Scary Stories Our Brains Tell Us
No one is immune from experiencing anxiety. In fact, a little bit of anxiety can actually be helpful in maintaining motivation, staying alert, and keeping ourselves safe! However, sometimes our minds do a little (ok, or a lot) too much towards that goal of safety. Anxiety can take many different forms, but today, we’re going to chat about the mental part of anxiety. This too shows up in different ways, such as intrusive thoughts (“what if I just took my hands off the steering wheel?”) or as the inner critic (that voice in our heads telling us all that we’re doing wrong). But in this post, we’re going to focus on the narratives, or stories, that our brains tell us about the world - stories that can sometimes take a frightening turn.
Our brains, bless them, work very hard to make sense of the world around us. From the time we’re born, our brains are absorbing messages about the world, other people, ourselves, and how it all connects. As we grow older, our environments expand and we take in information not only from our immediate environments (school, home, friends, family) but also from the larger systems and structures surrounding us, including media, politics, religion, and society at large. Our brains do what they can to make sense of all this information by creating more cohesive stories about how we relate to and fit into this world around us.
A primary goal of these stories is survival - to protect us from what the brain perceives as threatening or dangerous. Which sounds nice and helpful, right? It can be! But our brains can get things wrong, either by misperceiving things as threats when they aren’t or developing narratives that may protect us in some ways, but also have harmful unintended consequences.
Here’s an example*:
Jen experienced bullying from her peers growing up. In response to these experiences, her brain began to collectively categorize peers as a danger or threat. The story her brain tells her is that it is dangerous to try and make friends because they will end up hurting her. As a result, Jen keeps to herself and avoids social situations with peers, even when they haven’t acted rudely towards her. Her brain is happy because she is safe from the perceived threat! However, Jen is lonely. The price she is paying for safety is to be missing out on the opportunity to develop positive social relationships that would increase her feelings of fulfillment and joy.
*A simplified example of someone’s unique narrative, which in real life would be significantly more nuanced. Just sayin!
So what do we do when we realize that these narratives aren’t working for us? This is often a big piece of the work we do in therapy - working together to understand how and why these stories came to be, how they may be simultaneously helping and harming, and how we can gently shift these stories towards being more helpful and more in line with our values and goals. However, in addition to therapy, there are also some in-the-moment strategies that we can practice to increase our awareness of these stories and gain a little bit of distance from them. Here a few strategies that we like to use:
Externalize: When you notice one of those stories at work, try responding with “Thank you for trying to keep me safe, brain.” By recognizing our thoughts as separate from ourselves, it reinforces the idea that we are not our thoughts - we are the ones observing our thoughts. This then allows us to get some of that distance from the stories, which can help us to make different choices.
Thought Labeling: Another technique to distance ourselves from our thoughts is to try responding with “I am having the thought that [insert thought].” This can help us remember that the thoughts are simply a string of words put together that only have meaning once we assign meaning to them - another way of getting a little bit of space from them.
Think of Alternate Possibilities: The stories our brains tell us are just one version of the world. One strategy to help expand our thoughts (again, to gain distance so we can make informed choices) is to acknowledge that the story being told is one possible explanation, while also inviting in other possibilities or explanations. Sure, your boss’s tone of voice could mean that she’s mad at you. But what else could it mean? She may be having a bad day, hasn’t had her coffee yet, isn’t feeling well, is worried about something happening outside of work - so many possibilities that don’t fit the initial story playing in your mind!
The hope with these techniques is that we’re able gain a little bit more space, to allow us to make a more intentional choice on how we want to respond to the stories that we’re being told to believe. In making a more intentional choice, we can reflect on and attempt to take action that is more in-line with our goals, values, and needs.
Going back to our friend Jen from the example above, here’s how it might look in practice:
Jen gets invited to a happy hour with her co-workers. The story her brain tells her is that they don’t actually like her, she wouldn’t have fun, she’d rather just stay home, etc. But this time, Jen recognizes what her brain is doing. She responds internally by thinking “Thank you brain for trying to protect me from getting hurt.” Then she thinks about how she values connection with others and has been feeling lonely. She thinks of some examples that prove the story wrong, like how her co-worker sent her a nice email the other day, and reminds herself that she can always leave early if it feels too uncomfortable. She decides to go to the happy hour, to see how it feels.
In this example, Jen ends up choosing not to believe the story her brain is telling her so that she can instead take action that moves her more towards the life she wants to be living. While this takes practice and is, again, a simplified version of what it looks like, the important takeaway is that we have more power than we think we do when it comes to reacting to our thoughts.
Bonus! Here are some questions for further self-reflection:
What are the stories my brain tells me that may be holding me back?
Where did these stories come from?
In what areas of my life are these stories showing up?
When are the stories the loudest?
What are the things in life I value the most?
How can I take action towards those values?
Have questions for us? Want help troubleshooting the use of these techniques? Get in touch! As always, we’d love to hear from you. Hope you all have a wonderful Halloween holiday! 👻
Warmly,
Sammy & Miriam
