podcast

Hi everybody. Welcome to the podcast today. Did you know that storytelling is an awesome anxiety management strategy? This is something I had no idea about. I stumbled into it kind of without really meaning to because of a friend of mine who was a really good storyteller, and I'm gonna let you hear her tell our story about how we started telling stories to each other almost every day.
Your husband invited us to come down to Brazil with our daughter so we decided to bring her down for a week or 10 days to visit you guys in Brazil. And when the time was over, it was sad to, to leave and not be able to talk to you anymore. So I went back home. We started sending each other audio messages. You were three or four hours ahead of me in time. So I would wake up in the morning and I would have a message from you, and then I would go for a walk and send you mine. You would walk on the beach and send me yours and I would walk around the neighborhood and send you mine. We kind of fell into the habit of sending each other a high low buffalo. That's what we called it, , and it was just summarizing your day and giving the high of the day, the low of the day, and the buffalo, which is just something kind of un unexpected. Something, it could be something good, could be something bad, just something kind of different. So we started, we started doing that in our audio messages and it was just such, such a good way to tell the story of the day. And so we did it almost every day, and sometimes they were longer and sometimes they were shorter. But I just looked forward to yours so much and I enjoyed sending you mine. Something about telling, telling stories of what happened to you helped me see it more from the outside, you know, instead of it just happening inside my head all the time, I could start to see it more objectively, maybe. , I started to feel like this is just today's story. It's gonna be different tomorrow. It's gonna be something different tomorrow. That this is not going to last forever. This is just, this is just about today. It's a really good way of feeling more peaceful and accepting what the day had brought without getting too upset about it or feeling like this this was gonna last forever. And I really, I enjoy telling stories. I'm not really a writer, but I I've always liked telling stories and , trying to explain what happened to, to me in my day, and, and have it be understood and have it mean something it helps it mean something to me too. It's really beautiful. It really is.
Susie is a really good storyteller. I'm not such a great storyteller, and at first it was really hard for me to make stories out of just a really normal day. I'm not that good at making stories up out of normal everyday life. In fact, a lot of times when my parents would call me, you know, they'd ask me what had been going on, how things were going in with the family and everything, and I, and I just couldn't really think of anything to say. It just all seemed really normal. It was just routine and so I didn't really know how to tell stories about my life. Thanks to Susie, I had to start to try and practice this. There's no other way to talk about what's happened in our lives except through telling a story about it. Because if you think about it, there are so many aspects to every experience and every circumstance and every event that whenever we talk about it, we are inevitably choosing certain parts of it that we will select and that we will bring forth, and we're ignoring other parts of it, and, and we are, in doing that, in choosing which parts of it we're going to talk about and the ones that we won't talk about, we are giving a meaning to the events, a certain meaning to the events, and so we end up making sense of what happened through telling a story about it through choosing what parts of it we are going to remember and what parts we are not going to remember.
So I found it was interesting when I was reading about this that researchers talk about how the early memories that we can recall can be considered to be an indication of our present understanding of ourselves, because we actually choose in our present lives to remember particular events in the past in a certain way. And story is this narrative thread of our entire experience, not literally what happens to us, but what we make of what happens and what we tell each other, what we remember, the meaning that we give to what happens.
But as I started to practice doing this high low buffalo storytelling event every day in my messages to Susie, it got a little bit easier for me to make stories out of just regular humdrum everyday events.
But I also started to notice that it gave me some uh, pretty noticeable benefits. And first of all, when I was talking about the highs or the best things that happened to me in my days, it made me able to savor those and relive those and enjoy them even more. And that kind of boosted my sense of the good things that were happening in my life. And this is something that has been shown in research to people that have studied groups of people with post-traumatic stress or mild depression or just, you know, daily stress, that if they can engage in this type of activity where they, they narrate and recall specific positive experiences and, elaborate on the details of them, reflect on them, actively think about them, that this boosts their sense of wellbeing and it helps alleviate feelings of stress and anxiety. And I, I found that with me as well. I found that it helped me to magnify the effect of the best parts of my day and helped me to feel that my life really did contain some really great everyday things.
