surveys suggest that most people spend most of their leisure time engaged in passive media consumption, often with their eyes on a screen.

The appeal is understandable: After a long day, what could be easier than zoning out in front of the TV? But the same qualities that make passive consumption so appealing may also make it dangerous, my research suggests—at least if we let it replace the more active, effortful activities that make life feel meaningful.

In a recent study, my colleague and I set out to identify the types of leisure activities that make us happiest. We distinguished between high-skill activities (playing guitar, for example), which can be improved with effort, and low-skill ones (like scrolling social media), which can’t.

As expected, participants were significantly more likely to spend their free time on low-skill activities. But when we asked which activities they derived more happiness and meaning from, the results flipped. Despite being more effortful, high-skill activities were strongly linked to greater happiness. The secret ingredient? Flow.

Flow—a state of complete immersion in a task—occurs in the goldilocks zone where challenge meets ability. Despite being effortful, even stressful, people experience substantial happiness and satisfaction during flow states. In our study, flow was the key reason why high-skill activities made people happier. Low-skill activities offered no opportunity for flow to kick in.

Ready to shift more of your free time to high-skill activities? These tips could help:

• Set a five-minute timer. This is a classic psychology trick to tackle difficult tasks. Getting started is often the hardest part—but if you can sit down to practice the guitar for just five minutes, you’re likely to keep going for much longer.
• Think long-term. Try focusing on long-term success over short-term comfort. Nobody (including yourself) will be impressed by how improved you are at scrolling TikTok after a year, but they might be impressed when you can order food at a restaurant fluently in a foreign language on your trip to Europe.
• Be willing to quit. Hobbies should be enjoyable! If you find yourself dreading spending time on a hobby, it is time to pivot to something else that naturally sparks your childlike curiosity.

Max Alberhasky, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at CSU Long Beach.

“If you’re going to leave everybody behind, all your possessions, the life you’ve always known, there’s got to be a really good reason,” Carl Nassar says. And when his parents packed up their home in Lebanon and boarded a one-way flight to Canada with their son, then 3, their reason was crystal clear: the stable, secure future they desperately wanted him to have.

Their mission shaped Nassar’s life. “I noticed very early that when I worked hard on my schoolwork, the tension my parents felt seemed to ease. I thought, If I do well in school, maybe they’ll finally be able to relax.” So he achieved, and achieved some more, until he was a tenured professor of engineering in Colorado, where he lives today. Sitting in his new office, “I thought I’d feel a sense of belonging, of being welcomed.” Instead, he saw only more expectations, more pressure, more never-being-enough.

So he left, and became something totally new: a therapist. Hearing that he was giving up tenure and a six-figure salary, “my parents fell off their chairs.” Yet as his practice established itself and his fulfillment grew more apparent, they slowly came around. “There’s a richness that comes from being able to do what you love in a responsible, thoughtful way,” he says. “If your heart is somewhere else, it’s really worth pursuing.”

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The Neuroplasticity of First Attempts

How your brain responds to learning something new as an adult.

By Aditi Subramaniam, Ph.D.

Recently, I laced up a pair of roller skates for the first time in over two decades (after what can only be described as a disastrous attempt at imitating my younger brother). I had zero expectations. My goal was modest: Survive two hours upright.

Yet before I could even stand, my amygdala, the almond-shaped cluster of neurons that helps us sense danger, braced for catastrophic collapse. I realized it was going to be a challenge to even get upright—forget staying there.

Watching my daughter glide effortlessly across the rink, I was struck by how different it is to pick up a new skill in adulthood. But doing so taps into the same neural machinery that helped us learn to walk, hop, or ride a bike as children: the motor cortex, the cerebellum, and the basal ganglia. The wiring is still there in adulthood, but it’s less nimble, less quick to lay down fresh connections.

Neuroplasticity may not be the elastic sponge it was at age five, but it hasn’t retired. Even older adults show measurable increases in grey matter when they learn a new motor skill. In other words: wobbling on roller skates literally changes the brain’s structure. Novelty, aerobic activity, and repeated practice all act like fertilizer for the growth of new connections in the brain—slow fertilizer, maybe, but fertilizer nonetheless.

Children don’t mind awkwardness; it’s their natural habitat. Adults, however, often mistake it for incompetence. But motor learning studies show that while adults learn more slowly, we are far from hopeless. With feedback and persistence, gains are real and measurable.

Novelty, in short, rewires us. Each stumble and recovery forces the adult brain to reroute, reconnect, and revise. Neuroplasticity may be slower in adulthood, but it’s still alive—and it thrives on challenge

Aditi Subramaniam is a neuroscience Ph.D. turned science writer.

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