Mind Games

The Stories We Tell Ourselves Inside Our Head

I was at a client’s office doing some advisory work when, just outside the office, I heard three employees debating the intent of an email.

They weren’t debating what the email said.

They were debating what the person who sent it really meant.

They were doing what most of us do, building the stories we tell ourselves about what someone else thinks, feels, or intends, from scraps of silence and incomplete information.

Each of them had an interpretation. And none of them were particularly positive. They were reading between the lines, looking for hidden meaning, assuming the worst of the sender’s intentions.

I walked out and said, “Why don’t you pick up the phone and ask them what they meant?”

They did.

And, as it turned out, everything they had imagined was wrong.

The sender hadn’t been trying to insult anyone. There wasn’t some hidden agenda. There was no passive-aggressive message buried between the lines.

It was just an email.

This happens all the time in workplaces, particularly in larger organizations where there is less direct communication.

It may seem trivial, but the amount of time people spend interpreting each other’s words, motives, and intentions doesn’t just hurt the people involved.

It costs companies time and money.

Someone sends an email. Someone else reads it. Then they read it again. Then they forward it to someone else and ask, “What do you think they meant by this?”

A conversation begins about a conversation that never actually happened.

And suddenly three people are spending an hour trying to solve a problem that could have been eliminated with a five-minute phone call.

But this isn’t just a workplace problem.

We do the same thing in our personal lives.

We create stories.

And then we start living as if those stories are true.

The stories we tell ourselves are the explanations our minds generate when someone else’s behavior leaves a gap we can’t immediately fill.

The Stories We Write

You sent the text.

They didn’t reply.

You know exactly what it means.

Except you don’t.

And the story you invented may be doing more damage than whatever they actually meant.

You hit send. Then you waited.

They didn’t respond.

An hour passed. Then a few more. Then a day.

And somewhere in that silence, you started writing. Not on paper. In your head.

A story about what the silence meant.

They saw it and chose not to reply. They’re pulling away. They don’t value you the way you value them. They’re upset about something you did last week, and this is the punishment. The thing you said at lunch crossed a line, and now they’re creating distance.

You know what this is. You’ve seen this before.

By the time they text back the next morning with, “Sorry, crazy day. What’s up?” you’ve lived inside a narrative for 18 hours that had nothing to do with what actually happened.

What happened was their phone died. Or they were dealing with a problem at home. Or they read your message while talking to their spouse and forgot to respond.

The explanation was boring.

Your story was a novel.

And you didn’t experience the boring explanation for those 18 hours.

You experienced the novel.

Your body responded to the story you wrote, not to the thing that happened. Your chest tightened, the anger built, and you rehearsed the confrontation in the shower.

All of it was real.

And all of it was based on fiction.

The Certainty Tax

There is an old principle often associated with Hanlon’s Razor: never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by something less complicated.

The version that fits daily life is even simpler:

Never assume something was done on purpose when it can be explained just as easily by someone being busy, distracted, forgetful, or having a bad day.

Most of the stories we write about other people’s behavior assume everything they do is intentional. The reality is usually less cinematic. The thing you interpreted as a message wasn’t a message. It was noise. And you turned the noise into a narrative because a narrative, even a painful one, is often easier to live with than not knowing.

Why Do the Stories We Tell Ourselves Feel So Real?

The stories we tell ourselves feel real because our bodies respond to them as if the event actually happened. An 18-hour stretch of convincing yourself someone is angry produces real anxiety, real tension, and real anger in return, even if the other person has no idea anything is wrong. The brain processes an imagined threat the same way it processes a real one. The story becomes the experience.

That’s the certainty tax.

It’s the price you pay for needing an explanation more than you need the right one.

Uncertainty is expensive for your brain. An unanswered text. An unexplained cancellation. A colleague who was short with you in a meeting. A client who suddenly stops returning your calls. Each one opens a gap. And your brain hates open gaps. So it fills them.

The problem is that once we decide what something means, we stop looking for real information. We start looking for confirmation.

She didn’t respond to the text. She’s pulling away. She cancelled dinner last week. Confirmed. She seemed distracted when we talked yesterday. She’s been pulling away for months.

Each individual moment may have a perfectly boring explanation. But you’re not evaluating them individually. You’re stacking them into a case. And by the time you finally bring it up, the case feels overwhelming.

Except the entire case may be built on moments that each had an innocent explanation.

The dramatic story puts you at the center. The boring explanation has nothing to do with you. They weren’t sending a message. They weren’t even thinking about you.

And that’s the part that stings.

Most people’s behavior toward you has very little to do with you. They’re wrapped up in their own problems, their own insecurities, their own bad days.

Much of it is overflow from a life you can’t see. It hit you by accident, not by design.

For most people, being forgotten is harder to accept than being wronged.

When the Story Creates the Reality

I did a version of this last year with someone I do business with.

His emails got shorter. He pushed a call to the following week. I read the whole thing as him losing interest.

And without even noticing it, I got colder in my own replies. Shorter emails back. Slower responses. Less enthusiasm.

I was matching what I thought was happening. Which meant I was now creating the distance I had invented.

When we finally talked, I learned that he had been dealing with another problem with a new client. It had nothing to do with me. He had no idea anything was off between us. From his side, nothing was.

I had spent a month reacting to a story.

And the only real distance in the relationship was the distance my story had created.

That’s the dangerous part. The stories we tell ourselves don’t stay in our heads. Eventually, we behave as though they’re true. And the other person responds to our behavior. Now the story has become real.

We thought someone was pulling away, so we pulled away first. We thought someone didn’t respect us, so we stopped respecting them.

And then we look at the relationship and say: “See? I was right.”

Maybe we weren’t. Maybe our behavior helped create the very thing we were afraid of.

