Recommendation: Hidden Brain's 'Change Your Story, Change Your Life'
Recommendation: Hidden Brain's 'Change Your Story, Change Your Life'
Shankar Verdantam's Podcast (Episode Released 30 October, 2023)
In this article, you can listen to the 1-hour podcast published on the Hidden Brain Website and follow along with the main pieces of the transcript (copied from the site), which I have shortened and structured into sections, like a script guide.
In ‘Recommendation: 3 Essential Steps to Master Change’ there are numerous ways to take in new information. Experimenting and identifying what works for you is a journey in itself. There, Nathan Lozeron provides an illustrated video summary of Brad Stulberg’s book.
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Shankar Vedantam interviews Jonathan Adler, psychologist and researcher, at Olin College,
Hidden Brain podcast host, Shankar Vedantam uses science and storytelling to reveal the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior, shape our choices and direct our relationships.
We all tell stories about ourselves, often without realizing we’re doing so. How we frame those stories can profoundly shape our lives. In the kickoff episode to our monthlong series on healing, psychologist Jonathan Adler shares how to tell our stories in ways that enhance our wellbeing.
Table of Contents
What is Narrative Psychology? (At 10.27 minutes)
What is a Redemption Sequence and a Contamination sequence? (At 11.58 minutes )
Why does it matter where we stop and start the different chapters of our life story? ( At 14:28 minutes)
Chicken and egg - what causes what? In which direction does the arrow of causation run? ( At 27:26 minutes)
What happens when events come along that challenge our preexisting narratives - What are the Four Principles of a Constructed Story? (At 30:05 minutes)
Accommodative processing over automatic assimilation of events into our lives. How do we reshape our story, our identity to accommodate new events? (At 30:10 minutes)
Agency: being able to direct your life. Passive subject or Active protagonist? (At 34:06 Minutes)
Communion and connection. 'I'm not alone' (At 38:29 Minutes
How do we make the story meaningful? Hedonic - feel good versus Eudaimonic - feels meaningful (At 41.05 minutes)
Our personal stories within a broader narrative ecosystem (At 42.55 minutes)
The Broader Narrative of Societies, Cultures and Nations (At 45:08 minutes)
Narrative psychology
Jonathan Adler: You can't totally control the things that happened to you in your life. You have some more say about how you make sense of it. And it's important to remember, we're talking about stories here. So we know from research on memory that we're not very good at recording the objective facts of our experience. For a long time, that frustrated cognitive scientists. But in more recent years, it's become clear that our memory works like this for a good reason. If you think about why we have memory in the first place, it's not so we can hold on to every single thing that's happened to us in some heretical way. We have memories so that we can make sense of what's happening to us right now, and anticipate what might happen next. So if you walk by a cave and a bear jumps out, you don't necessarily need to remember that cave and that bear. But you need to remember that dangerous things might hide in dark places.
So the slippery reconstructive nature of memory is a feature of the system, it's not a bug. And stories are an amazing tool for holding onto the meaning of our past experiences. The objective facts of our lives are what they are. But the stories are about where we draw connections between things, where we place the chapter breaks of our lives. And those are narrative acts, not historical acts. And the way we do that can have big implications for our wellbeing.
Jonathan and Dan McAdams have found that one of the most crucial choices we make in telling our stories; and it's important to underscore that most of us make these choices unconsciously; is where we start and stop the different chapters of our life story.
Redemption and Contamination sequences
So stories that we narrate as starting bad and ending good, we call that a redemption sequence. And stories that start good and end bad, we call that a contamination sequence.
We're remembering these are stories. This is how we narrate the experience, not necessarily the objective facts of our lives. Because all lives have good and bad.
These are narrative interpretations that take on different thematic arcs, redemption and contamination. But these different ways of narrating our lives have different implications for your wellbeing. We find over and over that when redemption sequences occur in people's life stories, they tend to be associated with positive wellbeing, good life satisfaction, lower levels of things like depression, higher self-esteem. And it's just the opposite for themes of contamination.
