March 28, 2021

The Stories We Tell Ourselves

As a child and into adulthood, I strove to excel at almost every task, setting impossibly high standards for myself and overachieving at every turn. I didn’t have over-bearing, controlling parents that demanded nothing less than perfection from me. Nope. It was me being demanding of myself – my own fiercest competitor in the race to the top.

My drive for excellence was partly innate, but it was also propelled by another invisible force – fear. Somewhere along the way, my perfectionist tendencies became stoked by a trifecta of fears associated with people-pleasing, loathing of making mistakes, and facing disappointment from myself and others.

But where did this all come from?... Cheryl Strayed, American novelist and motivational speaker, provides this answer: “Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves…”

What story of imperfection are you telling yourself?

I’m not good, smart or cool enough
I don’t have the right body, education, means or finances
I should be or should do…
I won’t be liked
I will be judged

When we continually tell ourselves these stories, we start to believe them as truth. Drip by drip, these self-acquired “truths”, or what I deem to be learned and memorized behaviours, further cement themselves in our lives. In my case, the stories I told myself fuelled my maladaptive perfectionism.

How do we learn and memorize behaviours?... With lots of practice!

A pioneer in the study of the mind-body connection, Dr. Joe Dispenza explains the neuroscience behind memorized behaviours and how they mould our identities and lives. Breaking it down to the basics, this is how it works:

1 – You have an experience (good or bad).

2 – An emotion is attached to this experience.

3 – When you think about this past experience repeatedly, it reflexively becomes a memorized emotion.

4 – The memorized emotion dwells in your subconscious mind from where it resurfaces automatically as a conditioned response any time you are reminded of your original experience. This is also known as a habit.

Now, this is where the neuroscience gets interesting…

5 – The repetition of emotions through association causes neurons in your brain to form synaptic connections by continuously firing and wiring together. Meanwhile, an emotional reaction to an experience creates a chemical state of being.

6 – When this chemical state of being lasts a few hours or days, it is qualified as a mood.

7 – When a mood sticks around for a few weeks or months it becomes a temperament.

8 – When a temperament lingers for years, it becomes a personality trait – your mental signature.

Coming full circle, you can now understand how our personalities can be moulded beginning with an emotional reaction to a single experience, for better or for worse, that morphs into a memorized behaviour. Breaking this down scientifically helped me to understand how my perfectionist fears developed, and that with some work and introspection I could change the state of being I had created. I could change my personality or “personal reality” by consciously changing the emotions I memorized.

What is my biggest takeaway from this knowledge? It comes down to one statement: