One of the more curious traits of human nature is seen in how we like to tell stories to ourselves.
Anytime you’ve caught yourself rehearsing words in your mind to prepare for some real life situation, you’re getting your story straight.
Sometimes we revisit past scenarios and the words we wish we’d said.
Or we revisit past triumphs or sometimes we just want to take a quick dip in old miseries.
Other times we simply tell ourselves whatever we want to hear to justify our actions or attitudes.
Outside of lying to ourselves, our storytelling isn’t necessarily harmful.
Most often it’s a mechanism for coping with things as we wish they could be.
The time we need to be very cautious about our storytelling is when we are trying to make important decisions.
Especially when we know we are about to make a mistake but we go ahead and do it anyway.
Paul Rosenberg says this is an example of mental inertia where we’ve started moving in a particular direction and don’t want to stop ourselves.
The story that we’re telling ourselves of why we started an action in the first place, becomes an excuse to keep going, even if we are wondering if we should probably stop.
Rosenberg recommends working on increasing our awareness of our thinking processes and—when the story tries to stop us from reasoning—hitting the pause button.
It’s only when we notice a story running in the background that we can consciously shut it off and think more clearly.
Our Internal Narrative