Where you stop and start frames of your story makes a big difference.
If we end that story, end that chapter when I get back to college, it feels like a contamination sequence. But if I string it together with the things that came next ... spoiler alert ... It feels like a redemption sequence.
The effects of redemption and contamination stories: 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. You can see how powerful this is in a study conducted by William Dunlop and Jessica Tracy. They were researching the stories told by people fighting addiction. They found that people who told redemptive stories of their last drink were more likely to stay sober than people whose stories didn't contain redemptive themes.
For example, they talk about one participant who felt like the last drink for him really symbolized the low point. And it was the moment when he committed to really turning his life around, which he then goes on to do. And that is emblematic of many findings in the field: some that look at behavior, some that look mostly at mental health outcomes, where we find that the stories that we tell about our lives are strong predictors of how we're doing.
One study shows a connection between the themes in peoples narratives and biological markers of stress and ageing. Potential biological consequences of our stories, not just psychological ones
What was interesting was that the key narrative theme in this study was not redemption. It was a theme of integration, where we think about the extent to which participants were able to make sense of having had this challenging kid and integrating that into their own life story.
We found that among the chronically stressed parents, stories of integration were associated not only with their self-report of lower levels of psychological stress, but also with significantly less telomere shortening over 18 months.
As far as I know, this is the only study to show a connection between the themes in people's narratives and biological markers of stress and aging. But it suggests that there may be biological consequences of our stories, not just psychological ones.
Chicken and egg - what causes what?
Now, when you hear someone tell a redemptive story and you see that they are experiencing better mental health, there is a question that arises, which is: in which direction does the arrow of causation run? Are they telling redemptive stories, and therefore feeling better about their lives? Or are they feeling better about their lives, and therefore telling redemptive stories?
At one point, you followed a group of patients as they worked with a psychotherapist. You charted both the changes they experienced while in therapy and the stories they told about their lives, and also which preceded which. What did you find, Jonathan?
Jonathan Adler: Yeah, I became obsessed with that directionality question. In that study, I enrolled a bunch of people, adults ranging from ages 18 to 92. They were seeking individual therapy for a huge range of problems. There were folks with really significant psychopathology like depression, anxiety, eating disorders. But there were also people just wanting to do some work on themselves.
There was a woman who wanted to think through her own childhood as she was about to become a parent. There was a woman who was feeling lonely in retirement. So before they started with their therapist, we collected their stories and we measured their wellbeing, user standard measures. Then on the other side, we had nearly 600 narratives from across all these participants. And what we found was, first, people got better over the course of treatment. Which is good, because decades of research on psychotherapy suggest that it works.
And we found that people's stories changed in meaningful ways over the course of treatment.
And then the changes in the story actually came before changes in wellbeing, and not the other way around. Because 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.
Four principles of a Constructed story
All of us constantly construct stories about our lives. Most of the time, this happens under the surface. We are not mindful about the narrative choices we make. Every so often, however, something happens in our lives that causes us to revisit our stories: a marriage, a divorce, the birth of a child, the death of a close friend. All of these take time to assimilate into the narrative of our lives.
At Olin College of Engineering, psychologist Jonathan Adler has studied what happens when events come along that challenge our preexisting narratives.
1 Accommodative processing over automatic assimilation of events into our lives
Jon, I want you to tell me the story of a physician named Annie Brewster. Can you describe what Annie's life was like when she was in her late 20s?
Annie was one of these unbelievably driven, successful students. She had done extremely well in medical school, landed a great residency, was working a million hours. But she had started to experience some tingling on one side of her body. She went to get it checked out. She was very well-connected in the medical sphere and waited to see the uber-specialist, who quite brusquely told her that she had multiple sclerosis.
I want to play a bit of tape here from Annie herself, talking about how she reacted to the news from her doctor.
