Where There's Stress, There's a Story

The mind is an extremely powerful connect-the-dots machine, constantly and rapidly making associations between what it notices, triggering any one of a zillion memories or projections about the future. All of these scenarios include you of course, and often there’s something at stake, some fixation on having things go a certain way.

The mind becomes so quiet that you notice the tiniest ripples in your feelings. Our experience is full of some very subtle feedback that normally gets drowned out—tiny gut feelings, emotional residue from thoughts about certain topics, faint attractions or aversions to tiny details like the way your food is sitting on your plate.

With so little noise, you can start to map out the mechanics of the everyday preoccupied mind—how thoughts make you worry and ruminate, and how unnecessary most of the resulting stress is.

Where there’s stress, there’s a story, and you probably don’t need to hear it. Or tell it.

When you notice stress rising at some random moment, find the story. It can probably be summed up in a sentence.

Normally our minds are so abuzz with layers of dialogue, memories, fears and ruminations, that we barely notice we’re thinking at all. Our everyday experience is so saturated with ongoing idle thought that it essentially becomes invisible. We’re like David Foster Wallace’s proverbial goldfish—after an older fish asks him, “How’s the water today?” h... See more

Just leave the narrative unfinished—not that they ever can be finished—and go back to what you were doing before the storytelling started. That’s where life actually happens.

Whether the story is true or not (or may become true) isn’t important. You may still have to live through an actual audit or a nervous first date, and there is some uncertainty there, some real possibility of pain or difficulty. But even if the topic is decidedly relevant to your life, that doesn’t mean you need to tell or re-tell this story right ... See more

But there’s no real decision-making happening, no useful preparation, just another unplanned session of self-flagellation, as we demand more control and certainty from our experience than is ever going to be available to us.