Category:

It is also powerfully reassuring to learn more about your brain's capacity to "heal itself." This broadly means that patterns of response in the brain are more "plastic" than previously assumed. This is terrific news for anyone with a brain injury or a disease like Parkinson's. But new hope is echoed for many more people when you understand what lets you change patterns in your thinking and responding.

Insight depends on allowing yourself to challenge some familiar assumptions, and revise what you have been consciously and unconsciously telling yourself about yourself (and about every experience coming your way). The power of story is not just something that writers and readers know: the "default position" of the brain is "storytelling."

It is completely natural that you and I are always telling ourselves stories. (You also have stories coming from your unconscious in your dreams.) By "stories," I don't mean fiction or fantasies, although they may be a lovely part of your imaginative life. "Stories" are the reflection of your own evolving expectations, as well as what you have been trained and conditioned to expect—or be repelled by. They go to the heart of what you believe matters most, how you identify yourself and what you are most strongly identified with. How you inspire yourself, what you are inspired by, how you set your intention-compass for the day: all these gifts owe much to "story," even the fundamental message, "Yes, I can do this."

A need for story is deep in your human nature. (Scientists are not exempt. Science tells many stories—most of them evolving.) A need for rich stories is also real, stories that acknowledge your complexity, inner contradictions, slow or swift changes in perception. No one, for example, consciously thinks, "My name is Anxious. My primary identity is anxiety. Or fear." But someone may well have a hundred reasons why they cannot take a risk, cannot trust anyone—even an old friend. Maybe they feel too afraid to contradict their boss at work or their partner at home. Or are regularly awake at 3 a.m. scanning their mind for things that are "sure to go wrong."

Nothing has more power than the stories you are telling yourself about yourself, about the impact others are having on your life, about what is fair or unfair, what is manageable, or not. Only some of this is conscious.

You inevitably have unconscious inner drives that can be tricky to "own." You may also be projecting—which means you are attributing motivations or intentions to other people that come from your mind, not theirs. Such stories—inner narratives, dramas—can be utterly convincing. They can cause severe disruptions in your most intimate or dependent relationships. Yet they are one possible interpretation only, perhaps driven by old patterns of self-criticism or worse, rather than the reality-check audit ("Is there another, kinder way of thinking about this?") available to you when you are less stressed or distressed.

During those hard times, your inner stories will almost invariably become blaming, floundering—and anxious. But—and it's a consoling "but"—you are not stuck with any limiting patterns, stories, or expectations.

I love it that in his core book, The Brain's Way of Healing, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Norman Doidge points out that as new as some of these neuroscientific discoveries are, the insights about your essential cooperation with your whole-self healing are ancient.

Dr. Doidge writes, "The father of scientific medicine, Hippocrates, saw the body as the major healer, and the physician and patient working together with nature, to help the body activate its own healing capacities."

No matter how intrusive anxiety is in your current life, it need not and must not define you. Nor need it dictate the stories that consciously and unconsciously guide your life. Truly, however you identify, whatever you most identify with, your name is not Anxious.