I recently had one of those experiences that fell outside my ordinary ones: a Tuesday night walk into unknown territory with strangers. I knew it was special, but it didn’t fit neatly with the regular narrative I had created about me, my choices, or my chances. I also learned later that the meaning I assigned to the experience was very different from the one others had. Same experience, different significance. As I tried to make sense of it, I realized something: our lives resemble a film with an unfinished script. We don’t control what the camera captures, but we have complete editorial power over the story we tell. We can choose which scenes matter, how to frame each moment, which details to emphasize, and which to discard. Our film is always in the making, assembling what life brings regardless of the scripts we thought we’d written. That makes our film truly ours, irrespective of the events.

Because of my neurobiological obsession, I realized the whole thing by remembering that the brain is fundamentally a prediction machine. Every moment, it asks: what comes next? These predictions are built on what we’ve stored from the past—not objective facts, but the memories we’ve decided matter. Yet which experiences does the brain select? The answer is deceptively simple—emotion. It’s how we feel—the emotional charge attached to each moment—that determines whether and how deeply an experience gets encoded. A single humiliation will remain significant if we felt humiliated, hurt, angry. Our brain learned that the event matters and will keep it handy. But guess what? Our mind is the one that decides whether “this was challenging,” “this was devastating,” or “this was something I had not learned from. How useful!”

Unfortunately, without our intentional participation, a fantastic day—like the Tuesday I had—can evaporate from memory, while one moment of disappointment—learning others didn’t enjoy it—can burn bright for years. Naturally, the brain prioritizes emotional relevance for survival. The only way to transcend that simple Tuesday into a highlight of the week is by actively deciding whether we want it to be motivational, delightful, or miserable. That’s where the “editor” role becomes handy. Research has come out with results about how the celebration of pleasures can contribute to changing the negative trend of our brain and transforming the inner experience into a better movie. Buddhists have known this for centuries. We can select the best of the occurrences to make our story better with the benefit of helping the brain anticipate more positive outcomes in the future.

Instead of focusing on how all the preprogrammed survival can hurt us, we can focus on how our predictions can create a different reality. We can spend years predicting negative futures while watching good things happen. Or we can engage with our circumstances in a way that assigns another layer of emotion to the experience. An additional emotional charge that modifies the whole perspective. One that stimulates the brain to produce some feel-good chemicals that calm down fear centers.

The “editor” practice becomes this: conscious participation. When something happens where we can rescue a thread of emotion—genuine connection, unexpected success, beauty—allow yourself to feel it fully. Let the pleasant emotion be as vivid as the emotions you grant to negative experiences. I’m not suggesting mere positive thinking. I’m suggesting using your mind to direct your brain’s attention toward what’s actually worth preserving. If you look for something good, rather than look for bad, you’ll find it. You’re training your predictions. Your conscious mind has the real estate to expand, and your brain will produce “best-guess” chemicals.

With difficult experiences, feel what needs to be felt. Rejecting negative feelings is not the answer. Observe and allow them to be there too. But then ask: what else happened? What else is true? How can I help myself to make this better, more tolerable, more significant? Your conscious mind has the mental power to edit which emotional moments deserve to take space in your life story and what emotions you allow to define it. This is mental power applied with intention.

Just remember that we don’t control what happens to us. But we have profound control over which moments we choose to feel deeply and therefore how we build our emotional archive. Life arrives as raw footage—scenes we don’t direct but absolutely must edit with our conscious mind to create our narrative. The emotional weight we assign to different scenes becomes the basis for how our brain predicts what comes next and interprets the happenings. We can build, piece by piece, an emotional archive that reflects the full complexity and beauty of our actual lives—one that we consciously choose to create and continue telling ourselves. Even better, we can edit old scenes anytime because the film is never finished.