The Story We Tell Ourselves | @caroline-cavanagh | The Anxiety Alchemist

17 Jun 2026 · 1 min

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1:02

In this short monologue, Caroline Cavanagh explains that everyone constructs personal narratives about the past, and these stories are heavily influenced by current mood. When feeling down, people tend to recall negative events and adopt a "short‑straw" narrative, which, through repeated telling, becomes their default self‑story and part of their identity. Conversely, positive moments are often omitted, leading to a skewed self‑perception. The talk highlights how these self‑crafted stories shape how we see ourselves and suggests awareness of this process can help reframe our internal narrative.

Chapters

We do all tell ourselves a story, and it's one of those things that came up to me, sort of hit me in the face a bit like a wet fish. History is his story. It is just story, which is why people disagree about what's gone on in the past, because we all reflect on it in different ways. And we will tell ourselves different stories based on your mood. If you're in a particularly bad mood, you'll remember all the times where things go wrong and, oh, woe is me, and— I always get the, you know, the short straw. And that becomes the narrative. And the more you tell the story, the more it becomes the story you tell. It's your default. But there are lots of other versions of those stories as well. There are lots of times when actually you didn't get the short straw. You got the cream on, you know, you got the icing on the cake. But you forget that bit. You cut it out of your story. So the stories we tell ourselves becomes the narrative that also then becomes part of our identity.