People who can sit comfortably in the sentence ‘I used to believe that but I don’t anymore’ have access to a kind of freedom that people who need to be consistent may not experience

Changing your mind is the most underrated form of personal courage available to anyone over fifty. We celebrate physical bravery, financial risk-taking, career reinvention. But quietly releasing a belief you once held as sacred — admitting, without shame, that you were wrong — requires a kind of psychological flexibility that most people never develop. And the cost of that rigidity is enormous.

The conventional wisdom says consistency is a virtue. We admire people who “stick to their guns.” We describe someone who changes positions as wishy-washy, unreliable, even weak. Political leaders who shift their stance get labelled flip-floppers. Friends who change their worldview make us uneasy. The cultural message is clear: pick your beliefs early, defend them forever, and treat any revision as a moral failing.

That message is wrong. And the people who’ve internalised it are paying a price they can barely articulate — a slow narrowing of their inner world that compounds with every year they refuse to let an old conviction go.

The brain’s addiction to being right

The human brain has a well-documented relationship with consistency. When we hold a belief and encounter information that contradicts it, something measurable happens in the brain: research suggests that regions involved in error detection become active. We experience cognitive dissonance, that uncomfortable tension between what we believe and what the evidence is showing us.

Most people resolve that discomfort by rejecting the new information. They double down. They rationalise. They surround themselves with people who agree with them, and they avoid situations where their beliefs might be tested.

This pattern gets stronger with age — not because the brain declines, but because it becomes more efficient at its own defence mechanisms. Decades of holding a particular worldview create deep neural pathways. Questioning those pathways feels physically threatening. The amygdala doesn’t distinguish between a challenge to your survival and a challenge to your opinion about how marriage should work.

The result is a kind of internal calcification. Not cognitive decline. Cognitive rigidity. They are different things entirely.

What intellectual humility actually looks like

Studies have found something that shouldn’t surprise us but does: people who can acknowledge uncertainty in their own beliefs tend to have better relationships, make more accurate predictions, and experience less chronic stress. Research from the Greater Good Science Center has explored who actually demonstrates this quality — and the findings challenge assumptions about age and certainty.

Intellectual humility doesn’t mean having no convictions. It means holding your convictions the way you hold a living thing: firmly enough to keep them safe, loosely enough to let them breathe.

People who demonstrate intellectual humility tend to update their beliefs when presented with compelling evidence. They can say “I was wrong about that” without experiencing it as identity collapse. They treat their past selves with curiosity rather than embarrassment. The sentence “I used to believe that but I don’t anymore” feels natural to them, even welcome — because they understand that changing your mind is evidence that your mind is still working.

The people who can’t say that sentence? They’re often the ones white-knuckling their way through every conversation, defending positions they privately doubt but publicly can’t abandon.

The hidden cost of consistency

I’ve spent years studying how the brain’s threat system operates, particularly during major life transitions. What fascinates me is how the same neural architecture that kept our ancestors alive — the fight-or-flight response, the pattern-matching, the preference for the known over the unknown — can become a prison when the circumstances of life demand genuine change.

Consider what happens when someone retires after decades of professional identity. They carry beliefs about who they are, what matters, how days should be structured. Many of those beliefs served them brilliantly for forty years. And many of those beliefs are now actively preventing them from discovering what comes next.

I’ve written before about how the real retirement transition involves standing in the open question of who you might become. That standing requires the willingness to release beliefs that once defined you. “I’m the kind of person who needs to be productive every day.” “My worth comes from my expertise.” “Rest is laziness.” These beliefs don’t dissolve on their own. They have to be examined, challenged, and — sometimes — gently set down.

The people who can’t do that get stuck in a loop. They fill every hour with activity. They cling to old routines in new contexts. They perform a version of themselves that no longer exists — and they wonder why freedom feels so much like suffocation.

The psychology of the true believer

Research on the psychology of belief reveals something important about why some people cling to their positions with such ferocity: belief and identity become fused. When your belief about something — politics, religion, parenting, what constitutes a good life — becomes part of how you define yourself, abandoning that belief feels like abandoning yourself.

This is why arguments about politics at dinner tables get so heated. Nobody’s actually debating policy. They’re defending their sense of self. And the more threatened that self feels, the louder and more rigid the defence becomes.

True believers — in any domain — often display remarkable certainty. They can be charismatic, persuasive, deeply committed. They look strong. But underneath that certainty is often a brittleness that reveals itself under pressure. Push a true believer’s position with genuine evidence, and what you’ll encounter isn’t engagement. You’ll encounter rage, dismissal, or withdrawal.

Contrast that with someone who can sit calmly with the sentence: “I used to believe that, but I don’t anymore.” That person has done something psychologically demanding. They’ve separated their identity from their opinions. They’ve discovered that who they are survives the revision of what they think.

That discovery is the freedom the title of this article describes.

