We underestimate the power of stories. We think stories are things that we can tune into and leave whenever we want, like they only exist in movies, games, or books, but in reality our lives are stories. Literally. Psychologists have found that we actually understand ourselves and our place in the world by constantly writing what narrative psychologists call our life stories. Every day we string every event in our lives and every decision we make like sentences in the stories we write about ourselves. In short, stories are how we make sense of our lives. To say we write our lives as ongoing stories in our heads might sound like we're just making things up. And although if we were to look closely at our daily annoyances and problems, we would find that most of them are entirely in our heads and are based on unquestioned biases. But it doesn't mean our problems and our life stories aren't real. They are very real and so are our feelings. But the power of this realization is the discovery that we are the authors of our life. We get to look at our past and future and decide what kind of story we're in. Following this logic, it shouldn't be surprising that how we write our stories determines how we feel about our lives overall and even determines a large part of our sense of well-being. Two people can undergo very similar traumas like losing a job or a loved one, but the one that writes their life story as a redemption story. A narrative psychology concept I discussed in my Gris Review will focus on how to use these traumatic events to make themselves stronger. Studies show that if you write your life story where you're the victim to negative events that you can't escape or use for growth, what they call a contamination story, your sense of well-being suffers greatly and you become more prone to anxiety and depression. Writing a redemption story, learning to grow and change to accommodate negative events in your life until you find closure, leads to significant gains in mental health and well-being. This isn't simply about thinking positive thoughts. Research shows that simply ignoring negative feelings and only focusing on positive ones isn't enough. It does help our short-term, hedonic well-being as in it boosts our mood in the moment, but the key to long-term, eudaemonic well-being is to take ownership of the negative events in our lives and incorporate them into a larger narrative of challenge, growth, transformation, identity building, and newfound peace. This truth is actually something we've tuned into since the beginning of storytelling. The traditional hero's journey cycle refined and popularized by Joseph Campbell illustrates the course of story writing since the oldest story known to humanity. The themes from Gilgamesh to Luke Skywalker are very similar. It's a journey of a protagonist dealing with difficult life events and going through change, challenge, and danger. Before they grow stronger and more worldly, returning home a new, elevated, but calmer figure, until the cycle starts again. This hero's journey is not only a literary device, but something of an ancient roadmap telling us how to deal with challenging events in our life stories. In some modern stories, we often see that villains or antagonists are often people who have undergone trauma very similar to that of the hero character, but they've written stories void of emotional growth, focusing instead on accumulating power in an attempt to control the threat of pain, often leading to their corrupted behavior and subsequent demise. However, the heroes use their pain as a tool to inspire self-growth, kindness, and courage. The heroes didn't ignore their fear or pain. They incorporated it into their story of redemption to make themselves stronger and more compassionate. This is one reason why stories are so important and why we love them. We can learn how to write our own stories like a hero or a heroine, how to focus on growth, love, community, and resilience in order to defeat other harmful narratives. The power of stories isn't just about fictional people, of course. The most outstanding and inspirational story to me would be Victor Frankl's author of Man's Search for Meaning. He wrote about his psychological realizations while imprisoned in a concentration camp during World War II. In a situation we would expect a person to crumble into despair, rage, or hopelessness, Frankl wrote a different story for himself. He taught himself to use his painful experiences to learn more about himself and others and came to strikingly beautiful, hopeful, and inspiring conclusions. He created his own meaning in every moment of life and this meaning kept him alive. If Frankl could write a redemptive story and find beauty, meaning, and well-being while undergoing such immense pain, then the same is possible for any of us. Knowing all of this can help us determine in what ways we've written ourselves as victims or heroes in different parts of our lives. This process is very closely related to the principles of cognitive behavioral therapy, which I always recommend everyone learn the basics of. It's very difficult to change our life story writing styles and to learn how to give ourselves a better story. Instead of rewriting our whole lives, we might even have to just start changing the genre from now on. A great place to start right now is to consider your current life goals. Studies have shown that while life goals about money, property, status, and career might be helpful for immediate adonig well-being, the people who showed consistent, eudaemonic well-being far into the future with those whose main goals focused on intrinsic growth that weren't related to how people thought of them but focused on understanding the self-better and giving back to others too. These goals would be things like wanting to grow by learning more about how to tend to close relationships, wanting to overcome personal fears, wanting to get to know yourself better so that you can find a job you'll love that will also contribute to society. Studies show that how we write our stories is greatly affected by the stories we watch or play. Our whole lives we've loved our favorite movies and games because we were learning from them how to write our own stories. If we become more mindful of the stories we take into our world views and which stories and characters stick out to us, we can learn more about ourselves and how we've been writing our life stories. We can learn to be more patient, compassionate, curious, and hopeful authors. Now that we all know this, we can begin identifying what we can learn from our favorite protagonists and how to interpret our struggles and new healthier ways that will fortify our ability to not only withstand past, current, and future setbacks but to use them to make ourselves stronger, kinder, and happier. Thank you so much for watching. If you're interested in more videos about mental health, well-being, and media, please go ahead and subscribe. If you have any suggestions for future videos, please let me know in the comments below. And as always, happy playing.