Now talking about the lows, the stories that I told about my lows every day, this was really important because a lot of times the difficult things that happen in my day to day feel overwhelming and feel chaotic, and I don't really know how to make sense of them. In fact, a lot of times when I would leave the house to go out on my walk, Susie described that we end up sending our messages to each other on our walks. And because I'm in an earlier time zone, I go out on my walk and I send, uh, my message to her first. So anyway, when I would go out to the beach to go on my walk, a lot of times I would feel really kind of overwhelmed and oppressed and uneasy with this anxiety that I'd been dealing with from the difficult things that had happened to me the day before that I hadn't really made sense of, but as I went through the exercise of telling the story to Susie of my low, that that would help to process and select things from that experience that made it meaningful for me, that helped me to understand it in some way, helped me to process it. And a lot of times if I didn't feel like I had quite processed it when I had told her the story, I would, after I had sent her the message, I would go back and I would listen to the message that I had sent, and that would help me additionally to just make that additional processing, that meaning making out of the difficult experience that I was having. And giving a meaning, telling a story of the hard and difficult and rotten things that happened in the day all of a sudden helped them to not feel overwhelming, helped me to see them from a little bit of a distance, and helped me to not feel so consumed by anxiety about them.
And Susie is, um a really sympathetic listener. A lot of times she would listen to my stories and just validate the the lows. She would just validate and say, I can really understand why you're feeling this way, and I can think of this and this time in my life when I felt something similar. And sometimes just the validation in and of itself that she would give to me would help me to process it even further because it would help me to give that meaning to my experience like, oh, I'm not the only one who's ever gone through this. Oh, this is normal. Oh, this was, this is passing, 'cause she went through it before and, and now she doesn't feel that, she feels better now. And so it, it would help me to give that meaning. But in addition susie would often be able to off offer an outside perspective, right? Because she's not the one going through the thing. And so she could give me that removed perspective that sometimes I wasn't able to have on my own. And that her perspective a lot of times helped me to shift the theme of my story. So sometimes my stories, my low stories ended up being, um um, chaotic stories where, you know, there's not really a, a uniting thread through all of it, and there was a lot of dwelling on the hard parts. Um, or they would end up being a, what, what, um, researchers call a contamination story where things were good and now they're bad. Right? Where things are just going downhill, everything's going down the drain. But Susie, with her outside perspective was a lot of times able to help me to convert those stories into what you might call a, a redemption story, where you can see something good coming out of the bad. Something that I was learning, some way that I was growing, some way that I had done really well in dealing with this difficult thing. Something that I wasn't appreciating in myself, you know, that I was, a way that I was dealing with it. Or simply expressing the certainty that I would figure this out and that I would be able to make, make my way forward.
Anyway, research talks about how we should try and focus on, if we want to have storytelling be something that helps us with our anxiety, if we can make our stories into redemption stories rather than contamination stories, or in other words, where we're getting something good out of the bad rather than things going from good to bad, right? So things going from bad to good rather than good to bad, right? That this really helps with anxiety, and this is something that Susie's just been really good at helping me to do, either through validating or through validating and offering an outside perspective where I can start to see something some positive that is coming to me through this difficult situation.
And talking about my buffaloes helps me to laugh at the weird things that happened in my life. So as, as Susie explained there, you tell about your high, you tell about your low, you tell about your buffalo, and your buffalo is just something unexpected or funny or, or weird or random that happened in the day, right? So anyway, with telling these stories over and over again every day and having to practice this, um, it would help me overall to see that every day was gonna have high, low and buffalo, right? That life is just full of these varied emotions and that sometimes they're funny, sometimes they're sad, but all of it is like clouds just passing through the sky. And we talked about this briefly in the episode where we talked about mindfulness, right? About adopting this perspective that you're the sky and that your emotions are the clouds that pass through you. Well, telling stories every day really helps me to feel that sense that I am the sky because I am the storyteller, right? And I tell all of these stories that happened to me, all these experiences and emotions that happen to me are stories. They're like the clouds, and they pass through this sky and they pass through, and then a new day comes and there's a new story, right?
