In some situations and conversations, many of us find ourselves stressed out and reactive when we’re missing information. It’s a common reaction, but it can seriously strain our interpersonal relationships. Nearly all of us do it at some time or another: We experience a situation and create a story around it in our heads. We then react to the story that we created, not what actually happened.

Dr. Kavetha Sundaramoorthy, M.D., who often goes by Dr. Kavetha Sun, is a Harvard-trained psychiatrist who often shares impactful ways to change our mindsets. She uses simple tools to reframe our thinking so that instead of responding to our emotionally-tinted, self-written fables, we are able to zoom out, detach, and gain clarity.

In a clip posted online, Sun shares the first thing she teaches “every patient” she treats. She pulls out a whiteboard and places three Post-it notes on it. The first reads “Experience.” The second says, “Story.” The third reads, “Reaction.”

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Experience, story, reaction

She shares, “Your mind operates at three levels. The first one is a direct experience. So for example, ‘My wife rolled her eyes at me this........

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