Changing the narrative of your life – how to start becoming the writer of your own story

ZILLO Young Reporter Jack Bojtler, takes us on a deep dive on how you can change the narrative of your life.

Many of us may have a familiarity with the concept of ‘choose your own adventure’ style stories, often found within literature or videogames. The decisions that you make within these, whether seemingly unimportant or crucial, completely alter the trajectory of the storyline. In essence, the same is true for our own lives.

Despite this, there are a seemingly never-ending array of barriers and preventative factors to feeling a sense of personal agency and control over our own lives within the modern world, almost as though our lifestyle is in control over us. I’m sure you can relate to the reoccurrence of saying to yourself ‘just 5 minutes of social media’ before falling into a perpetual cycle of mindless scrolling for far, far longer. Perhaps, you feel completely confined and restricted by the monotonous nature of your school/work life, wishing for a sense of freedom and flexibility of schedule. This restrictive characterisation of our lives, in conjunction with the exponential acceleration of technological developments that our brains cannot adequately accommodate for, have left us in a rather peculiar and contradictory existence. It feels as though we have everything we could need on a material level, yet still we crave more. We have never had the ease of connection and creation of new friendships that we have due to online connectivity, while we feel more isolated and disconnected than ever before. We have an almost absurdly high abundance of opportunities available to us, and still all of the days seem to bleed into one another in a monotonous and repetitive fashion… so what is the course of action?

In this article, I’ll provide a collective array of suggestions to act as an antidote for these aforementioned paradoxes, all holistically combining to take back a sense of control, authority and autonomy of our own lives. Essentially, as though we are choosing our own adventures.

Breaking free from the shackles of inaction and comfort

Oftentimes, we feel a sense of safety and security in taking the pathway of least resistance within our lives; there lies a certain comfort in what is already explored and known. We may have internal desires and aspirations for ourselves, or perhaps an envisioned way of leading our lives, but the difficulty comes in the externalisation of these from our minds into our reality. As we begin to transition to such a manner of lifestyle, we are bound to be met with resistance, particularly regarding uncertainty towards ourselves and our own actions. Upon being met by such feelings, it is all to easy for us to recede back to what is comfortable, what is familiar and what is known. Although this certainly requires reduced expending of mental energy, it is fundamentally inhibitory towards personal growth and development, depriving ourselves of beneficial experiences that can contribute to learning vital life lessons and striving towards self-actualisation.

This regression into usual procrastinatory, damaging or restrictive daily routines has a plethora of psychological explanations. When we use certain neural pathways within the brain, they are reinforced through increased myelination of neuronal cells, making the behaviour more habitual, harder to break and more likely to be repeated in the future. Contrastingly, neural pathways that are not used within the brain deteriorate through a process called synaptic pruning. This process is influenced by neural activity, as neurons that are frequently activated and involved in transmitting signals tend to maintain their connections, while those that are less active or unused may be eliminated.

Furthermore, allowing ourselves to become creatures of comfort has negative consequences for our cognition, regarding neurotransmitters and brain structure. Oftentimes, we may resort to vices that offer us a source of pleasure as an attempt to reduce the experience of negative emotion. These can come in many forms, such as coping mechanisms of psychoactive substances or social media, and while they may provide a short term source of pleasure and satisfaction, they are undoubtedly destructive to our minds. When we engage in such activities, we cause an excessively high influx of the neurotransmitter dopamine (responsible for feelings of pleasure and reward) within our brain, causing this aforementioned feeling of temporarily increased mood. Despite this, our minds operate through homeostatic processes, just as our bodies do, in order to create equilibrium of internal conditions (e.g. sweating when your core body temperature becomes too high, or reduced circulation to bodily extremities as a means of keeping circulation to our internal organs when our core body temperature reduces). Consequentially, our brain therefore reduces its sensitivity to dopamine after unnaturally high levels of the neurotransmitter are released, thus leading to a reduction in our dopamine baselines and leading to a reduced state of mood, motivation and positive emotionality in our typical cognitive state. In addition to this, the anterior midsingulate cortex (the area of our brain responsible for willpower) experiences growth when we actively engage in situations or practices that are regarded as being mentally strenuous or prompting discomfort, while it decreases in size as a consequence of comfort and a lack of challenging experience.

