How to Use Life Stories to Better Your Life

“Life stories do not simply reflect personality. They are personality, or more accurately, they are important parts of personality, along with other parts, like dispositional traits, goals, and values.” Dan McAdamsmn and Erika Manczak, APA Handbook of Personality and Social Psychology.

If you were to summarize your life so far in a few sentences, how would you tell your story? Is your story arc going up or down? Does your story match one or more of The Seven Basic Plot Points 📖, i.e.: overcoming the monster, rags to riches, the quest, voyage and return, comedy, tragedy, and rebirth?

Here’s how Star Trek: Enterprise tells its story of quest:

Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no man has gone before!

It’s adventurous, exciting, and open-ended (see Life > Principle: Open Life View).

Power of a life story

Life story/narrative is powerful because it:

• Engrosses us through the release of neurotransmitters, including oxytocin (connection, empathy, trust), cortisol (excitement, distress), dopamine (strive, focus, pleasure, satisfaction).
• Helps us make sense of our circumstances, such as “where am I at? What are the factors contributing to my current situation? How do the pieces of my life fit together? Where am I going?”, etc.
• Gives us a sense of agency and confidence, the feeling that: “I am the narrator of my existence, and I am somewhat in control”. For example, psychologist Johnathan Adler conducted a longitudinal study where he asked 47 therapy-goers to write personal narratives and complete mental health assessment over a period of time. “What he found,” according to editor Julie Beck, “was not only that themes of agency in participants’ stories increased over time, and that mental health increased, and that the two were related, but that increased agency actually appeared in stories before people’s mental health improved.” For more about agency, see Life > Life Perspectives >Bondage vs. Choices, Freedom and Free Will.
• Impacts our mental health and overall wellbeing: “For instance, if you’re the kind of person who would remember the positives that came out of that (hypothetical) bullying episode at your new school, it’s also more likely that you enjoy a greater sense of wellbeing and satisfaction in life”, writes psychologist Christian Jarrett, “Moreover… changing your self-authoring style and focus could be beneficial — indeed, helping people to re-interpret their personal stories in a more constructive light is the basis of what’s known as ‘narrative therapy’”
• Changes our behaviors: “For example, one found that a storytelling approach was more effective in convincing African-Americans at risk for hypertension to change their behavior and reduce their blood pressure. A study of low-performing science students found that reading stories of the struggles of famous scientists led to better grades. A paper published last year found that witnessing acts of altruism and heroism in films led to more giving in real life”, editor Jeremy Adam Smith summarizes.
• Is open-ended: Unlike a written or told story, which has a beginning, a middle and an end, our life narrative is open-ended. Even for the most risk-adverse person in the stablest environment, things can happen in an instant that thwarts their best plans. This is why having an open life view is an advantageous strategy, because it prepares us for unexpected changes. See more in Life > Principle: Open Life View.

Life improvement through life stories

Due to the above impactful traits of life stories, we can actually use them to better our lives.

• Use lifetime goals to inform your genre. For example, if you want more new experiences, tell your story as an adventure; if you want to have more fun, tell it as if it’s a comedy.
• Expect setbacks and reframe your problems. All great stories have ups and downs. When encountering challenges, try reframing the problem as a way to overcome them. For example in The Biggest Bluff 📖,author Maria Konnikova reframes her mindset from a victim to a victor when playing poker: “A victim: The cards went against me. Things are being done to me, things are happening around me, and I am neither to blame nor in control. A victor: I made the correct decision. Sure, the outcome didn’t go my way, but I thought correctly under pressure. And that’s the skill I can control… These are the seeds of resilience, of being able to overcome the bad beats that you can’t avoid and mentally position yourself to be prepared for the next time [p.134].”
• Tell positive stories. “People who tell more positive stories and stories with more elements of redemption (for example, that time that you lost your job, but ended up switching career paths into something you enjoy much more) tend to enjoy greater wellbeing, at least based on research with Western samples, in terms of more life satisfaction and better mental health”, Jarrett remarks. For more, see Life > Life Perspectives > Optimism & Pessimism.
• Tell redemptive stories. Jarrett also found “one recent study in which student volunteers were asked to write narratives so that they featured more redemptive sequences (such as by considering ‘one time that a failure has changed you for the better). Compared with control participants who weren’t prompted in this way, those encouraged to feature more redemptive sequences subsequently showed greater goal persistence, even several weeks later, saying that they tended to finish whatever they started.” For a related discussion, see Groups > System 1: Group Emotions > Guilt / Redemption / Shame / Regret / Salvation.
• Tell yourself who you are and what you will do, instead of what you wish for.For example, if your wish is to lose weight, tell a story of how you are a health-conscious person who achieves wellness through healthy dieting and exercise. While wishes don’t always come true, you have more control over your sense of self and your drive for resolutions.
• Tell complex, layered stories. Don’t typecast or pigeon-hole yourself. Beck reasons: “People contain multitudes… Someone might have an overarching narrative for her whole life, and different narratives for different realms of her life — career, romance, family, faith. She might have narratives within each realm that intersect, diverge, or contradict each other, all of them filled with the micro-stories of specific events. And to truly make a life story, she’ll need to do what researchers call ‘autobiographical reasoning’ about the events — ‘identifying lessons learned or insights gained in life experiences, marking development or growth through sequences of scenes, and showing how specific life episodes illustrate enduring truths about the self,’ [psychologists] McAdams and Manczak write.”
• Find “unity” in your narrative. “There is evidence that finding some ‘unity’ in your narrative identity is better, psychologically, than not finding it…”, according to Beck. Be careful not to throw away parts that don’t neatly fit into your narrative, though, or your life experience could be diminished.
• Be introspective but not obsessed. Be self-aware enough to construct an accurate and descriptive life narrative, but do not get bogged down by specific details so you can see the big picture. Think of that friend who is stuck telling the same troubles over and over without a way out — what would you say to them to get them out of the loop?
• Include others in your story. Jarrett proposes that “people whose stories express a greater sense of being a protagonist in the events of their life and having more meaningful communion with others [enjoy more life satisfaction and better mental health]. For example, the episodes they remember frequently involve loved ones and close friends, such as that hilarious hen night in Brighton, or shared hobbies, like the time they and their cousin went to cooking classes together.”
• You don’t have to follow cultural scripts like getting a good job, getting married, having kids… Here’s an example of how a millennial tries to reframe the narrative others tell about her generation into one of her own.
• Don’t be afraid to rewrite your story entirely. Sometimes we just need a new storyline, or a change of genre. Be cautious but bold — you only live once.
• Talk to the future but keep it open-ended. You can follow the trend of your current story to predict the future. Also, you can make better decisions that align with your future goals is by writing a letter to your future self. However, if things don’t pan out the way you expect, just take the learning and update your narrative so your predictions will be more accurate next time. For how, see Self > Method: Iterative Learning.