There's a, a book by Emily Esfahani Smith, where she talks about how happiness is fleeting, but meaning is what creates an enduring sense of wellbeing. And I can link her book in the show notes. But anyway, she talks about four different pillars of being able to create a meaningful life. And there's belonging, there's purpose, there's transcendence. But the fourth pillar she talks about is storytelling. That storytelling gives meaning to our experiences. I'll go through something whether it's good or whether it's difficult, and I'll already be trying to think of how I'm gonna frame this in a story to tell to Susie. I'm already organizing it into a meaning in my brain, right? And you can tell stories, you can tell them by writing them down to yourself in a journal, but it can be helpful to tell them to other people. Then there's that social interaction and a lot of times that other person can help bring a new perspective into it, they can help you to process it further. And then there's just that, you know, appointment with the other person, right? I know I have an appointment, so to speak with Susie, to tell her my stories and that's what gets me to tell them. Whereas if I'm just writing them down every day, I might not, I might skip more days, right?
Anyway, this exercise of telling stories every day about even my mundane, seemingly unremarkable experiences, it helps me to convert in real time my chaotic day-to-day experience into a string of of meaning and purpose in order, and this is a big anxiety buster because when we feel like things are chaotic and outta control and we don't understand them, that's when we feel anxious. But when we can see order and patterns and meaning in what's happening to us, then we feel like we know which way to go. We know what to do with what's happening to us. We know what we want out of our lives. We know how to respond to things that are happening. So find some way that you maybe can get a story buddy, or include storytelling in your life because it's what can help distill meaning out of the chaos of your existence and help you to understand what it means for you, who you are, who you have been, who you will become. And it helps you to see all these different things. It is a really powerful tool. I'd encourage you to try it. We're gonna have our kindness narrative now. This is also a story, another story, somebody else's story. It's not your story, but, but research has shown that even listening to these other stories of other people can help give you these wonderful effects of a gratitude practice in your life where you feel like there's resources in the world that are on your side and that you can handle what you're up against. So take advantage of this moment to hear this kindness narrative that one of our listeners shared with us.
In 1997, my wife and I had our first child in March and in May we went on a, on a big trip in Asia. We went, spent three weeks wandering around Turkey, seeing fascinating things and then we, we left Turkey and went to Russia crossing the Black Sea on a boat headed for the Port City, the resort town of Sochi Russia from where we intended to travel to Moscow, where, where my wife's parents were working at the time.
We had had a really good time in Turkey on a shoestring budget, and when we arrived in Sochi, I, I was unable to get any cash from an electronic bank machine. My debit card did not work, and we had no cash. We couldn't even get from the shipyard on a bus to town. We had to, somebody loaned us some money.
They, they paid for our bus there to get into town. Once we got into town, we weren't really that much better off. Um, while we were trying to wait to think of more things to try, we were just sitting on the street. Somebody came by for the second or third time and noticed we were still there and they, they came and they bought us a, a pizza for our family.
'cause they could tell that we were, we might need some help. I had been taught as a, as a little kid at school that Russia was bad and that Russians were, were equally bad. And this, this experience of actually being there helped me to realize the people who live in Russia are not, not in complete alignment with their government.
And we were the beneficiaries of tremendous kindness while we were there. I think the greatest, the greatest moment was when we had tried to buy an airline ticket to get from Sochi to Moscow, where my in-laws were. And we couldn't buy it. And so we, we talked to my in-laws and they tried to buy it for us on the Moscow end.
And after an extra day of my in-laws calling people and trying to make arrangements in Moscow, they succeeded in buying a ticket for us that the agency assured them would appear on a fax that would be sent to Sochi at the hour of our departure. And so we, with that information, we went to the airport and we, we waited for the plane and when it was time to board, we went and talked to the agent there, and he looked for our names on the list, but couldn't find them.
The fax had not arrived, and he had no indication, uh, that we were supposed to have a ticket there, and so we could not board the plane. He, he just explained that he, he couldn't, that he didn't have the, the authority to authorize me to get on the plane without a ticket, which made sense. So we sat there, very sad, trying to figure out what to do.
The plane was boarded, the gate was closed, and then it delayed. It just stayed there for a while, and then after another 10 minutes or so, this agent came back to us and he came right up close to us and he talked to me and he said. I understand that you have to get to Moscow and I want to help you, but I want you to promise me that when you get to Moscow, you'll make sure that this ticket gets paid for because if it doesn't, I will probably lose my job.
And then he gave us a paper bag full of food and send us out to board the airplane. They reopened the gate, put the ladder, the stairs up, and we climbed up and we got on board the plane. We flew to Moscow and we were very grateful to this man, and I thought about it several times since, and I think that this person did so at at personal risk and I'm really grateful that he did that for us.