It’s Healthy to Put a Good Spin on Your Life

It’s Healthy to Put a Good Spin on Your Life

How we construct personal narratives has a major impact on our mental well-being

By Elizabeth Bernstein in the Wall Street Journal

Bill Baker spent a weekend last May running 22 miles and biking 52 while training for a triathlon—his 107th. Hours later he was in the hospital with a heart attack. Doctors told him not to drive for six months, much less do any endurance training.

His first reaction was despair and to tell his wife and friends that one of the most important aspects of his life had been ripped away.

Conversations with a relative and a world-champion triathlete who had both had heart surgeries helped. Mr. Baker recast his story. The New Milford, Conn., 50-year-old began focusing more on unexpected positives: the ability to jog without worrying about his pace and free time with family.

We all create narratives to process information and make sense of events, whether as explicitly as Mr. Baker or in subtler ways. The way we construct these stories has a large impact on our mental health, new research shows.

The issue is much more complex than just “look on the bright side of life.” There are concrete, methodical approaches to changing how we think—and also wrong ways to do it.

Two studies, published together in March in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, showed that people who frame events in their lives—even negative ones—in positive ways have better mental health, and those who frame events in negative ways have poorer mental well-being.

In the first study, led by a psychologist at the Olin College of Engineering, in Needham, Mass., researchers asked 89 adults in their mid-to-late 50s to tell their life stories, which were recorded and transcribed. The researchers chose this age group because it is a period in life when people often start to physically decline.

They assessed each person’s physical and mental health in the beginning of the study and followed the participants for four years, evaluating their health again annually.

The researchers then counted how often four major themes appeared in people’s stories:

• Agency—Did the subjects feel able to influence and respond to events in life, or did they feel battered around by the whims of external forces?

• Communion—Are the people connected to others or disconnected?

• Redemption—Did the subjects take a negative experience and find some positive outcome?

• Contamination—Did they tell narratives of good things turning bad?

The researchers found that when people displayed higher levels of agency, communion and redemption and lower levels of contamination, their mental health improved. They consider good mental health to be low levels of depression and high levels of life satisfaction and psychological and social well-being.

Personal Accounting

Steps to reframe your narrative:

• Understand why you tell the story you’ve created. (Do you feel like the guy who always gets dumped? Perhaps you’ve constructed this narrative to cope.)
• Take small steps.
• Note that your narrative is a part of who you are, not the total.
• Note that narratives are usually formed from previous experience, which can be viewed in more than one way.
• Understand what you will lose and gain by changing your narrative.
• Look for the element that isn’t true in your narrative. This can lead you into thinking of ways to change it.
• Reframe how the situation could be viewed.
• Be on the alert for the old version popping into your head.

Source: Warren Kennaugh, behavioral strategist

In the second study, the same researchers followed 54 people, half of whom went on to receive a diagnosis of a major illness, such as cancer, heart disease or diabetes, in the six months after they recorded their life stories. The researchers measured their mental health every six months for two years and looked for the same four themes in the narratives as in study one.

And they found similar results: People whose personal narratives—the stories they told themselves—contained more agency, communion and redemption, and less contamination, saw their mental health improve, even after getting a serious illness.

“You can’t impact every event of your life,” says Jonathan Adler, lead researcher on the study and an assistant professor of psychology at Olin. “But you have a choice in how the narrative plays out. You tell the story and the story really matters.”

Personal narratives “keep us sane,” says Warren Kennaugh, a leading behavioral strategist based in Sydney, who works with clients on changing their narrative. “While we may not like them at times, they enable us to make sense of others and the roles we play.”

When reframing negative events, acceptance is crucial, says Hal Shorey, a psychologist and assistant professor for the Institute for Graduate Clinical Psychology at Widener University in Chester, Pa., who helps clients with this issue.

“If negative events and their impacts are not first acknowledged, the experience of invalidation can actually lead people to hold on to the negative narrative,” he says. But there eventually comes a point when it’s healthier to just move on, he says.

Dr. Shorey recommends looking at how the situation could have been worse. And be aware that you probably had less control over the situation than you think.

Remember that many negative events lead to changes that push people in a positive direction. Losing that relationship might force you to finally change bad habits, such as drinking too much.

“It’s what you tell yourself that the negative event means about you and your future,” Dr. Shorey says.

In the 10-plus months since his heart attack, Mr. Baker, the owner of a public-relations firm, has worked to understand what happened to him and to feel he has some control over the future.

Shortly after he got out of the hospital, he reached out to Greg Welch, a former triathlon world champion who also has also suffered from heart problems. Mr. Welch told him: “There is more to life than triathlon,” and said he could call back anytime.

Mr. Baker then decided there was nothing he could do to change what had happened. “Being negative would have accomplished exactly nothing, other than making my wife miserable, as well,” he says.

He took action by continuing to swim, bike and run for recreational purposes. Exercise has now become even more important to him than it was before. But he’s let go of the obsession with times and pace.

Mr. Baker says he recognizes the importance of other people. He cherishes the extra time he can spend with his wife. She drove him everywhere when he couldn’t drive for six months. Now that he doesn’t block off March through September to train and compete, the couple can take summer vacations. He also continued to work out with his running group, even if he wasn’t training for a race.

Mr. Baker says little things bother him less: drivers who cut him off in traffic, the person in front of him at the coffee shop who is ordering for the whole office, why Kim Kardashian is famous.

And he started violin lessons last weekend. “I can no longer pursue triathlon in the way I used to,” he says. “But I am pretty upbeat about how the closing of the triathlon door opens up a whole bunch of new ones.”