The renewed assault from the ultraviolet burns further damaged my lips, from which blood and pus leaked into the chin cover of my face mask…The scabs always grew together overnight, and when I woke the act of tearing my lips apart (in order to speak and drink) opened up all the raw places. Breakfast consisted of porridge oats in a gravy of blood.

A major trait that helps in such grueling circumstances, Barrett and Martin write, is “hardiness,” which they define as a commitment to seeing life as meaningful and interesting; a belief that you can influence events; and a tendency to view even negative events as an opportunity to grow. About half of this mental toughness is passed down from one’s parents, they write, but the other half is determined by personality and environment. (And one of the most significant environmental contributors to hardiness is the presence of supportive family members and friends, just as we saw with Julia the NASCAR driver.) The hardy individuals wrote their own scripts about how well their lives were going, even when they were facing mounting setbacks and eating blood-oats.

Research305 shows that greater well-being and self-confidence306 tend to come with these so-called “redemptive” narratives, which are a way of telling yourself more edifying stories about what’s happening to you. As Joan Didion put it, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” But the kinds of stories you tell yourself matter. There are narratives about yourself in which your life can still get better, and there are those in which it will keep getting worse. There are stories where you are the victim, always put upon, and those where you are the hero, chopping through the brambles. There’s the tale in which your boss’s criticism means he hates you, and one in which he is trying to help you by being forthright. There’s a reason why Drake sings, “Started from the bottom, now we’re here,” rather than “Didn’t it suck back when I was at the bottom? I wish that had never happened.” Telling a better story about yourself, both to yourself and others, can change the way you view your circumstances.

One psychologist told me that a useful tactic for constructing these positive narratives could even be to lie to yourself a little bit. If you were bullied because you were frankly kind of a loser, just tell yourself it was because the other kids were intimidated by how awesome you were. That can give you the cognitive boost of a positive story, even if the story was, in actuality, a little dispiriting.