Henceforth, it is inherently evident that a lifestyle dominated entirely by comfort and inaction ultimately leads to a plethora of cognitive deficits; it traps us in a dopaminergic, vicious cycle that perpetuates without personal recognition and intervention. If our lives are a choose your own story adventure, comfort is the fundamental enemy to free will within it, leading the story for us and causing no differentiation in the traversal of alternative life pathways. Redevelop a sense of action by an intentional pursuit of what promotes internal resistance and discomfort, and you may find a tremendous array of new and unexplored options that comfort may have blinded you to. In the words of Marcus Aurelius, “Imagine yourself dead. Now, take what is left of your life and live it properly”. This is how we triumph over comfort.

Fostering new outcomes and possibilities by leading with trust in a society that fosters distrust

Our interpersonal relationships are an essential source of fostering new pathways and possibilities within our lives, being of absolute necessity due to our nature as social organisms. In relation to this, a key deterministic factor towards the creation and development of sustaining and fulfilling relationships is an aspect of personality regarded as agreeableness, with one if its sub-facets being interpersonal trust. When we lead with distrust in our interactions and interpersonal relationships, we impose restrictions upon ourselves, reducing the probability of new experience and subsequent opportunities for learning and growth. A key supporting study to this is “Personality and Relationship Satisfaction: A Meta-analysis” by Mallouf et al. (2005), with one of its findings being a positive association with agreeableness and relationship satisfaction, thus supporting the idea of the importance of trust in creating fulfilling relationships. In depriving ourselves with intentional or unintentional excessive distrust towards others, we drastically reduce personal agency in the forging of new pathways in our lives, as our interpersonal connections are vital catalyst to increasing our openness to new experience. This is thematically paralleled by British philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russel’s “secret of happiness”, arguing that you should “let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile”.

There are many explanations to why we may become distrusting and foster personality traits encompassed by disagreeableness, one of which is environmental influences. As a consequence of the sociological nature of modern day life, particularly social media and informational exposure, both our governmental and interpersonal trust has drastically declined, approximately since the 1960s. With the hyper-connectivity we now have within our lives, there have been huge consequential deficits in our interpersonal relationships, which have resulted in collective distrust as a by-product. As we have eliminated the discomfort and friction that are a core element to the development of long-term connections, we have thus sacrificed quality of relationships for quantity, while experiencing intense loneliness at times, due to an almost complete awareness of the social lives of others, presented in a glamorised fashion. These factors amalgamate to instil within us feelings of inferiority on a social, material and appearance level basis, in which we are likely to attempt to compensate through reliance on our own social media posts for a high level of external validation from others. This is especially dangerous as it bases our value and worth on other’s opinions of others and furthermore makes us more dependent on social media and technology as a whole. Oftentimes, when this is abused, it can result in almost narcissistic traits beginning to arise, unless we combat this with self-regulation and reflection. Furthermore, social media and the internet as a whole has a propensity to cause us to divert our attention away from what is most important within our lives, rewarding behaviour such as scapegoating, complaining of factors external to our control and more, which results in us fostering a negative view of the world and others. Thus, our social fabric has become more polarised and less cohesive with the passage of time, arguably due to a decreased sense of community and social harmony, as we are more likely than ever before to regard ourselves, our viewpoints, morals, values and knowledge as intrinsically more correct and superior to those of others.