Why this matters more after sixty

Young people change their minds constantly. They’re expected to. Nobody criticises a twenty-two-year-old for abandoning their college major or breaking up with someone they thought they’d marry. The narrative of youth is one of exploration, experimentation, revision.

But somewhere around middle age, that permission gets quietly revoked. You’re supposed to know who you are by now. You’re supposed to have your values sorted, your worldview settled, your political leanings locked in. Changing your mind at sixty-five feels — culturally, socially — like an admission that you wasted the previous decades.

The opposite is true. Changing your mind at sixty-five, after having held a belief for decades, requires more psychological courage than any twenty-year-old can imagine. It means examining the accumulated weight of years of living one way and saying: that served me then, and something different will serve me now.

I’ve watched people go through this. A woman who spent thirty years believing that financial security was the foundation of a good life, who discovered in retirement that her real wealth had always been relational. A man who believed asking for help was weakness, who found that learning to receive was the hardest and most important work of his seventies. Neither of them arrived at those realisations quickly. Both of them had to sit in discomfort for a long time first.

The willingness to sit in that discomfort — to tolerate the gap between the old belief and whatever comes next — is what separates growth from stagnation in the second half of life.

Comfort with uncertainty as a practice

Much of my coaching work now centres on helping people develop comfort with uncertainty. It sounds simple. It is extraordinarily difficult. The brain treats uncertainty as a threat state. The prefrontal cortex — the part responsible for planning and prediction — works overtime trying to resolve ambiguity. When it can’t, the stress response activates.

So when someone says “I don’t know what I believe about that anymore,” their brain is generating a low-grade alarm. Most people will do anything to silence that alarm: snap back to the old belief, adopt someone else’s belief, distract themselves entirely. The rare person will sit with the alarm, acknowledge it, and wait.

That waiting is where the freedom lives.

The people who adjust best to major identity transitions are the ones who can tolerate being in the question. They don’t rush to replace one certainty with another. They let the old belief fall away and resist the urge to immediately install a replacement. They live, for a while, in the open space — and they discover that the open space is habitable. Even, eventually, comfortable.

Wisdom, as I’ve come to understand it, is simply time plus reflection plus the willingness to be wrong. Remove any one of those ingredients and you get something else: stubbornness, nostalgia, or mere accumulation of experience without transformation.

What the need for consistency protects (and what it costs)

I want to be fair to the people who struggle with this. The need for consistency isn’t irrational. It serves a protective function. Consistent beliefs give us a stable sense of self. They make the world predictable. They allow us to act quickly without re-evaluating everything from scratch each morning. Research on humility in leadership shows how even people in positions of moral authority find it genuinely difficult to revise their positions — not because they’re arrogant, but because their communities depend on their certainty.

I explore this idea more deeply in a video I made about letting go—because I’ve found that releasing old beliefs isn’t just about changing your mind, it’s actually an act of self-respect that requires its own kind of clarity and compassion.

The problem arises when consistency becomes compulsive. When maintaining your position matters more than examining whether your position still serves you. When the cost of being wrong feels so catastrophic that you’d rather live inside a belief that quietly diminishes your life than face the temporary disorientation of letting it go.

The cost is subtle but pervasive. Relationships narrow because you can’t tolerate people who see the world differently. Curiosity atrophies because new information feels threatening. Joy contracts because spontaneity requires a willingness to be surprised, and surprise requires openness, and openness requires admitting you don’t already know everything.

The person locked into consistency lives in a smaller room every year and calls it conviction.

Permission to revise

So here is what I want to say to anyone reading this who recognises themselves in the description of the person who can’t let go: you are allowed to change your mind. About anything. At any age. For any reason.

You are allowed to look at a belief you’ve carried for forty years and say: “That was true for who I was then. It is no longer true for who I am now.” You are allowed to revise your opinion about politics, parenting, God, success, friendship, love, and what constitutes a life well lived. You are allowed to do this publicly or privately, gradually or all at once.

The people in your life who matter will adjust. The ones who can’t tolerate your evolution are — and this is worth sitting with — the ones who need your consistency for their own comfort, not yours.

I remember a belief I once held with absolute certainty about what a productive life looked like. When I eventually released it, the sensation was less like loss and more like setting down a heavy bag I’d forgotten I was carrying. The relief wasn’t immediate. First came the disorientation. Then the lightness.

The sentence “I used to believe that but I don’t anymore” sounds like an admission of error. It is actually a declaration of growth. It means your mind is still alive, still responsive to evidence, still capable of reorganising itself around new understanding.

That reorganisation — the brain’s ability to update, to prune old neural pathways and strengthen new ones — doesn’t stop at any age. What stops is the willingness to let it happen.

The freedom described in the title of this piece is real, and it is available. But it requires one thing that no amount of intelligence or experience can substitute for: the courage to sit comfortably in the space between who you were and who you are becoming, and to let that space do its work.

The people who can do that aren’t wishy-washy. They aren’t confused. They are among the bravest people I know.