Change the stories you tell yourself
We tell ourselves stories about who we are and how the world works. The stories we choose have a profound impact on our happiness, health, and sense of purpose.
In this episode, you'll learn how and why we tell stories, discover what the research says about changing them, and learn three tools to help you shift yours.
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Transcript
Hi, I’m Stephanie Harrison and you’re listening to The New Happy podcast, where we teach you how to be happy using the latest science and practical tools that change your life.
Today, I want to talk to you about skill of storytelling, and how it relates to our happiness.
Why do stories matter?
We’re all natural storytellers. We see it in the way we talk about what happens to us or to other people. Stories evolved, way back in the stone age, to help us trade and share information about other people. This information sharing had an important purpose: it facilitated connections, alerted people to those who were not contributing, and it moved us forward as a species to cooperate and do things that we couldn’t on our own. We needed it to achieve our social goals.
But we also have inner stories: the stories we tell ourselves. We can’t pay attention to everything that happens all around it. It’s physically impossible. So what happens is that our consciousness is constantly filtering what’s happening in the world around us through a lens, telling our selves a story about our lives.
It’s a bit like we are the director, the movie editor and a movie audience at the same time. The director is the part of us thats making choices about what to do in the world, the editor is choosing what part of that gets into put into the film, and then the audience is the part of you that’s watching it and interpreting what it’s all about. There’s really no such thing as an objective picture of your life or yourself or the world. It’s always being filtered through lenses that distort it in big or small ways.
The purpose of telling ourselves stories is that we use them to make sense of the world. Our world can be so chaotic and difficult and ever-changing, and finding our place in it is really hard. Stories help us to make sense of that psychological difficulty. In the research, this is called the life story schema, which is the cognitive model we create for ourselves to tell the story of our lives.
What’s the story you’ve been telling yourself lately?
To answer this question, think about the last month or the last year you’ve been through. If you were meeting someone and they asked you to tell them your recent life story, how would you describe it? What events would you focus on and highlight? What would you trace as the learnings of those key events, and then how did they affect you?
Once you have an idea of the story you’ve been telling, you can start to do something with it, to help your happiness. But first, it’s important to learn how to know when our stories aren’t actually serving us.
We’re always balancing this tricky thing, of understanding ourselves but not boxing ourselves in at the same time. It’s really easy to get stuck in our stories, because the more that we repeat them to ourselves, the more that they feel so, so true.
Sometimes these stories calcify into something that leads us away from happiness. What might have served us in the past is no longer useful. What we used to keep ourselves safe is actually now what’s keeping ourselves stuck. Because it’s not just the story that matters — it’s the actions that we take because of the story.
Your story is: I’m the kind of person who doesn’t take risks. So you don’t.
Your story is: I’m not good at being in a relationship. So you shy away from them.
Your story is: I am not lovable. So you look around for proof that you’re not, not seeing all of the many people and moments of love in your life that do exist.
Your story is: I don’t have any skills. So you feel low in confidence and scared of trying, leading you to miss opportunities to actually develop new skills.
But here’s the thing: There is no objectively true story. It’s whatever you decide it is. And yes, it takes work to write a new story. But that work is what transforms you and your life in such a positive way.
I think this is one of the most empowering lessons from all of psychology. It gives us so much power.
As you can see, one of the best ways to break up with a story is to do something that violates it. All of a sudden, your story is no longer calcified into the truth. It can be updated, and revised, and changed. You become the kind of person who speaks up and take risks. You become someone who is open to learning about being in a relationship or to accepting love. You become someone who is seeking new ways to develop skills.
When you do something that breaks your story, you’re tapping into something that psychologists know: our beliefs about who we are most frequently arise from our behavior, not the other way around. The thing about stories is that since they drive our behavior, they become self-perpetuating, trapping you in a difficult cycle. The more you do something aligned with your story, the more real it feels. If you break out of it by taking a risk or doing something out of the ordinary, you realize that you are not defined by that story. So my best advice to you is to go out there and try to do something that is totally out of the ordinary.
There’s another great tool that comes from the research of Dr James Pennebaker about rewriting your story. It’s called expressive writing, and it is especially helpful if you’ve gone through hard events in your life. Dr Pennebaker describes it as “writing as life course connection.”
Here’s how you do it. For the next three days, spend 15 minutes free-writing about your life or about whatever is feeling most difficult. Don't censor yourself, don't judge yourself: just express whatever you need to express. How does it change your story? How does it change your day-to-day?
One study found that people who wrote about traumatic experiences for four days in a row experienced profound outcomes. They had more positive moods and fewer illnesses than those who wrote about surface level events.
One way you can tell if your story is working for you is asking: do I feel like I’m living an authentic and meaningful life? Your feelings about your life point you towards the contents of your story. We know that, objectively, happier people don’t have more good events in their lives than unhappy people. They just are better at telling themselves stories about those difficult events than the unhappy people are.
There’s two key areas where we want to practice this. First is in our beliefs about who we are as people.
There’s this quote form the author Kurt Vonnegut that I love, where he says, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
How is your story making you pretend to be someone? Are you happy with that someone?
Here’s one way to think about this. If someone was giving a speech at your funeral, how would you hope that they described you?
Your answers might be things like: kind, supportive, funny, patient, always there for me, made a different in my life and our community, generous, supportive, creative, courageous… the list goes on.
This list shows you who you want to be at your core. And your task in the present moment is to go out and do something that’s aligned with it, to show yourself that you are becoming that person. It’s a bit like being a kid and playing pretend. We want to bring that same spirit here: who am I pretending to be today?
The second way we can shift our stories is through the way we describe our life experiences as being more meaningful or less meaningful.
Meaning is all about what you do for others and how you are connected to the world around you in a positive way.
To create a more meaningful story, ask yourself:
Who am I helping?
Whose life is better because of me?
Whose heart have I made lighter lately?
Your answers to these questions can become moments in your story, if you start to focus on them. Get the film editor to bring those moments back into your consciousness. If you’re having trouble finding something, that indicates that you might need to use the director part of you to go out and do something.
What is something I can do for someone else?
How can I contribute in a meaningful way using what I have and who I am?
It’s the stories we tell about our connection to the world that are what give us the feelings that we want, of purpose, meaning, love and connection.
You have so much power over your story, far more than you know. I hope in this episode you feel that and recognize a few ways you can reclaim your power. You can transform the way you see yourself and the world.
If you enjoyed this episode, we’d appreciate it so much if you could take a quick minute and rate/review it. It means so much.
Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next Friday.
