You Can Rewrite Limiting Stories

💭 Learn more: We talk more about this in episode #291 of the Joy Lab Podcast

Us humans are story-telling machines. That's a great ability... except when we get stuck in tight, often oversimplified explanations we've built about who we are, what happened to us, and what's possible for us next. 

The solution isn't to give up on stories. We just have to be able to see them as stories. In the last episode of the podcast, we talked about how thoughts lose their power when we see them as just thoughts. The same principle applies here. When we can hold a story loosely rather than gripping it as absolute truth, we keep what's useful without letting it run our lives.

In episode 291, we talked about three questions to ask of any story you're holding tightly:

1. Is it true? Memory isn't a replayable video. Dr. Elizabeth Loftus describes it as more like a Wikipedia page that we constantly re-edit based on things like our mood, experience, and the people around us. When we're depressed or anxious, our stories get edited through a narrowed lens and we often retell them to ourselves until they feel more true than they are. Checking whether a story is actually true and noting the emotional context you wrote or edited in is a helpful first step to loosen the grip.
2. Is it helpful? Research on affective forecasting shows we're not very good predictors of our future selves and we often overestimate how much a single event defines us. For example, if a partner cheat on us, we might think "I can never trust anyone." Getting fired for a mistake becomes "I'll never be able to keep a job." These conclusions are rarely true and they're also not helpful. A helpful story leaves room for growth and change, which is closer to the truth.
3. Is it kind? We don't have to transform every hard experience into a phoenix-rising story. But unkind stories activate our stress response and shut down possibility, whereas kindness and self-compassion activate parts of the brain that allow for learning and growth. Kindness is not just a nice option, but it's a condition that makes change more likely.

As Michael Singer wrote in The Untethered Soul: "In order to be who you are, you must be willing to let go of who you think you are."