Insights: Hidden Brain's 'Change Your Story, Change Your Life'
Summary notes, insights, prompts and creating synergies of articles.
Recommendation: Hidden Brain's 'Change Your Story, Change Your Life' is where you can listen to the 1-hour podcast and follow along with the main pieces of the transcript. I have structured the transcript into sections with a time stamp. The text on that post acts like a script guide.
The aim of this post is to help you ‘digest’ the information faster so that you can spend more time reflecting on the content and its implications.
This ‘Insights’ article is not intended to replace listening to the podcast. This is a ‘Key’ to help you unlock more value from the resource.
Hidden Brain Podcast
Hidden Brain podcast host Shankar Vedantam uses science and storytelling to reveal the unconscious patterns that drive human behaviour, shape our choices and direct our relationships.
The podcast episode and the reference sources are here, on the Hidden Brain Website. The episodes are also on these platforms (not linked). I usually listen on Spotify and then go to the website for the references.
Explore the wealth of information and diversity of topics. Each episode ‘layers up’ concepts, sometimes contradictory ones, to reach the more complex, potent findings! Yes, I’m a huge fan ;-) Yes, I’ve been googling the reference links or investigating concepts further. I’m a nerdy researcher at heart!
Shankar Vedantam is a wonderful storyteller, and the Hidden Brain team researches and presents various interesting studies through his interviews.
I enjoy the arc and flow of how he unveils and weaves the science, culture and implications together. He makes complex topics accessible.
The Summary
Here is a short summary of the 'Change Your Story, Change Your Life' podcast, in which Shankar Vedantam interviews Jonathan Adler, a psychologist and researcher at Olin College.
What is Narrative Psychology?
It is not objective facts. It's 'about where we draw connections between things and place chapter breaks in the story that is our life. And those are narrative acts, not historical facts. The way we do, that has implications for our well-being.
What is a Redemption Sequence and a Contamination sequence?
Stories that we narrate as starting bad and ending good = redemption sequence.
Stories that start good and end bad = a contamination sequence.
Why does it matter where we stop and start the different chapters of our life story?
The effects of redemption and contamination stories are strong predictors of positive health outcomes
The objective facts of the story don't change, but the way you think of the story changes profoundly.
Stories of integration were associated with self-reported, lower levels of psychological stress
One study shows a connection between the themes in people’s narratives and biological markers of stress and ageing. Potential biological consequences of our stories, not just psychological ones
Chicken and egg - what causes what? In which direction does the arrow of causation run?
Stories changed in meaningful ways over the course of psychological treatment.
Changes in the story actually came before changes in wellbeing, and not the other way around. It was as if people were narrating a new version of their lives, and then a week or two later, their wellbeing would catch up with the story.
As we go through our lives responding to ups and downs that come at us unpredictably, it can feel as if we are hostages to life events. This is why many people see the hand of fate in the things that happen to them. But everything looks different once we realize that we are not simply a beleaguered character in our life story; we are also the author.
What happens when events challenge our preexisting narratives?
What are the Four Principles of a Constructed Story?
1 Accommodative processing over automatic assimilation of events into our lives. How do we reshape our story and our identity to accommodate new events?
Most of what we do most of the time = Assimilation. We go on living our lives, and when new things happen, we just assimilate those experiences into the story that we've been telling, whether we do that consciously or not.
Events that make us question the story we've been telling lead to the story itself needing to change to accommodate that new experience = accommodative processing, a key narrative variable in supporting our wellbeing.
But it doesn't support our wellbeing in exactly the way redemption does, for example. Accommodative processing helps us feel like our life has meaning and we understand it, even if it doesn't always feel good.
Annie's story of receiving a multiple sclerosis diagnosis and the Health Story Collaborative
2 Agency: being able to direct your life. Passive subject or Active protagonist?
Stories that give us a feeling that we are in charge of our own lives are linked to higher wellbeing.
Agency is a theme in people's stories. We assess it along a continuum: from being able to direct your life, and then down at the other end of the continuum, you're batted around by the whims of fate. Again, these are themes and stories. No one is completely in control of their lives, so it's the way you portray the main character in the story, i.e. you.
Layla's story of being blind.
The stories we tell can either put us in the driver's seat or the passenger seat. Layla is clearly choosing to be in the driver's seat.
