The Stories We Tell Ourselves

It feels like stress is coming from external circumstances. From deadlines and uncertainty. From responsibility and change. From the sheer volume of decisions modern life asks us to make every day.

And to be clear, those things matter. They’re real. Anyone who tells you stress is “just in your head” hasn’t lived inside a body that’s trying to lead, create, or carry responsibility in this moment.

But over time, I’ve learned something that’s been harder to accept.

The biggest driver of stress in my life isn’t what’s happening around me. It’s the stories I’m telling myself about what’s happening.

Those stories don’t originate in the present. They don’t begin with email, or markets, or politics, or technology. Many of them were written long before the chaos of modern life showed up. They live in the body. They were formed early, quietly, often without language.

And yet, they still govern how I respond to stress today.

One of the most confusing things about stress is how often it refuses to leave. You change jobs. You gain more autonomy. You make more money. You get healthier.

From the outside, life looks more stable. But internally, the tension remains. Sometimes it even intensifies.

This is where many capable adults begin to doubt themselves. What’s wrong with me? they wonder. Why am I still anxious when things are objectively better?

The mistake is assuming stress is only a reaction to circumstances.

The nervous system doesn’t respond to facts. It responds to meaning. Two people can face the same situation and experience it very differently, not because one is stronger or weaker, but because the story attached to the moment is different.

Stress persists when the meaning hasn’t changed, even if the circumstances have.

The human nervous system is efficient. It’s designed to help us survive, not to help us reflect. To do that, it relies on shortcuts. Stories are one of those shortcuts.

A story is the fastest way to answer the question, What does this mean? And once meaning is assigned, the body reacts accordingly.

These stories aren’t always verbal. Often, they’re felt. They show up as tightness, urgency, avoidance, or over-preparation. They tell us who we are, what we’re capable of, and what’s at risk.

Stillness matters here because stillness slows interpretation.

When there is no pause, the story runs automatically. Old conclusions get applied to new situations without review. The body reacts as if the past is happening again.

Stillness doesn’t erase the story. It gives you a moment to hear it.

To explain what I mean, I need to go back a long way.

I was seven years old. My dad asked me to spread lime on the lawn. He handed me the spreader but didn’t explain how it worked. I filled it, started walking, and within moments created a thick, scorched stripe across the yard. Then I ran out of lime.

One pass. One mistake. A very visible one.

My dad was furious.

I don’t remember exactly what he said. I remember how it felt. The heat. The shame. The sense that I had messed something up I shouldn’t have touched in the first place.

From that moment, a story formed. Not consciously, but decisively.

There were certain things I wasn’t good at.
Certain tasks I shouldn’t attempt unless I was absolutely sure.
Certain mistakes that meant more than just learning.

That story didn’t announce itself. It embedded.

We don’t usually think of childhood moments when we talk about adult stress. That can feel indulgent or irrelevant. But our nervous systems don’t organize themselves by age. They organize themselves by meaning.

Decades later, that story still shows up.

It shows up when I’m running my own business and facing tasks that feel technical, operational, or unfamiliar. Setting up a CRM. Formatting something in Canva. Working through systems that don’t come naturally to me.

Objectively, these are solvable problems. I’m competent. I can learn. There’s no real danger.

And yet, stress rises.

The stress isn’t about the task. It’s about the story.

I’m not good at this.
I’m going to mess this up.
This will prove something I don’t want proven.

When that story is running, the nervous system reacts as if the stakes are far higher than they actually are. Cortisol rises. Avoidance creeps in. The work feels heavier than it should.

For years, I approached these moments the way many of us do. I tried to correct the story. I told myself it wasn’t true. I gathered evidence. I reminded myself of past successes. I pushed harder.

Sometimes that worked. Often it didn’t.

Because stories at this level aren’t persuaded by arguments. They’re held in the body, not the intellect. Trying to overwrite them with positive thinking often adds pressure. Now you’re not only anxious, you’re failing at being calm.

The problem wasn’t the presence of the story.
It was my relationship to it.

The shift came when I stopped trying to fix the story and started treating it as a hypothesis.

This is where the idea of experimentation became essential to my stillness practice.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff, whose work on Tiny Experiments has deeply influenced my thinking, describes experimentation as a way of learning that doesn’t require certainty. A tiny experiment isn’t about getting it right. It’s about creating conditions for curiosity.

That framing changed everything for me.

Instead of asking, How do I get rid of this story?
I started asking, What if I ran a small experiment instead?

What if I approached this task playfully?
What if I told myself a different story for the duration of this one activity?
What if the goal wasn’t competence, but exploration?

When I brought creativity and storytelling into mundane work, something shifted. Setting up a CRM became a puzzle instead of a test. Designing a post in Canva became an act of expression instead of proof.

Stillness gave me the pause.
Experimentation gave me permission.

The goal isn’t to eliminate old narratives. They’re part of us. Many of them formed to protect us. The goal is to change which stories have authority.

Stillness helps you notice when an old story is speaking. Experimentation helps you respond without submitting to it.

Over time, this builds trust. Not the brittle kind that depends on performance, but the embodied kind that comes from surviving small risks without catastrophe.

You learn that a mistake isn’t a verdict.
That discomfort isn’t danger.
That growth doesn’t require fixing yourself.

Seen through this lens, stress becomes more intelligible.

Some stress comes from circumstances. But much of it is sustained by internal narratives that interpret neutral challenges as threats to identity.

When you’re running your own business, leading others, or creating something that matters, those stories get activated frequently. The work asks you to grow into unfamiliar territory. The nervous system reaches for old maps.

Stillness is how you notice you’re using one.

I’m not suggesting you excavate your childhood or rewrite your life story. That’s not what this is about.

This is about noticing.

The next time stress spikes, pause long enough to ask:
What story am I telling myself right now?
How old might that story be?
What happens if I treat this moment as an experiment instead of a test?

Stress doesn’t always disappear when you change the story. But it often softens. Space opens. Choice returns.

Stillness doesn’t silence the stories we tell ourselves.

It lets us hear them clearly enough to decide which ones still deserve to run our lives.

And that, quietly, changes everything.