Storying: It’s a Lot Like Breathing

Just as breathing is automatic, and you can’t decide to stop breathing, storying is automatic, and you can’t decide to stop storying.

Your unconscious (System 1) monitors and manages your physical functions such as alertness, arousal, breathing, circulation, and digestion. Actions you take, including many of the lifestyle choices you make—as well as the circumstances of your life—can affect these functions.

You can consciously attend to some of them—breathing, for example—some of the time. But you can’t attend to any of them all the time. And you can’t consciously control them because you don’t have enough System 2 bandwidth to handle the job.

In addition to maintaining homeostasis by managing physical functions, System 1 also manages things like your sensory perceptions, your awareness of being located in space and time, your immediate reactions to events, and the vast majority of choices you make each day.

You can consciously attend to some of these functions, too, some of the time. But you can’t prevent System 1 from managing your mental processes and your real-time reactions any more than you can prevent it from managing physical functions. Although you might wish to have more say, moment-to-moment, it’s good that you don’t.

Storying Is Automatic.

One of the mental activities System 1 regularly engages in is weaving your experiences into coherent stories. I call this storying, because there doesn’t seem to be a better word to describe it. Storytelling and narrating both describe relating a story in some manner: either something that already happened or something that is—or is being—made up. Your brain is neither relating a factual account of past or present events, nor is it fabricating your stories out of thin air. Editing may be a more accurate term, but that implies the preexistence of a story to be edited.

The process of storying includes interpreting events and experiences as they occur for meaning and relevance, deciding which details are worth remembering, adding or subtracting for effect and coherence, reorganizing sequences, if necessary, and incorporating the resulting story into your ongoing life story based on your current beliefs and model of the world. Your brain is so good at this and does it with such speed that you aren’t even aware it’s happening.

Just as breathing is automatic, and you can’t decide to stop breathing, storying is automatic, and you can’t decide to stop storying. (Your brain is you, so you are storying, whether or not you’re conscious of doing it.)

There’s No Such Thing as a True Story.

But just as you can consciously focus your attention on your breathing to calm yourself or remind yourself to be present, you can consciously focus your attention on your brain’s storying, at least from time to time. You can learn to be skeptical of the stories your brain spins. You can allow for the possibility that your stories are often interpretations, explanations, rationalizations, and justifications. No matter how satisfying, they are not true, not fact, not an accurate reflection of reality. Your unconscious may be more or less biased than another person’s unconscious, but everyone is biased to one extent or another.

We are the great masterworks of our own storytelling minds—figments of our own imaginations. We think of ourselves as very stable and real. But our memories constrain our self-creation less than we think, and they are constantly being distorted by our hopes and dreams. Until the day we die, we are living the story of our lives. And, like a novel in process, our life stories are always changing and evolving, being edited, rewritten, and embellished by an unreliable narrator. We are, in large part, our personal stories. And those stories are more truthy than true. —Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal

Storying doesn’t just help you make sense of your own world; it also helps you make sense of the rest of the world. And you’re not the only person storying. Everyone else is doing it, too. Consider the implications.