The story in your head has a life all its own, often without a reality base.
It is the story you tell yourself. This is a running internal dialogue, that is all about your interpretations of the stimuli you perceive.
Your story is filled with expectations, internal messages, and history. It can trigger an unnecessary alarm of the magnitude of fight, flight or freeze.
According to Kristen Neff in a course she teaches with Brene Brown on Courageworks.com, one of the tasks of your brain is to understand who you are, and then to look out for problems.
Your brain tries to protect you by telling you a story about what it perceives. It warns you of what might happen next if you don’t do something. This seems to be the leftover remnant of our survival adaptation from ancient times when the brain truly had to be on the lookout for lions, tigers, and mammoths even.
The protective story in your head is often untrue, or at best holds only grains of truth.
A good practice is to be mindful of your story. Check it out rather than assuming it is true.
