How your brain builds and edits your identity

Knowing that our perception is an illusion, our sense of self is illusion

all of it is an illusion in the sense that it's a construct of our brain

Our brain is creating this for us. And given that, that's an opportunity because we can have some control

over how our brain perceives the world. And that's where the power lies

Our perceptions are basically formed from a combination of what we expect, so that's coming internally from our past experiences, and then what's coming into our brain externally

And when those two things meet, it creates this perception, which is what we actually experience

Your inner voice is your ability to silently use language to reflect on your life

It provides us with a survival advantage. It's an incredible problem-solving device

I realize that we have this ability to change our trajectory and change our thoughts

And we can expand the box that we're in. We can expand our perception of who we are in the world

Our minds are shaped by our prior experience. So as these neurons start forming connections and as you go through life and have experiences, it's a pruning process

So it actually strengthening the important connections and allowing the other unimportant connections to kind of wither away And then you start to develop a more defined structure There this constant interplay between things that our brain processes unconsciously that

informs our behavior. So what you're conscious of at any moment can affect what you perceive and what you

remember as well. So if you're in a negative headspace, you're going to start perceiving more negative things

in your environment. If you're in a positive headspace, you're going to perceive more positive things, even though the environment may be exactly the same

So being mindful is your brain controlling what you're attending to and also controlling what you're taking in and how you're reacting to the world

the more you can understand. And also knowing that you live within a certain kind of perceptual box

can create potentially the impetus for you to develop or try to work on developing more empathy for others

who are living inside their own perception boxes. We're all a work in progress until our very last breath

And there's always room for change. Nothing is set in stone. Many of us turn our attention inward to come up with some narrative that explains our experiences

in ways that give shape to our understanding of who we are, our identity

Our inner voice is part of what we call our verbal working memory system

Our inner voice also lets us simulate and plan, control ourselves. And then finally the inner voice helps us storify our lives Chatter refers to the dark side of the inner voice When we turn our attention inward to make sense of our problems we don end up finding solutions

We end up ruminating, worrying, catastrophizing. We get stuck in a negative cycle that takes this remarkable tool

that we possess, this inner voice, and it turns it into a curse rather than a blessing

The good news is there is a science-based toolkit that you can use to regain control of your inner voice

Rituals are one way to do that. By engaging in the same sequence of behaviors every time the same way

that's giving you a sense of order and control that can feel really good when you're mired in chatter

The real challenge is to figure out what are the unique combinations of tools that work best for you

given the unique kinds of chatter that you're experiencing. So the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves

have been shaped by our environment, our upbringing. We have something called observational knowledge

and that means that we learn about how the world is by observing those around us in our formative years

But observational knowledge has a flip side. Sometimes we observe our peers or parents being highly critical of themselves and so we learn to do that as well

Or perhaps your parents will exacerbate a particular narrative and then that boxes us into this kind of fixed mindset in our adult life where we don want to step outside the realms of what been defined for us So as humans we do have a negativity bias So we perceive negative

information more greatly than positive. And the negativity bias can really highlight those things

that we say to ourselves, those negative stories. If left unchecked, it will basically form a

template to how you see the world. So you will carry that into every aspect of your life and

your brain will perceive that as normal. Whilst our thoughts are extremely powerful, we can use

that to our advantage to really pull out the positive narratives that we want for ourselves

By pulling out the small wins, it will start to shine a light on a different outcome, not the one

that you have usually perpetuated. And it's not until you bring conscious attention to it

that you can start to make a change because the brain is just doing what it knows best

It's going to optimize energy for other things and just repeat what has been ingrained

So when we break those automatic patterns, we take control of that steering wheel

and we start to say, hey, this is how things have usually been

This is the box that I put myself in, that parents put me in, but I want to change that

And we start to essentially rewire and reshape our perception box and how we see ourselves and how we think other people interpret us as well