In this episode I'm talking about the dramatic stories and thoughts our brains love to tell us - and why believing them isn't always useful...
AND I'm offering you a simple technique to snap your brain out of any intense, scary, or painful story - so that you can start to see things through a more helpful lens.
Ready?
Mentioned in the episode:
In this episode I'm talking about the dramatic stories and thoughts our brains love to tell us - and why believing them isn't always useful...
AND I'm offering you a simple technique to snap your brain out of any intense, scary, or painful story - so that you can start to see things through a more helpful lens.
Ready?
Mentioned in the episode:
Hey guys! How’s everyone doing? I hope you’ve all had a great week this week - it’s been horrible cold, wet, windy weather here in the UK - so I hope wherever you are listening from is a little nicer and warmer. We’re now on week 2 of my group coaching programme - Master Your Relationship Mind Drama - and the groups have been learning all about processing emotion and how resisting or reacting to our emotions can create so much unnecessary suffering and drama in our relationships.
And a few of the past group have told me this was one of the most life changing skills they learnt from the programme - so I’m so excited to see the new cohort start to understand and implement it, it’s so exciting! I’ve had a few messages from people saying they missed this round but really want to sign up - so if that’s you, don’t panic - the next round starts in May, and I’ll drop a link to the waitlist in the information section of this episode.
Okay - let’s dive into today’s topic, which is MIND DRAMA. Very apt for the name of this podcast, of course. And as we we’ve already discussed through many of these episodes - our brains can be DRAMA QUEENS. Our brains are always taking in the information from around us through our senses - what we see, hear, feel, smell, taste - and then interpreting that information and creating narratives about.
Our brains are storytellers. As a species we’ve always been storytellers, and so our brains love nothing more than a compelling narrative and making meaning out of interactions and events that take place. So we end up with a lot of all-or-nothing thinking, black and white thinking, seeing things as huge successes or huge failures, people as villains or heroes, situations as good or disasters. We overgeneralise and use phrases like ALWAYS and NEVER. And when we’re not onto our brains about this, our brains can really create so much trouble for us.
So in this episode I want to talk all about the skill of separating the neutral facts of a situation, from the story your brain has about it. And I’ll give you an example from one of my past 1:1 clients. She was struggling with her relationship with her manager and we were coaching on it during one of our sessions. And together we pulled out and looked at the thoughts her brain had about the situation.
And of course, because she has a human brain - her brain had some pretty dramatic sounding thoughts about the situation. And a good sign post for when our brains might be on the drama bus is when it starts using novel-like metaphors - like she sucks the energy out of the room, she makes my life hell, I never get a moment of peace, it’s a disaster, she’s just out to get me - these were some of my clients thoughts.
Now this isn’t me trying to downplay or invalidate what she was going through. Not at all! If you’ve ever coached with me, you know compassion and understanding is the foundation of every single session. Her experience was valid, meaning she really was having some painful thoughts about this creating really uncomfortable emotions that needed to be heard and processed. But that didn’t make her thoughts useful.
And how did we know that her current way of thinking wasn’t useful? Because she was not getting the results she wanted. She found herself dreading work, not wanting to participate during meetings, making more mistakes than she used to, feeling paralysed and not taking any action. So her brain’s current way of thinking about this situation was not serving her in any way.
Because the thoughts her brain had about it, the ones I just mentioned, were just escalating the sense of being unsafe. They were turning up the amp on the DANGER signal in her brain - and as we know - our brains are always trying to keep us safe, which means they’re very hypervigilant and obsessed with things that could be dangerous. And when we’re telling ourselves repeatedly a situation is very severe and dangerous - we tend to go into fight or flight mode, which makes finding a solution to the problem very difficult. We can’t think rationally. We can’t offer ourselves calm, useful solutions. And even if other people offer us reasonable solutions, we tend to want to reject them because we’re already committed to believing this is a disaster and there's no turning back.
So the skill I want to encourage you to practise is coming back to the neutral facts of a situation. When you’re having a lot of thoughts about something - I want you to write down just the key, boring, neutral facts. And I say boring for a reason. Circumstances (as in the facts of a situation) should sound boring.
Because there should be no added drama or colour to it. No narrative, no metaphors, no interpretations, no heroes and villains. Just boring old facts. And I once heard another coach, I’ve completely forgotten her name now, but she described thoughts as the colour we splash onto circumstances. So the facts of the circumstance are just grey, neutral, and boring - and our thoughts add that colour, the emotion.
