When your life changes so altogether that it reorganizes your experience of reality
(and the exhausting energy it takes to do that)
By Don Elium, MFT
“The brain connects and remembers things better when they make complete sense.”
There’s a moment—sometimes slow and sometimes instant—when your story about yourself or your life changes so altogether that it reorganizes your reality experience. It’s not just a shift in belief. It’s a shift in how your brain processes energy, emotion, and memory.
This phenomenon has caught the attention of neuroscientists who are studying what happens when our internal narratives collide with new information. They’ve identified two fundamentally different ways our brains maintain coherence—the sense that our lives make sense—and the dramatic neurological shift that occurs when we move from one to the other.
The first type, what researchers call error-based coherence, occurs when your self-narrative holds together emotionally but is built on missing or inaccurate information. The second, fact-based coherence, emerges when your story aligns with verifiable information and real events. Both can stabilize your nervous system, but their internal experiences differ dramatically.
Scientists say understanding this distinction may explain why some people suddenly feel like completely different versions of themselves after learning new information about their past, their relationships, or even their own psychology. It’s not just personal growth—it’s a fundamental rewiring of how the brain organizes reality.
The Brain as Storyteller
Coherence is your brain’s way of making sense of your life. Even when you don’t have all the facts, your brain tries to build a story that explains what’s happening, who you are, and how the world works. This internal storytelling is essential for maintaining emotional stability and social identity.
Sometimes, the story your brain creates is close enough to reality to work. Other times, it’s off—but it still “works” emotionally, at least for a while. Your brain is not designed to seek absolute accuracy. It’s a prediction machine designed to keep you safe and functioning.
When something important doesn’t make sense—when a loved one acts unpredictably, when early trauma leaves unanswered questions, when you don’t know why something feels wrong—your brain will fill in the blanks to restore coherence. This happens automatically. If the honest answer is missing, delayed, or too threatening to the system, the brain creates a stable explanation—even if it’s incomplete or inaccurate. This isn’t a failure. It’s protection.
Three major brain networks are involved in building and maintaining these stories. Think of them as different departments in your brain’s meaning-making operation. The Default Mode Network is the storyteller constructing your internal self-narrative and sense of identity. The Salience Network is an alert system that detects what’s essential and shifts your attention. The Executive Control Network is a manager who handles contradictions and directs behavior.
In an error-based story, this system works overtime. The Default Mode Network constantly rewrites to fit incomplete information, like an editor working with a partial manuscript. The Salience Network keeps sending alerts that something’s off, like a smoke detector with a low battery. The Executive Control Network burns energy suppressing evidence that doesn’t fit, like a security guard constantly turning people away. The result is emotional survival, but at a high energy cost.
The Hidden Exhaustion
Living inside an error-based narrative creates chronic internal strain. You may not realize it, but your brain is working constantly to suppress contradictions and maintain a version of reality that doesn’t quite fit. Every day experiences include a persistent feeling that “something doesn’t add up,” mental fatigue and emotional confusion that seems to have no clear source, difficulty accessing clarity or a deep sense of self, relationships that feel misaligned or chronically unsatisfying, and a felt urgency to figure something out, though no resolution comes.
This isn’t just psychological—it’s neurological. Research shows that the brain’s prediction error systems are constantly activated when coherence is forced. That means the brain is using energy to suppress or explain away new information rather than integrating it smoothly. You’re running a high-maintenance operating system, and it’s exhausting, even when you can’t pinpoint why.
Dr. Sarah Chen, a neuroscientist at Stanford who studies narrative coherence, explains it this way: “Imagine your brain as a computer running multiple programs in the background, constantly trying to reconcile conflicting files. That background processing is invisible to you but consumes enormous amounts of your system’s resources.”
When Information Changes Everything
Now imagine this: after years of feeling like something was off, new information becomes available—some fact or understanding that finally explains the pieces of your life that didn’t make sense. But here’s the crucial part: this shift only happens when your nervous system can handle the new information without overwhelming itself.
Your brain isn’t simply seeking “the facts.” It’s seeking information that can be integrated without causing system collapse. Sometimes factual information meets this criterion. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes, the most protective thing your brain can do is maintain an incomplete story until you’re strong enough to handle a more complete reality.
When manageable, accurate information becomes available, and your system can process it. Your story may reorganize—not through willpower but because the missing piece finally arrives in a way your nervous system can absorb. A fact clicks into place, and the whole structure of your narrative updates.
This is the move from error-based coherence to fact-based coherence. The information might come through therapy, a conversation, research, or life experience. What matters is that it resolves chronic prediction errors without overwhelming your system’s capacity to integrate them.
What Changes in the Brain
When manageable, accurate information resolves a long-standing mystery, several neurological shifts occur simultaneously. The Default Mode Network must no longer invent or protect a fragile narrative. It can reorganize around real events that now make sense, allowing a natural, low-effort coherence to emerge. Your brain’s prediction systems stop signaling a constant mismatch. Instead of the chronic background noise of “this doesn’t fit,” you experience resolution—a sense that things now align, dramatically lowering cognitive load.
With fewer internal contradictions to flag, the Salience Network no longer has to signal that something’s wrong constantly. It can redirect energy toward genuinely relevant signals: your needs, values, and what matters most now. Freed from constant contradiction management, the Executive Control Network can shift from defensive suppression toward goal-directed behavior and flexible problem-solving.
Studies show that hippocampal activity increases in pattern similarity across events when they form a genuinely coherent narrative. In other words, the brain connects and remembers things better when they make complete sense together, but only when the integration doesn’t overwhelm the system’s capacity.
