Your Emotion Brain – Toxic Stories
Key Point: The stuff your brain makes up today—the stories you tell yourself—will dictate whether you enjoy a day of laughter and contentment or twenty four hours of frustration, anxiety and guilt.
The information that your emotional responses can be driven by stories shouldn’t come as a surprise. Have you ever gotten scared watching a horror movie? Or choked up watching a tearjerker? Feeling emotional over a story, doesn’t make it real. You react emotionally even though you know it’s only a story.
The Stuff You Make Up
Making stuff up is part of your core psychology. Every time you find yourself with less than complete information on a situation— virtually all the time in the 'real' world—you make stuff up.
FYI: There are only two ways your perspective can be “wrong”. It can be incomplete (you miss stuff) and/or inaccurate (you make stuff up). In this article, I’m focusing on the stuff you make up because it’s the stories you tell yourself that fuel your toxic emotions.
Your perspective on any situation consists of two things: Firstly, objective verifiable fact (excluding the facts you might be missing) and, secondly, made up stuff. You might call the “made up stuff” your personal take on the situation, your unique interpretation or your angle. Regardless, it’s stuff you’ve made up. As soon as you catch yourself thinking: “this means”…you’re making stuff up.
Your Perspective On Any Situation = Objective Fact + Made Up Stuff
Crucial Point: The psychological key to managing your emotional state is to learn how to distinguish between objective fact and made up stuff and then vigorously dispute the fiction. And so, whenever you’re not feeling the way you want, the first question to ask yourself is: What am I making up?
What am I making up?
Psychologists have spent a lot of time studying the stories we tell ourselves and discovered that, when we get overly emotional, we’re making stuff up in a handful of simple, highly-predictable ways. And so, while you have the capacity to make stuff up and get overly upset about virtually anything, the ways in which you make stuff up are limited to three, easily recognizable story patterns…
- What if ____ ? stories
- All-or-nothing stories
- Desire-into-demand stories
These toxic stories poison your perspective and cause mental static, toxic emotions and self defeating behaviors.
The stories you tell yourself about situations can trigger, amplify and prolong an overly emotional and toxic response. Some stories can make you more angry than is helpful for resolving the situation. Other stories can leave you feeling anxious or guilty.
Fortunately, you tell yourself each of these stories with a different language, so they’re easy to recognize. And, identifying each of these three story patterns in your self-talk and conversations will give you a handle that you can grasp in order to control your overly emotional responses and self-defeating behaviors.
Your Storytelling Self
Introspective people—who already pay attention to their self talk—will immediately recognize these stories. If, as I describe (one of) the ways you make stuff up and upset yourself, it seems a little too close to home, please don't beat yourself up! Instead, pat yourself on the back, since recognizing these poisoned stories is a key step in getting your overly emotional behaviors under control.
Those of you who haven’t paid much conscious attention to your internal conversations may not immediately recognize your storytelling self. Nevertheless, once you know about the three types of story, you'll recognize them next time you're get overly upset. In this article, let’s talk about “What if…stories”.
“What If _____ ?” Stories
These are stories you tell yourself that end in catastrophe. They always begin the same way: What if [insert nasty outcome here]? Moreover—as cognitive psychologist Aaron T. Beck has observed—one “what if ____ ?” question often leads to more “what if ____ ?” questions. Each question triggers the next until you convince yourself that calamity is inevitable. This mental process, called catastrophizing, can lead to raw panic. In this way, you can take a speck of information and create a whole world-falling-apart scenario.
For example: On Monday morning your boss explains that she’d like to meet with you in her office later in the week…but neglects to say what the meeting is about. That’s when you begin asking “What If” questions, inventing a story and upsetting yourself…
What if I’ve done something wrong? … What if it’s a mistake I’ve made before? … What if it’s cost the company a lot of money? … What if I lose my job? … What if I'm too old to get another job in my industry? … And so on, until, mired in the worst possible case scenario, you persuade yourself that a sea of trouble awaits on the other side of a meeting with your boss…You can, quite literally, talk yourself into a state of intense agitation.
Also, whenever you have to decide whether or not to take advantage of a potential opportunity, drenched in the sweat of worry, you'll decide to stay inside your comfort zone, rather than growing into your full potential. Finally, when you’re in an over anxious state you’re also more vulnerable to outbursts of unhelpful anger.
How many times have you awfulized about something that, by the time it actually happened, wasn't nearly as bad as all the awfulizing you did? Nonetheless, because it seems so natural to awfulize we often assume that it's the only way we can react in some circumstances.
“What if” stories sometimes end with “… “It’s a total disaster!” At which point we start sweating the small stuff, make mountains out of mole hills and mentally exaggerate the importance of minuscule events.
To learn how to manage toxic “What If” stories (and “All Or Nothing” and “Desire Into Demand” stories), you need to learn the Perspective PowerTM Triple-R strategies: The Emotion Brain - The Triple-R Strategies