Basic features in a life story

Psychologists Kate McLean and colleagues sum up the ‘Big Three’ characteristics in our narratives:

• Motivational and Affective Themes: how much autonomy and positivity / negativity do we express in our stories, “and whether they are dominated by good situations turning sour (seeing that bullying episode as ruining things), or bad situations working out well in the end (like when the bullying led to positive outcomes)”. For a related discussion, see Life > Life Perspectives > Optimism & Pessimism.
• Autobiographical Reasoning: how do we interpret “the experiences in our stories, find meaning in what’s happened, and discern links between key events and ways we have and haven’t changed”.
• Structure: the inner coherence of our stories and how facts and contexts fit into our timelines.

Q&A

1. Q: Are life stories always helpful? Are there any caveats?

• A: There are indeed several caveats to note while using life stories to improve your life:
• While we can tell a nice life story just to feel good, don’t forget to also use it to develop yourself and find purposes.
• In order to not get stuck, use storytelling with iterative learning (Self > Method: Iterative Learning) to keep us progressing.
• We need to understand how our brain works enough to not have illusions or biases (see Self > Mind Hacking > System 1: Cognitive Biases)
• Don’t obsess or overthink about yourselves. Think about others too.
• You can tell a good narrative and be a jerk. For example, people with dark triad of personalities (see Life > Life Perspectives> Light & Dark Triad of Personalities) may tell tales of how: “I tend to manipulate others to get my way” and “I have used deceit or lied to get my way.”
• In using life stories to predict the future, be realistic about your chances because underestimating our chances could leave us feeling depressed, and overestimating our chances could make us unrealistically pompous.

Act, validate and further discussions

Start experimenting with storytelling today, and see what narrative gives you the most positive push towards your life vision.

In fact, 21st Century Personhood is a retelling of who we are and how we live in the 21st century. The hope is if we see ourselves as defensive collaborators with a resilient, ever-learning mind, an open life that self-actualizes through moral struggles, and deep understanding of our world, we can overcome systemic bullying and the greatest challenges of this century.

In Groups > Groups We Are In & Their Significance > Memes / Ideologies / Religions, we will examine how the collective stories we tell in our societies shape us. Then in Groups > Group Conflicts > Identity and World > Systemic Anti-bullying > From Identity Politics to Social Coercion, we will discuss how our identity — i.e., the character we pick for ourselves — can be a source of societal conflicts. To conclude this section, let’s read the poem Why we tell stories by Lisel Mueller:

I
Because we used to have leaves
and on damp days
our muscles feel a tug,
painful now, from when roots
pulled us into the ground
and because our children believe
they can fly, an instinct retained
from when the bones in our arms
were shaped like zithers and broke
neatly under their feathers
and because before we had lungs
we knew how far it was to the bottom
as we floated open-eyed
like painted scarves through the scenery
of dreams, and because we awakened
and learned to speak

2
We sat by the fire in our caves,
and because we were poor, we made up a tale
about a treasure mountain
that would open only for us
and because we were always defeated,
we invented impossible riddles
only we could solve,
monsters only we could kill,
women who could love no one else
and because we had survived
sisters and brothers, daughters and sons,
we discovered bones that rose
from the dark earth and sang
as white birds in the trees

3
Because the story of our life
becomes our life

Because each of us tells
the same story
but tells it differently
and none of us tells it
the same way twice

Because grandmothers looking like spiders
want to enchant the children
and grandfathers need to convince us
what happened happened because of them
and though we listen only
haphazardly, with one ear,
we will begin our story
with the word and

Do you have any suggestions, doubts, hypothesis or experience for this topic? Please comment below 👇!