Your Body Is Listening to Every Story You Tell Yourself

In 2007, a woman walked into a hospital emergency room convinced she was dying.

Her heart was racing. She couldn’t breathe. Her chest felt like it was caving in. Doctors ran her labs, checked her vitals, and ran her through a battery of tests.

But they couldn’t find anything physically wrong with her even though she felt like death was imminent.

So, what was the culprit? A voodoo curse.

She’d been told by a local witch doctor that she was hexed and her belief in that curse had triggered a full-body shutdown. Her organs were failing not because of any identifiable pathology, but because her belief in the curse had decided: this is it.

It took a doctor who understood the power of belief to stage an elaborate “curse removal” ritual in the ER. He pretended to extract the hex.

And just like that she recovered within hours.

Sounds extreme, right?

But what if we all do some version of this every single day?

The Stories We Tell Ourselves

We don’t think of ourselves as superstitious. We think we are logical and evidence-based. And that we don’t believe in curses or magic.

But we do believe things like:

• “I’m bad at remembering names.”

• “I always get sick this time of year.”

• “I’m not a morning person.”

• “My body just doesn’t respond to exercise.”

And guess what? Your brain treats those statements the same way that woman’s brain treated the voodoo curse. Not as observations. As predictions.

According to neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, your brain doesn’t react to the world as it is. It predicts the world based on past experience, then makes your body match that prediction.

It’s called predictive processing and it’s happening constantly, mostly outside your awareness.

Your brain is essentially running simulations of your future, millisecond by millisecond, using your beliefs as the script. And then it directs your physiology, your attention, and your behavior to make that script come true.

So when you say, “I always mess up presentations,” your brain hears: Prepare for failure.

It floods you with cortisol, narrows your focus, tightens your throat, and makes your hands shake.

When Your Past Becomes Your Future

One of the most haunting examples of this comes from research on chronic pain.

Scientists at Northwestern University found that people with chronic back pain showed different brain activity when anticipating pain than those with acute pain.

Their brains had learned to expect pain, even in situations where there was no physical injury present.

The prediction itself kept the pain alive.

But here’s where it gets wild: when researchers helped patients reframe their relationship to the pain by shifting their expectations and attention many experienced significant relief.

This isn’t about “thinking positive” or pretending pain doesn’t exist.

It’s about recognizing that your brain’s prediction system can get stuck in loops. And those loops feel like truth, even when they’re just echoes of the past.

Another study looked at people with insomnia.

Researchers found that many insomniacs don’t actually sleep worse than others, they just believe they do.

Their brains predict a bad night. So they spend the evening anxious, hyper-focused on sleep, scanning for signs of failure. And that anxiety disrupts the very thing they’re trying to achieve.

When they were taught to reframe their expectations to expect variability instead of catastrophe, their sleep quality improved. Their biology didn’t change, only the prediction did.

The Beliefs You Didn’t Choose Are Still Running the Show

Here’s the uncomfortable part: most of your beliefs about yourself weren’t chosen. They were installed. Maybe by a parent who said you were “too sensitive.” By a teacher who made you feel slow. By a relationship that taught you that you were hard to love.

And now those old narratives are still feeding data into your brain’s prediction machine.

In one study, researchers found that women who believed the stereotype that “women are bad at math” performed significantly worse on math tests, but only when they were reminded of their gender beforehand.

Remarkably, when gender wasn’t mentioned, the gap disappeared.

And the most dangerous part? You don’t even notice it’s happening.

You just think, “I guess I’m not good at this.” And move on. But your brain filed it away. Added it to the prediction model. And next time, it’ll prepare you to struggle again.

READER POLL

What Happens When You Rewrite the Script

So what do you do with this?

First, you notice. You start paying attention to the casual, throwaway beliefs you carry about yourself.

Not to judge them but just to see them. Because once you see them, you can test them.

In one incredible study, elderly men were placed in an environment designed to look and feel like it was 20 years earlier, old magazines, old music, old shows from their youth.

They were also told to act as if they were their younger selves. Within a week, they showed measurable improvements in vision, hearing, strength, and cognitive function.

Their bodies didn’t reverse aging. But their expectations shifted and their biology followed.

Another study gave people a placebo and told them it was a powerful stimulant. As a result, their metabolism increased, their heart rates went up and their energy spiked.

Then they gave the same people the same pill, but they were told it was a sedative. And this time, their bodies slowed down.

What is important about all this is to know is that your brain isn’t neutral. It’s not a passive observer. It’s constantly shaping what you experience based on what it expects to find.

And that means you have more power than you think.

Catch you next week,

Shakila

P.S. Here’s the results of last week’s poll.