The Relief of Resolution
People often describe the shift to fact-based coherence as a sudden sense of lightness or mental clarity, an increase in available energy or mental space, feeling like life has “clicked” into place, emotional access to grief, peace, or motivation that was previously blocked, and a sense of finally being able to breathe.
These aren’t just feelings. They reflect a neurological shift from high-maintenance false stability to low-maintenance genuine integration. It’s the difference between constantly managing a fragile illusion and operating from sustainable information your system can process.
Take Maya, a 34-year-old marketing executive, who spent years feeling anxious in relationships, always sensing that partners were about to leave her. She’d constructed elaborate strategies to prevent abandonment, exhausting herself trying to be the “perfect” girlfriend. Then, in therapy, she gradually learned about her father’s untreated depression during her childhood—how his emotional unavailability had nothing to do with her worth, but everything to do with his struggles. The information came slowly, in doses her system could handle. “It was like someone finally gave me the missing piece of a puzzle I’d been trying to solve my whole life,” she says. “I stopped trying to be lovable and started just being myself. The difference was immediate and profound.”
When Facts Are Too Much
But not everyone’s story unfolds like Maya’s. Sometimes factual information arrives with a force that overwhelms rather than relieves. Consider the difference between learning gradually about a a physically illness versus suddenly discovering you were adopted, or slowly recognizing patterns of manipulation versus being confronted with evidence of betrayal all at once.
When new information threatens to overwhelm the nervous system, the brain’s protective mechanisms—denial, dissociation, and gradual processing—are actually the more energy-efficient choice. In these cases, maintaining partial information or even protective “errors” uses less energy than trying to integrate facts that would cause system collapse.
Dr. Michael Rodriguez, who runs a clinic specializing in trauma and memory, sees this regularly in his practice. “The brain doesn’t automatically prefer factual information,” he explains. “It prefers manageable information. Sometimes that means facts, sometimes a protective story that allows the person to function until they’re ready for more reality.”
This is why some people can’t “see” specific facts even when presented with evidence—their nervous system correctly calculates that those facts would require more energy to process than their current system can spare.
Relationships in Transition
What happens inside your brain doesn’t stay there. Whether your story is error-based or fact-based affects every relationship you’re in. When operating from error-based coherence, you may hold onto beliefs about others that no longer serve the relationship, interpret their behavior through filters that don’t match current reality, and unconsciously avoid information that threatens your emotional survival story. Conversations get stuck, old arguments repeat, and genuine repair feels impossible.
When you shift to fact-based coherence—when your system can handle more accurate information about your relationships—you can see your relational history more clearly. You can hear what people mean instead of what you expect them to mean. There’s mental space for genuine updates, repair, or even letting go when necessary. You become less reactive and more present to what’s happening now.
The quality of your internal coherence affects how safely you can love, grieve, grow, or forgive. It influences whether you’re relating to the person in front of you or your predictions about them.
The Messy Middle
A transitional state exists between the old story and manageable new information, often disorienting but essential. During this phase, the Default Mode Network experiences surprise (“Wait, this changes everything about my story”), the Salience Network rapidly re-sorts priorities (“This new information is now the most important thing”), and the Executive Control Network works overtime to update response patterns and behavioral habits.
Neurologically, this is where the most reorganization happens. You might experience this as a mix of shock, grief, relief, and clarity. It may unfold slowly over months or happen seemingly overnight. For some nervous systems, this transition feels manageable. For others, it can feel overwhelming. Both responses are normal variations in how brains process major narrative updates.
The key factor isn’t the objective accuracy of the new information, but whether your system can integrate it without overwhelming itself.
When Stories Fall Apart
Rather than consciously “letting go” of old narratives, error-based coherence often becomes too costly to maintain. The constant energy required to suppress contradictions, manage prediction errors, and maintain a story that doesn’t quite fit eventually exceeds what the system can sustain.
When this happens, the old story doesn’t get deliberately released—it falls apart under its energetic weight. Like a house of cards that collapses when you remove the constant effort holding it up, error-based coherence often disintegrates when the brain can no longer afford the maintenance costs.
This process can feel chaotic and disorienting. Your identity networks are restructuring your internal self-concept, your executive control systems are updating behavioral patterns, and your salience network works overtime to sort what matters now from what no longer fits your updated understanding.
Sometimes this leads to freedom from a long-carried burden and sudden clarity. Sometimes it leads to loss, grief, or necessary changes in relationships built on incomplete information. The collapse isn’t always immediately comfortable, but it allows for more sustainable coherence to emerge—if and when your system is ready.
Consider James, who discovered at 42 that he was adopted—information his parents had hidden from him his entire life. “Everything suddenly made sense,” he says. “Why I never felt like I belonged, I looked nothing like my siblings, and certain family stories never added up. But my old story about who I was just… crumbled. I didn’t choose to let it go. It became impossible to maintain once I had this new information. It took months to figure out who I was versus who I’d been trying to be.”
The Architecture of Meaning
As neuroscience continues illuminating how our brains construct meaning, one thing becomes clear: the stories we tell ourselves aren’t just stories. They’re the architecture of our psychological lives, determining everything from how much energy we have to how safely we can love.
Understanding the difference between forced coherence and sustainable integration may be one of the most practical insights neuroscience has offered yet—not just for understanding ourselves, but for recognizing when our current story is becoming too costly to maintain, and why our brains naturally reorganize around information that can be integrated without overwhelming the system.
The exhausting work of maintaining a story that doesn’t quite fit becomes impossible once you’ve felt what it’s like to operate from a narrative your nervous system can sustain. But the path from one to the other isn’t always straightforward, and it isn’t always gentle. It’s a biological process that respects the system’s capacity above all else, including its capacity for the sometimes challenging work of living closer to what happened, when and if that becomes possible.