And so coming back to the session with this particular client - the facts we had were that the manager had given her some feedback on a project and was asking for it to be re-done, and would send 2-3 emails a day with suggestions or requests. Now doesn’t that story sound much more dull! So much more dull than the story of the villain and the victim, and the villian sucking the energy from the room and destroying lives. And my friends, when it comes to managing your mind - dull is good! Bring yourself back to the very boring facts of a situation, and just noticing the dramatic flare your brain had given to that situation - and notice how thinking about it in the way you currently are is just one option, and it may not be an option that’s really helping.
One of my all-time favourite teachers, Kara Loeintheile always says to consider - does this thought sound like a Victorian woman falling dramatically onto a fainting couch. And I think that’s a good way to imagine our brains sometimes. And once me and my client got down to those neutral facts - she was able to find other ways to think about it that didn’t feel so scary and dangerous and enabled her to show up the way she wanted to.
And once you’ve written down the very neutral, boring facts of the situation and then written down the main thought you have about it - you can assess if there’s a striking gap between the two. As in - does this thought seem a bit excessive or over-the-top in relation to the facts? Is there some over-generalisations happening? Any all or nothing thinking? Any jumping to conclusions or doom predictions going on?
And again - I want to be really clear - this isn’t about gaslighting or invalidating yourself. Women are often told that we’re too dramatic, and so we often try to be fine and cool with things we don’t want to be fine and cool with. And so it’s important you don’t misunderstand what I’m teaching here and use it against yourself. We don’t want to simply change our thoughts to be chill and okay with everything - not at all!
We just want to be onto our brains about where our thoughts may be spinning a web that’s not aligned with the actual reality of the situation. And take back control over how we think about any situation we’re facing. And a good question to keep bringing yourself back to in any situation is - does thinking this way about it serve me? When I think this way about it, how am I likely to feel? And how am I then likely to show up? How will I act, what will I do or not do? If the answer is no, thinking this way is not helping and it’s in fact making things worse - that’s reason enough to coach your brain around it.
I’ll give you another example from one of my 1:1 clients. She was talking about her life in general and she said - ‘I feel like I’ve wasted my life and I’ve made bad decision after bad decision. And I just don’t feel like I’ll ever be happy.’ And I’m sure these are thoughts a lot of people can relate to, and again, we had to start our session by just having so much compassion and care for where she was at - because those thoughts are such painful thoughts to be believing.
But when we looked at the facts of her life - the facts she was referring to - the facts were she’d moved away from her family, worked her way up a career ladder and bought property, she’d been married for 6 years and then gotten a divorce, and since had chosen to prioritise work, so was currently single. Those were the neutral facts. So much less painful - not as colourful or dramatic or painful - and just as real, no MORE real, than the story she was telling herself.
And as I said before - our brains are storytellers. Our brains love nothing more than a narrative, and your brain doesn’t care if the story is a horror story, a tragedy, or a love story - as long as it’s a narrative that makes sense. And the narrative her brain has weaving her was one of tragedy and pain. And so it had cherry picked moments of her life to focus on, and interpreted it in a way that made sense for the narrative of her life being a ‘waste’. It of course ignored and disqualified all the amazing things she was proud of, all the happy moments and ways she’d made an impact on people’s lives - because that didn’t fit into the narrative.
Even take the fact that she had been married and then gotten a divorce. That’s a neutral circumstance, but her brain had chosen the story that that meant she’d made a bad decision (and always made bad decisions). Her brain was choosing to see the marriage and divorce as this huge mistake that brought her entire decision making skills into question and as meaning something so detrimental about her and her personality. But here’s another, much more dull way to tell that same story - she decided to marry someone because at the time she loved him, and then 6 years later, she changed her mind and left. Notice the difference between those two stories.
This is so important guys. Our brains will hoodwink us into believing that their mean, unhelpful stories are the facts - when really they’re not the facts at all. Your brain is always directing its own little movie, it’s spinning a narrative. And the way it’s painting the story isn’t an honest reflection of reality, and it isn’t always favourable.
And I think another reason we almost want to give into our brains dramatic stories, is because we think if we don’t then we’re not taking it seriously. If we’re not very big, and dramatic, and hard on ourselves about the situations we’re in - then maybe we won’t change them. And remember - our brains are always trying to keep us safe, so they’d rather overreact to a situation that could be dangerous, and be wrong - than underreact and we die. That’s how the primitive brain kept us alive throughout evolution. By being very hyper vigilant and treating everything as life or death.