Annie Brewster: It took me a long time to come to terms with that diagnosis, to accept it into my life. Really, it was difficult for me because I had always thought of myself as somebody who was really strong. My body had always worked for me, done what I wanted it to do. And to think of myself as someone with an illness, I really had to redefine myself and get over some denial.
Jonathan, you say that Annie was engaging in an internal process of accommodation. What do you mean by this? And is accommodation a good thing?
Jonathan Adler: Most of what we do most of the time, we call 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.
But sometimes something happens that really makes us question the story we've been telling. In those instances, the story itself needs to change to accommodate that new experience. And what we call accommodative processing is a key narrative variable in supporting our wellbeing. But it doesn't support our wellbeing in exactly the way redemption does, for example. But accommodative processing, it helps us feel like our life has meaning and we understand it, even if it doesn't always feel good.
Annie tells this story that once she did finally start to accommodate this experience, when she did really start to reshape her identity to include this idea of herself as having an illness, she stepped away from her very prestigious medical career. She went down to part-time and she founded a nonprofit organization called Health Story Collaborative.
I met Annie about a year into that process. She was going around and collecting other people's stories and curating them. And 10 years later, we have worked really closely together, developing programs that leverage the science of narrative in order to support storytelling in the highly fragmented and fragmenting medical ecosystem.
Shankar Vedantam: When we modify our life stories to accommodate new life events, those events no longer feel random and aberrational. The less we feel buffeted by random events, the more we feel like we are in control of our own lives. This leads to the next idea.
2. Agency: being able to direct your life. Passive subject or Active protagonist?
Jonathan has found that 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.
Shankar Vedantam: Jonathan cites the remarkable story of a woman named Layla:
In the last five years, I've been doing a lot of research focused on identity development among people who acquire physical disabilities. And Layla was a participant in one of my studies. She tells this story of having these horrible headaches, which gradually intensified to the point where she couldn't function. She spends time in three different hospitals in Nairobi, Kenya, where she lives. And no one can figure out what's going on.
She decides to fly to India to see a specialist, and he sends her right into surgery. When she wakes up, the pain is gone, but she also can't see. The surgeon had been able to alleviate the unexplained swelling in her head that had been pressing on her optic nerves, but the nerve was also irreparably damaged. So for a few months, everyone held out hope that her vision might return. But Layla was actually the first one to accept that it wouldn't.
She said, "I realized as soon as I started accepting it, I started becoming less frustrated and sad." And though it was incredibly difficult and scary for her, Layla gradually threw herself into the task of becoming a blind person. She shifts careers. She moves to the United States to get training and computer science, where she starts working on adaptive technology for other blind and low-vision people.
Layla: I think my blindness is the best thing that ever happened to me. Even right now, if a doctor came in and told me they have a cure, I would not take it. Because I think for me, it made me understand myself, and it gives these new challenges every single day. It presents me with something. And through those challenges, I'm able to understand myself.
Shankar Vedantam: That's a remarkable account, Jonathan. But as I hear Layla talking, I feel like I've heard the same thing in the deaf community. Many deaf people today say, "The real problem is not with deafness. I just happen to speak sign language. I speak a different language than you do."
Now we can all debate how and whether something should be considered a disorder. But I think the point you're trying to make here is that the stories we tell can either put us in the driver's seat or put us in the passenger seat. And Layla is clearly choosing to be in the driver's seat.
Jonathan Adler: That's right. 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 and social environment around us."
In Layla's story, like you said, 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?"
Shankar Vedantam: You can see a 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?
Now, as Jonathan says, 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'
Most of the narratives we have discussed so far have championed the idea of 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."
Jonathan Adler: Exactly. In this room full of people who did not look like him, Antonio found someone who did, and they really connected. He says, "Diego threw down this challenge. If you think there should be more people like us here, then come and fix it."