Traditional models of disability in the United States have this medical approach, where disability is a problem to be solved or eradicated. Social models of disability or relational models really push back on that and say, "Disability is in the interaction between my body and the built social environment around us."
In Layla's story, there's also this sense of agency. "Now that this is part of who I am, what am I going to do with it? How can I take control of this and use it for things that matter to me?"
The theme emerging here. As you tell the story of your life, do you see yourself as a passive subject, someone to whom things happen? Or as an active protagonist, someone who is directing the course of her own life?
Every life offers lots of evidence that allows you to draw either conclusion. Given this, Jonathan is saying, choose narratives that put you in the driver's seat.
3 Communion and connection. 'I'm not alone'
Focus shifts beyond the individual. ‘But it's also the case that no man is an island.’
[The story of Antonio] Antonio is telling a story that says, "I'm not alone."
4 How do we make the story meaningful? Hedonic - feel good versus Eudaimonic - feels meaningful
One final feature of a constructive story is that it generates meaning for the person who tells it. You say we're not always able to tell a happy story about what happens to us. But we can try to tell a meaningful story. There are benefits to telling such stories.
We think about the broad study of wellbeing, it tends to cluster in two domains,(Aristotle.):
Hedonic wellbeing, which means it feels good.
Eudaimonic wellbeing, which means it feels meaningful.
Two domains of wellbeing are actually relatively uncorrelated with each other.
Plenty of things that feel good but don't feel particularly meaningful. We might binge-watch TV or something.
We can all think about experiences that feel meaningful, but don't feel particularly good.
Health Story Collaborative, researches the ways in which people can really think through the hard parts of their lives and find some meaning out of that. Even if the meaning doesn't ultimately feel good in that sort of happy sense, that meaning is still incredibly worthwhile.
Our personal stories sit within a broader narrative ecosystem
Western culture of positivity: everything has to be a redemptive story.
In the United States, there is an expectation that we can narrate challenging experiences in our lives with a redemptive spin. We Americans love the theme of redemption, and we expect people to be able to do it. I call this the Press for Redemption. (Carer Mentor note: Susan David terms this The Dangers of Toxic Positivity)
Health Story Collaborative, finds that people feel like they're having this double whammy experience where, "I'm sick AND I'm not telling the right kind of story about it. My cancer didn't teach me that I'm such a fighter, or that people love me more than I ever would've realized if I never had cancer." No, some people say, "This just sucks."
It would be better, in those instances, to acknowledge that, and not try to convince them that it doesn't suck. Let them know that there's a reason why they feel like they're telling the wrong kind of story: Our culture puts a particular premium on a particular kind of story. And then to help them find other kinds of narrative roots that might lead towards a sense of meaningfulness, even if they can't make you feel better.
The Broader Narrative of Families, Societies, Cultures and Nations
Societies tell themselves narratives. Nations tell themselves stories all the time.
Kate McLean and Moin Syed have written really compellingly about what they call master narratives. These are the dominant storylines in our culture that tend to be invisible, but also ubiquitous and sort of rigid and powerful. And we are always in a constant dialogue with the master narratives in our particular cultural contexts.
Families have narratives that guide the way relationships unfold. So do countries.
Again, narratives are not all good or all bad at the individual level, and they're not all good or all bad at the national level, either. But these national narratives emerge from the collection of individual narratives that the members of that country tell.
The Insights Generation.
3 Prompts for reflection.
What resonated most deeply with you?
What was the biggest new idea or piece of information that you’re taking away from this?
What ‘Rethink’ or reframe of your own story does this bring to mind?
Don’t accept information at face value, develop your critical thinking - any caveats here?
Professional Actionable outputs
A) Redraft your CV or Resumé to reflect your narrative.
B) Create a short 6-second pitch of your redemption sequence, including a flavour of yourself beyond work. Share your ‘Why’, your authentic story. (I’ll discuss this in a future article)
Personal reflections
Consider sharing your story with a loved one. Notice where you paused and how you summarised phases in your life story.
Here is more stimulus for thought via Bruce Feiler’s ‘Life is in the Transitions’
Lastly - Reference all this work in a journal or online.
You can read some of my story in the Carer Mentor Journey Section.
A Recalibrated Frame of Reference
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