16. The Stories We Tell Ourselves
July 4, 2025
When I was in my 30s and early 40s, I thought I was a terrible sleeper. I knew that 7-8 hours of sleep a night was the goal. But I would wake up multiple times at night, and once I woke up, my mind would start racing. I worried about how tired I would be the next day, I thought about how it would affect me at work, with the kids, with my workout plans. I felt like I was up for hours. Then, sure enough, I was tired the next day. I chalked it up to a stressful life and assumed I could not do anything about it.
At some time in my late 40s, I started wearing a Fitbit, and it tracked my sleep. It showed the different cycles of sleep, and how you move through them during the night. I started doing some research and learned that 90-minute cycles ARE COMPLETELY NORMAL when sleeping. And that waking up in between them does not mean that you have ruined your chance for eight hours of sleep; you simply need to not worry about it, turn over and go back to sleep. So I did. And I still do. And I am getting great sleep, according to my Fitbit. What happened? Nothing physically changed. I only changed the story in my head about what was happening, and because of that change, I stopped worrying. My mental shift, led to an emotional shift, which literally changed my physical experience of being tired.
I have heard a lot from Dr. Deepak Chopra and others about our “conditioned mind” and how we create and amplify our suffering through thinking, ruminating, re-living, regretting, worrying. This experience with sleep is one of those examples. My mind had been “conditioned” to “know” what it meant to have good night’s sleep, and until I unlearned that fact, that is, until I replaced it with a new “knowing,” I suffered due to it. The “conditioned mind” involves what can be referred to as “ruts.” I picture ruts from the days of horse-drawn wagons; when wagons would be pulled over ground over and over in the same place, it would make a physical rut. They were fixed and deep and easy to fall into. In an internet search, I found another framing of the word “RUT,” namely, Repetitive Unpleasant Thoughts. These RUTS may be beliefs like “I look terrible” or “I am not a good sleeper.” These RUTS are features of our conditioned mind.
We have RUTS in our thinking about aging. Recently, I overheard an older person talking with their nurse after a fall. They were embarrassed that they had fallen and were not able to get up on their own. “I hate getting old,” they said. The nurse replied, “Well it happens to all of us.” In my experience, this type of talk is very common among people as they age. But I am calling it out as conditioned thinking. A RUT. What if, instead of saying, “I hate getting old,” we would say “I don’t like being weak,” or even better, “I am going to get stronger.” Weakness is what led to the fall, after all, and to not being able to get up. Being weak and being old do not have to go together, but they are often together in the RUT in our thinking. There are many weak people who are not old, and many (a growing number of) older people who are not weak. By using these words interchangeably, we create a RUT in our thinking that is difficult to come out of. But we can shift our perspective. And we must, if we want to be valuable elders in our society.
Practice this week – listen for people in your daily life, in ads, in movies and television shows, putting the idea “getting older” with a negative perception. Think about how you could say it differently. Give yourself an option for thinking of it differently. “What we think is what we become” is a quote often attributed to Buddha. And once you think about it differently, it also gives you options for acting differently. First step – be aware of the conditioned mind. Choose to lay down thinking patterns that are not negative, but take you in the direction you want to go. Then, follow that direction, and do not let your conditioned mind stop your effort.