With the rise of such discord, a large amount of empirical evidence has come to light to support the notion of social media being a destructive force to the social fabric of our lives, as well as our overall wellbeing. A plethora of recent research has found a positive correlation between social media use and poor mental health; this includes anxiety, depression, loneliness and narcissism. Arguably, this is interlinked with an entrapment in the same repeated pathways of social media use, becoming closed off and isolated from the opportunities and experiences we could have in our lives by becoming consumed by the digital world, ultimately to our own detriment, fostering personality traits of increased disagreeableness and neuroticism. In order to transcend above this, maintaining our emotional regulation, agreeableness and openness to experience, there are a number of measures that we can take. For one, we can substitute narrow-mindedness and dismissal of other’s perspectives and opinions with an attitude of compassion in the form of curiosity. By engaging in curiosity as opposed to confrontation, we can enable interpersonal interaction that benefits both parties by the fostering of new information and perspectives. Rather than attempting to assert the perceived certainty of our beliefs, we can instead ask them as to why they believe what they do. This is arguably what true compassion looks like in the modern age; overpowering the tendency to desire to view those with opposing views to our own as enemies or opponents, instead as unique and multifaceted individuals who we have the opportunity to learn from, as they can from ourselves.

Embracing failure as an opportunity for learning and positive decision-making

We, as humans, are by design inherently flawed and will always inevitably be met with a continuous array of problems, adversity and failure across the span of our lives. In spite of this fact, these seemingly negative features of the human experience are in themselves positive, dependent though on our perspective upon them and subsequent changes in our life approach. Using the analogy of choose your own story adventures for our own lives, failures are in fact a positive indication of personal growth and development, indicating that there is an increased rate of discovery of life pathways, as opposed to staying regimented in the same continuous path, indicated by a lack of divergent outcomes and results. Upon increasing the frequency of unique outcomes through the differentiation of our choices, we can begin to cultivate a greater degree of awareness regarding the trajectories that our lives can take based upon our behavioural patterns. As this holistic comprehension of the possibilities of our life direction continually grows in clarity, we can thus begin to discard of negative behaviours that result in undesirable outcomes, replacing them instead with those that have resulted in an increased probability of beneficial outcomes.

Regardless, such positive trajectories can come with great difficulty in their maintenance. There are a plethora of explanations as to why this can be the case, but it can often occur through the cyclical interaction of our root beliefs with the cycle of complacency. As our level of success increases as a consequence of effort or positive change within ourselves, it is of an extremely high likelihood that our confidence may increase to such an extent that it is no longer congruent with our abilities and achievement, thus resulting in an unconscientious confidence that results in rather sudden and drastic failure. And so, the vicious cycle of complacency perpetuates, unless we are able to learn from such a failure with adequate adjustment as a means of prevention from its perpetuation. Essentially, the solution to this is a certain level of uncertainty and doubt in ourselves, as well as a level of confidence that is congruent with our abilities. In doing this, we ensure that we maintain positive root beliefs that allow the maintenance of personal growth, such as intellectual and moral humility, growth mindset, gratitude etc. (learn more about root beliefs here)  As said within the bible in proverbs 12:15 “The way of fools seems right to them, but the wise listen to advice” thereby highlighting the importance of such humility and open-mindedness to the beliefs and suggestions of others, particularly as an antidote to the cycle of complacency and the cultivation of a positive learning attitude towards failure.

Conclusion

Although it is arguably highly reductionist to compare our inconceivably existence to the framework of decision-based novels and games, the choices we make within our lives are an undeniably vital aspect to our relationship quality, wellbeing, achievement and so much more. Although our personal agency and associated freedom can certainly feel infringed upon due to the confinement of modern life, we can begin to reclaim it through limiting the influence of technology and social media over our personal autonomy, a reconnection with our human nature in leading with trust towards others, in addition to embracing our flawed predetermined design that results in failure not as a barrier, but instead a catalyst and indicator of growth and learning. The modern world is undeniably daunting, but the more we fall and raise ourselves up within it, the less it feels so, and the more equipped we perceive ourselves to be in its navigation. We can almost compare ourselves to muscle fibres in this manner, which, when destroyed, return back with an increased degree strength. In essence, failure in any regard is ultimately how we grow in the long term, and thus, in embracing it, we allow ourselves to truly experience reality to the highest degree, and consequentially, our own lives.