But of course - in your average every day situation that isn’t actually life or death, this kind of thinking actually prevents and stands in the way of us creating change. Like for this client - telling herself she’d wasted her life and only made bad decisions and would never be happy - was not inspiring change. It wasn’t helping her to wake up in the morning, grab the bull by the horns, and make the changes to her life she really wanted to make. It wasn’t helping her usefully and constructively reflect on the decisions she had made in her life and notice unhelpful thought patterns she wanted to challenge and change for the future. So she could make better choices next time.
Nope - it just kept her feeling stuck and downtrodden and like a victim to her life. It made her want to hide under the covers, avoid taking risks, avoid other people because she couldn’t bear comparing herself to them. These thoughts were creating more of exactly what she didn’t want - which was feeling out of control of her own life.
So listen to the way your brain tells the story of your life and your situations. Really take a step back and observe it and consider - what are the boring neutral facts of this? And is the colour my brain is splashing onto this a little too extra? Is it actually hindering me, rather than helping me?
Another example I’ll share is from another one of my clients - she came to the session and was having a lot of negative thoughts about her partner to do with a particular situation that had just happened. So she’d just moved in with him - and he’d asked her if she would move some of her belongings into the spare room so the bedroom didn’t seem so cluttered. That was the fact, ‘Boyfriend says ‘Please can you move some of those things into the spare room so the bedroom is less cluttered.’
And her brain had done what all brains love to do - which is jump to making this mean something incredibly painful, that resulted in them having a huge argument. Her brain had interpreted that fact and made it mean ‘He doesn’t want me to be here’.
Now when we were coaching on this - and she saw the facts of what he said written out next to her brain's interpretation - she very quickly saw that her thought didn’t really hold up. She in fact said there were so many ways he was making it clear he wanted her there - he’d cooked a lovely dinner for them to welcome her, he’d gone out and bought her a bigger chest of draws and thrown at loads of his own things to make space for her. He’d suggested putting pictures of her family up, so they weren’t all just his pictures. There was so much evidence that this thought wasn’t true.
But her brain had done the fainting lady on the fainting couch stunt - and jumped to that thought anyway, and it had caused so much unnecessary suffering for her. And again, it made sense why her brain had jumped there - because it was trying to keep her safe. It believed it was in danger of rejection and so sounded the alarm. But it’s really important that we don’t rush to respond to this anxiety, and assume that because our brains are screaming DANGER that that actually means it’s an emergency. Taking a moment to breath, allow the emotion, take a step back and reassess the facts - means you can then respond more rationally and intentionally, and in a much more useful way.
One client of mine once said - ‘I’ve just been rejected by everyone my whole life’. The facts were she’d had 3 romantic partners, 1 she’d chosen to break up with, 2 had broken up with her. Again - notice the difference in those two statements. One is a painful, dramatic story - one is just the neutral facts. And understanding the difference between the two is really at the heart of all thought work.
And with this client - her brain hadn’t even considered the facts of all the people who had wanted to date her that she’d turned down, or the many friends and family members who had continuously wanted her in their life and not rejected her. But because that didn’t fit the narrative, her brain didn’t consider it. It was committed to ‘I’ve just been rejected by everyone my whole entire life!’ - and so ignored any evidence that suggested otherwise.
So I really want to encourage you to take the time to write down the neutral facts of situations and then notice the thoughts you have about them. Notice if there’s a gap. Is it like your brain has leapfrogged or olympic long-jumped to a thought that feels like a reach compared to what’s actually going on here? Ask yourself - what’s the most boring, neutral way I could describe this? This is a good place to start so that you can then decide how you DO want to think about it, the colour you INTENTIONALLY want to splash onto the situation.
Consider - what might somebody else think about this? What emotion would I love to feel and what thought would someone who felt that way have about it? Play around and brainstorm ideas and alternative thoughts - because this shows your brain that the option it had come up with was just ONE option available to you.
Okay guys, that’s all I’ve got for you today! I hope it was useful. Like I said, the next round of my group coaching is in May so I’ll put the link for the waitlist in the information section of his episode. My 1:1 coaching spots are currently full and it may be a few months before any spots become free - there is a waitlist for that too. So go get on my email list and I’ll let people know when spots become free.
If you’re loving this podcast, please could you do a little something for me? Could you give it a rating on whatever podcast it is you’re listening from? That would mean the absolute world to me and keep me reaching more and more people with this work! I hope you all have lovely weekends, and I will speak to you all next week - bye!