The Same Mind Games Happen at Work

This is where something that seems personal becomes a business problem.

We don’t have one brain for our personal lives and another for our professional lives. The same person who wonders why their partner didn’t text them back wonders why their boss didn’t respond to their email. The same person who assumes a friend is pulling away may assume a client is losing interest.

We bring all of ourselves to work. And our stories come with us.

The stories we tell ourselves about colleagues, managers, and clients follow us through every interaction.

A manager sees an employee become quieter. They’re disengaged. A salesperson doesn’t hear back from a prospect. They’re not interested. A founder hears criticism from an employee. They don’t appreciate what I’ve built.

Maybe. But maybe not. And if you act on the story before you know the facts, you can create a very real problem out of an imaginary one.

An employee who feels distrusted becomes less confident. A manager who assumes the worst begins to micromanage. A salesperson who assumes rejection stops following up. A founder who interprets questions as criticism stops listening.

The original assumption may have been wrong. But the behavior it produced was real.

That’s how relationships deteriorate and how cultures become unhealthy. And it’s how companies end up spending months on problems that never needed to exist.

Assumption is an invisible operating cost.

Companies track payroll, revenue, and productivity. But few measure the hours spent interpreting each other’s behavior.

The meeting after the meeting. The Slack conversation about what someone “really meant.” The email forwarded to a colleague with, “What do you think they mean by this?”

All of it creates friction. And much of that friction begins with a story someone told themselves.

When the World Becomes the Story

The same thing happens on a much larger scale. We see it in politics, in the news, on social media.

We see a few seconds of someone’s life, a single sentence, a clipped video, a headline, and we think we know the whole story. We fill in the blanks, decide what kind of person they must be, and become angry at the story we created.

The news media and social media have become extraordinarily good at exploiting this human tendency. They know that anger gets attention. They know that fear keeps us watching. They hint that someone with a different viewpoint isn’t simply wrong. They’re a threat.

And the more we consume the same sources, the more convinced we become that our version of reality is the only version that makes sense.

I used to get worked up over politicians and political points of view that I had no control over. I would spend hours angry at people on television I would never meet. Then I realized what I was doing.

I was giving away my time. My attention. My mood.

For what? I couldn’t control them. But I was allowing them to control me. Once I let that go, I felt lighter, more focused, and more present.

The same principle applies to social media. A relatively small number of the loudest voices can dominate the conversation, creating the impression that everyone is angry, divided, and at war with everyone else. But what we see isn’t necessarily reality. It’s what the algorithms have decided will keep us watching.

The lesson isn’t to ignore the world. It’s to be careful about confusing what you’re being shown with everything that is true.

Don’t let someone else’s rant, whether online or on television, hijack your headspace. Letting it go isn’t surrendering to their viewpoint. It’s reclaiming your mood and your time.

Chill.

Advice From My Father

When I first got out of school and began working with my father, I would frequently run into these types of situations, either personally or through someone I was responsible for managing.

My father was a pretty chill guy. He wasn’t much of a worrier.

His advice was always the same:

“Before you get yourself worked up about something, stop and examine the facts. Based on the information you have, can you actually draw a conclusion? Before you give it any more thought, take the shortest path to getting all the facts.”

That was his way of telling me to stop playing mind games with myself.

If something was unclear, find out. If an email seemed hostile, pick up the phone. And if you didn’t know, don’t pretend you did.

That is why, years later, when I saw those three employees debating the intent of that email, my instinct was simple.

Pick up the phone. Get the facts. Move on.

It’s advice I not only needed to learn myself. It became something I wanted to instill in the people who worked for us. Because this isn’t just an individual skill. It has to be part of the culture of a business. And it’s something I look for in the companies I advise to this day.

The healthiest organizations aren’t those where everyone agrees. They’re the ones where people feel comfortable asking questions before they make assumptions.

Where someone can say, “I’m not sure what you meant by that.” Where a manager can ask, “Is everything okay?” and get an honest answer. Where “I see this differently” is a comment, not a controversy.

Where people pick up the phone instead of writing a novel in their heads.

This isn’t to say that deliberate manipulation doesn’t happen.

There are people who use silence, mixed signals, and confusion as tools of control. Those people are usually easier to spot than we think. At some point, their intentions become transparent.

When they do, the answer isn’t to keep examining your own assumptions. Call it out. Directly. For your own sake and for the people around you.

But most people aren’t doing any of that.

They’re not thinking about you at all.

And that’s when your own mind takes over.

The Chill Factor

You’re carrying something right now about someone in your life.

Maybe it’s a grudge, resentment, or just some distance you’ve been creating without naming it.

You can’t stop writing stories. The gap-filling is automatic. But you can start checking your stories before you act on them.

How Do You Challenge the Stories We Tell Ourselves?

Three questions: What actually happened, stated as facts only with no interpretation attached? What am I assuming about what those facts mean? What is the shortest path to finding out what actually occurred? For most situations, the answer to the third question is a single conversation. The question you’ve been avoiding usually ends the story faster and does less damage than the story itself.

What’s the boring explanation?

Not the most generous one. Just the boring one. The one where nobody is sending a message. The person was tired. Or distracted. Or dealing with something you don’t know about.

The math says: assume noise until you have real evidence of signal.

Sometimes that’s a phone call. Sometimes it’s a question you’ve been avoiding.

What you’ll often discover is the hardest thing: they weren’t thinking about you at all. But there’s freedom in that. It means you don’t have to carry every slight or react to every silence.

Sometimes the distance between two people isn’t created by what happened. It’s created by the story one person told themselves about what happened.

And sometimes the most important conversation you’ll ever have isn’t with the person you think has wronged you.

It’s with yourself.

Stop. Examine the facts. And before you let your mind write the ending, find out what actually happened.

Peace.