And Antonio says, "I'm a competitive guy. And the next fall I was on a one-way bus trip to Olin College."
4. How do we make the story meaningful? Hedonic - feel good versus Eudaimonic which feels meaningful
Shankar Vedantam: So Jonathan, 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 and tell a meaningful story. And there are benefits to telling such stories. Can you explain what you mean?
Jonathan Adler: Yeah. To pan back for just a second, when we think about the broad study of wellbeing, it tends to cluster in two domains, which get their cumbersome names from Aristotle. On the one hand, we have what's called hedonic wellbeing, which means it feels good. On the other hand, we have a kind of wellbeing called eudaimonic wellbeing, which means it feels meaningful.
These two domains of wellbeing are actually relatively uncorrelated with each other. If we think about our lives for a second, that makes sense. We all do 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.
So in my work with Health Story Collaborative in particular, we find that feeling good is not always an option for people. Telling redemptive stories, or stories high in the theme of agency and communion; that's not always possible. In those situations, we're often interested in 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 within a broader narrative ecosystem
Shankar Vedantam: I am trying to imagine how someone who is going through a rough time might hear this episode, Jonathan. And I worry that that person might say, "I've just lost my job, I've just gotten divorced. I've just lost a close family friend. And now Jonathan Adler comes along and tells me that if I'm unhappy, it's because I'm not telling the right story about my life." How would you respond to that?
Jonathan Adler: I want to say three things to that person. The first thing is, I'm sorry. I'm sorry that things are so hard for you right now. Of course they're hard, and of course you're not feeling good. The second thing I want to say is there are all kinds of ways of making meaning of these experiences. And so we might think about exploring themes of agency or communion. If you lost your job, are you feeling connected to your spouse or your kids? Or if something challenging has happened, might there be some growth that comes from it? So we might explore those themes.
But the third thing I want to say is our personal stories exist in a broader narrative ecosystem.
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.
And in my work with Health Story Collaborative, we often find 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."
And I think in those instances, we want to acknowledge that, and not try to convince them that it doesn't just suck. Let them know that there's a reason they feel like they're telling the wrong kind of story, because 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.
Shankar Vedantam: Many of the examples we've talked about here have involved individuals. But as we've started to see, I think towards the end of this conversation, we're slowly broadening out beyond the individual. Because of course, these ideas are relevant outside of individual minds as well.
Societies tell themselves narratives. Nations tell themselves stories all the time. Do you think ideas of narrative psychology speak to how nations talk to themselves, and perhaps how they ought to talk to themselves?
Jonathan Adler: I do. And this is really at the forefront of the field. My colleagues, 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.
And as you said, countries certainly do.
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 are emergent from the collection of individual narratives that the members of that country tell.
[Reference to speech Barack Obama made at the 2004 Democratic National Convention].
Appealing to entrenched master narratives is a very strategic thing to do. And many, many politicians adopt redemptive themes in their speeches. Obviously, there are many wonderful aspects of that storyline, and as we've discussed, problematic ones too. But we see evidence of leaders serving as narrators-in-chief. They shape our narrative ecology as they model storytelling for us.
The Broader Narrative of Societies, Cultures and Nations
Shankar Vedantam: We started this conversation, Jonathan, by talking about ways in which you came to understand the life events in your own life, and to tell stories about those life events in a way that was more positive than negative. I'm wondering, after all these years of studying narrative psychology, do you do this on a regular basis now?
Jonathan Adler: It's not that I am consciously going through my daily experiences and editing them into the kinds of storylines that I have learned are likely to support my wellbeing. But when difficult things happen in particular, I think I do pause. And I remember that there are different kinds of wellbeing. And that the way I make sense of those experiences will lead me to different kinds of wellbeing.
But I think for a lot of people, just the awareness that you are not only the main character in your story, but also the narrator, and that the way you choose to tell the story of your life really matters. That can be an empowering insight.
Jonathan Adler is a psychologist at Olin College.