Psychologically, people tend to prefer what is familiar and cognitively easy to process; the mere-exposure effect described by Robert Zajonc (1968) shows that repeated exposure can increase comfort and liking. A familiar version of you is, in a way, a well-rehearsed stimulus: easy to interpret and emotionally low-friction.
By contrast, an unfamiliar version requires effort—new interpretations, new conversational rules, new expectations. That effort can be experienced as anxiety, which then gets attributed to you rather than to the discomfort of adjustment itself. [...]
