Fact vs. Fiction

Imagine you’re texting with your spouse, partner, or a good friend. You’re in the middle of a pretty intense discussion, and you know that person got your last message because you saw the three dots...

But an hour has gone by with no response. What are you thinking? “____ is really mad.” “____ doesn’t understand what I’m saying.” “____ doesn’t care about me.”

So now you’re playing this reel in your mind and your emotions respond accordingly. A brain hijacked by emotions has a hard time focusing on anything else. 

When you do hear back, you learn the actual details: Your spouse got called into a meeting unexpectedly with his or her boss and couldn’t respond; your friend’s toddler fell off the swing at the playground and needed her full attention; your partner stopped at the grocery store on the way home to surprise you with dinner and left the phone in the car.  

Our brains are wired to make sense of things. But the stories we make up as a result often make it worse. They’re one-sided, and they usually magnify our anxieties and fears with worst-case scenario plots.  

Who among us hasn’t felt that jolt of fear when a plane hits a patch of turbulence? Our mind immediately reacts as though the plane is falling out of the sky, which, by the way, it almost never does. Does that story make the fear worse? Consider what might happen if you instead just noted, “Oh, that’s turbulence. It’s bumpy.”

With the regular practice of mindfulness, we become better at distinguishing between fact and fiction, and we learn to note what is actually happening without immediately judging it as good or bad or attributing certain outcomes to it.

FOR REFLECTION: Think of a recent conflict with someone important to you, at work or at home. What story did you tell yourself and how did it affect the conflict? How would you have responded if you had paused and considered how your story might not be true?