Maybe One Day You'll Have Breakfast And It Will Rewrite Your Life!

We were at breakfast on the beach, and I could feel the weight of something unspoken between us. My mother’s voice finally broke the silence.

“You know, I send messages to the family, and no one replies,” she said, her words filled with frustration and hurt. “It feels like I’m just sitting here, ignored, until you all need something, and then suddenly, I matter again.”

I knew that no amount of explaining how busy everyone was would change the way she felt. This is a familiar replay of a story she’s told herself many times—about being undervalued and taken for granted.

“It’s not nice to feel hurt,” she added. Even though she admitted we didn’t intend to hurt her, she stayed stuck in that loop. The story kept replaying, growing bigger, more painful each time.

Then she brought it back to me.

“You’ve done it too,” she said. “Gone off on your own, living your life, and then I only hear from you when you need something. I’ve been doing this your whole life.”

Her words hung in the air. I knew there was truth for her in her feelings, and I also knew it wasn’t the whole truth. Right now, the truth didn't matter because my work with Open Loop Fatigue shows us she was trapped in a Replay Loop.

The reason the mind goes into Replay Loops is because it is trying to resolve an experience to something helpful - so that we can process new experiences faster,?make choices, and choose productive actions.

How Story Templates Help Us Process New Experiences Faster,?Make Choices, and Choose Actions.

Our brains create and rely on mental shortcuts that psychologists call heuristics, they draw on not just isolated facts but a web of past experiences. You can think of this like a library of Story Templates.

Stories are our natural, human way of encoding not only facts but the rich context around those facts—emotions, values, outcomes, and relationships. They aren’t just “what happened” but also “what it means". So that, we can access them easily to help us navigate how we approach new situations.

This 'Story Template' wasn’t helping my mother, so she kept replaying that thought.

Her brain wasn’t trying to make her suffer. It wasn’t asking her to replay these moments to punish her. Instead, it was searching for resolution—a useful way to interpret what had happened so she could move on (with a feeling of clarity, wellness and more joy).

Open Loop Mastery will help you realise: we are not stuck because of the experiences themselves, but because we haven’t found a useful way to close the loops they open.

This is grounded in both psychological and neurological principles:

1. Cognitive Closure: Our brains are wired to seek closure. When we experience something unresolved or ambiguous, it creates an open loop—a kind of cognitive dissonance that the brain wants to resolve. An open loop allows us to access that experience at will and search it until we can close it in a useful way. The brain replays these experiences, not to change the past, but to find an interpretation that resolves that dissonance in a useful way.
2. Narrative Interpretation: We interpret our experiences through stories, and those stories shape how we feel and respond to events. If the initial interpretation is negative or incomplete, it leaves the loop open, creating a replay cycle as the brain searches for a more satisfying conclusion.
3. Reframing as a Tool: The idea of consciously choosing a more useful story to close the loop aligns with cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), which focuses on reframing thoughts to create healthier emotional responses. This isn’t about perfection or denial of reality, but about finding an interpretation that serves us better and helps us move forward.

Mum wasn’t actually looking for us to change our actions or apologize for not responding, in fact, ALL that would do is keep that loop open, because it's not useful for us to validate that story for her. It's not what she is really looking for.

What she needed was a new interpretation of the experience—something that allowed her to close that loop and stop replaying the hurt.

The brain’s goal isn’t to create an ideal or perfect outcome, but to close the loop with a useful emotional closure - so that we can process new experiences faster,?make choices, and choose actions.

That is what we use Story Templates for.

What If That Replay Loop Is Just A Search For a More Useful Story?

I took a breath. “Mom,” I said, “You’re telling yourself a story that’s keeping you stuck.” She raised an eyebrow, not quite following.

“What if,” I continued, “instead of seeing yourself as someone we only come to when we need something, you recognised that you’re the kind of mother who gave us the space to become independent? You didn’t smother me, or try to make me live the life you wanted for me. You let me figure things out on my own, and you let me know I could count on you when I needed support.”

She was listening, but I could see her struggling with the shift.

“That’s one way to see it,” she said, a little dismissively, as if to say, “Sure, that’s your perspective.”

But I pressed on, knowing that simply reframing the story wouldn’t be enough. It had to be useful—it had to help her break that painful Replay Loop.

“That’s not just my story,” I said. “It’s a way of seeing the situation that helps. It doesn’t keep me stuck replaying the argument that I visited, that I connect, that it is never enough. Or replaying the times I didn’t reach out at the times you felt ignored. It lets me recognize that I’ve had the space to grow, and that I’m thankful for it. And when I do come to you, it’s because I know you’re always there for me.”

I leaned in, gently but firmly. “Mom, your brain is stuck in this loop, trying to find a way to resolve how you feel. But the story you’re telling isn’t closing that loop—it’s keeping it open. What if you could choose a story that actually helps you move forward?”

She was quiet for a moment, absorbing the thought. I could see the shift, even if it was subtle.

“That’s my story of you,” I said again. “And it’s a story that works for me. Does it work for you?”

She looked at me, and for the first time, I saw a flicker of understanding. It wasn’t about pretending the hurt didn’t exist or brushing it aside.

It was about finding a way to interpret the situation that allowed her to STEP OUT of the Replay Loop and into a story that was generous to her, and made her life more meaningful!

Closing Replay Loops is not about perfection or getting everything right. It’s about Useful Reframing. Learning how to find 'a useful interpretation', so that you can navigate forward with clarity, and make better decisions, with more joy. And that’s one of the things I want to share with you in my book.

The truth was, she didn’t need to replay that story of being ignored because it wasn’t helping her.

What she needed was not to change the past, but to consciously create a story that would close the loop in a better way, one that allowed her to see herself not as ignored, but as a mother who gave her family the space to grow and flourish.

What she needed was a useful way to see the situation—one that allowed her to let go of the hurt and move forward to feel the infinite joy in a breakfast in the sun by the beach.

Please take part in the Open Loop Fatigue research here: https://bit.ly/OpenLoopFatigueSurvey

(For more on Heuristics, see my article here on Thinking Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/my-take-thinking-fast-slow-daniel-kahneman-melanie-gow-xr1bf/)