It was three o’clock in the morning and I sat in my pajamas, peering out the window of my home office, scrutinizing the night. I couldn’t make out anything in the dark, but in my mind I saw very clearly the disturbing letter and deranged face of the person who had sent it, which I managed to concoct in my imagination with a little help from Dexter and the Saw movies.
After a long time, I turned away from the window.
Without really knowing what I was doing, I wandered over to my desk, sat down, and opened my computer. Somehow, even in the depth of my fear, I realized that this couldn’t go on. The lack of sleep was draining me, I wasn’t eating, and I was having trouble focusing at work. In this bleary-eyed state, I went “inside” again as intently as I could to find a way out of this mess. Introspection hadn’t yielded much in the previous days, but I focused my mind on the problem. What about a bodyguard? I thought to myself. One who specializes in protecting professors.
As ridiculous as this sounds to me in retrospect, at the time it didn’t seem ridiculous at all. But as I readied my fingers to start googling for bodyguards specially trained in defending frightened academics in the Midwest, something happened. I stopped, leaned back from my computer, and said to myself in my mind, Ethan, what are you doing? This is crazy!
Then something strange happened: Saying my own name in my head, addressing myself as if I were speaking to someone else, allowed me to immediately step back. Suddenly I was able to focus on my predicament more objectively. The notion that a cottage industry had developed for protecting professors with Navy SEAL–credentialed bodyguards, an idea that moments ago had seemed reasonable enough to google, now became apparent for what it really was: lunacy.
Once I had this realization, others quickly followed. How is pacing the house with a baseball bat going to help? I thought. You have a state-of-the-art alarm system. Nothing else disconcerting has happened since you first received the letter. It was probably just a hoax. So, what are you worried about? Enjoy your life the way you used to. Think about your family, students, and research. Plenty of people receive threats that amount to nothing. You’ve managed worse situations. You can deal with this.
Ethan, I said to myself. Go to bed.
As these thoughts began to spread like a salve on an open wound, I walked from my office to my bedroom. My heartbeat slowed, and the weight of my emotions changed. I felt lighter. And when I quietly got into bed next to my wife, I was able to do something that I had desperately wanted to do since I first received the letter: I closed my eyes without clenching my teeth, without booby-trapping the door to my bedroom, without clutching my Little League baseball bat, and I slept deeply until morning.
Saying my own name had saved me. Not from my hostile stalker, but from myself.
During the days and then weeks following that night, I kept thinking about what had happened. On the one hand, there was the uncomfortable irony that I was a psychologist who specializes in self-control and yet I had lost my self-control, never mind my rationality, albeit briefly. On the other hand, there was the scientifically intriguing observation that I had somehow regained control of my emotions and internal conversation by talking to myself as if I were another person. Normally, using one’s own name is associated with eccentricity, narcissism, or sometimes mental illness, but I didn’t identify with any of these. For me, at least in that moment of crisis, I had somehow managed to subdue my inner voice…with my inner voice.
And I had done so without even meaning to.
There’s a classic finding in psychology called the frequency illusion. It describes the common experience of, say, learning a new word and then suddenly seeing it seemingly everywhere you look. In reality, the word—or whatever recent new observation you’ve had—has always been present in your environment with an ordinary frequency; your brain just wasn’t sensitized to it before, so this creates a mental illusion.
Something similar happened to me after realizing that I had spoken to myself during a moment of tremendous emotional stress. The pattern recognition software in my mind for people talking to themselves as if they were communicating with someone else—using their names and other non-first-person pronouns—was activated. Over the next few months, then years, I noticed more and more noteworthy instances of it in several different contexts.
The threatening letter arrived in the spring of 2011, but the first case that caught my attention was actually a recollection I had of the basketball superstar LeBron James from the summer of 2010. As a lifelong Knicks fan, I had been holding out the naive hope that he would come to New York to redeem my floundering team. Instead, he appeared on ESPN to announce that he was leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers, the hometown team that had nurtured his career from its inception, to play for the Miami Heat—a high-stakes and, by his own admission, difficult decision. “One thing that I didn’t want to do was make an emotional decision,” LeBron explained to the ESPN commentator Michael Wilbon. A split second later, right after he articulated his goal to avoid making an emotional decision, he switched from talking about himself in the first person to talking about himself using his own name: “And I wanted to do what was best for LeBron James and what LeBron James is going to do to make him happy.”
A few years later, I came across a video of the future Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. In the summer of 2012, fourteen-year-old Malala was living in the Swat valley of Pakistan with her family when she received arguably one of the most stressful pieces of news imaginable: The Taliban had vowed to assassinate her as punishment for her outspoken advocacy of girls’ rights to education. When Stewart asked her how she responded to learning of the threat against her, Malala inadvertently revealed that employing her own name to coach herself had been key. After beginning to recount her experience in the first person, as she narrated the story and arrived at its most fearsome moment, she told Stewart, “I asked myself, ‘What would you do, Malala?’ Then I would reply to myself, ‘Malala, just take a shoe and hit him’ ”…But then I said, ‘If you hit a Talib with your shoe, then there will be no difference between you and the Talib.’ ”
The examples kept cropping up, not just in pop culture contexts—such as the actress Jennifer Lawrence pausing during an emotional interview with a New York Times reporter to say to herself, “O.K., get ahold of yourself, Jennifer”—but also in historical instances that had been hiding in plain sight. There was already a term for talking about oneself in the third person, “illeism,” which was frequently used to describe the literary device Julius Caesar had employed to narrate his work on the Gallic Wars, in which he had participated. He wrote about himself by using his own name and the pronoun “he” instead of the word “I.” And then there was the American historian Henry Adams’s Pulitzer Prize–winning autobiography, published in 1918, which he narrated entirely in the third person. In keeping with this stylistic approach, he didn’t title the book My Education or something similar. He called it The Education of Henry Adams.
By this time, I had already shared my observations about how people use their own names and second- and third-person pronouns to talk to themselves with my students and colleagues. As a result, a conversation had gotten under way in the lab, and we had begun to examine the relationship between language and distance. We had a strong intuition that using one’s own name—silently in one’s own head, that is, not talking to oneself aloud in ways that elicit raised eyebrows and disrupt social norms—was a tool that helped people control their inner voice.
Of course, all of the “evidence” I had come across was anecdotal. It wasn’t scientific proof of anything, though it did seem to suggest a common pattern in human behavior. For years my colleagues and I had been studying approaches to distancing, yet all the techniques we had uncovered required both time and concentration, whereas using one’s name to mentally speak to oneself in a moment of distress had taken neither. Could talking to yourself as if you were someone else be its own form of distancing?
“Are you serious?” the participant in our experiment asked.
“Yes,” the experimenter told him. “Follow me.”
She led him down the hallway.
Like the other volunteers who had come into our lab, he had known only that he was going to participate in an experiment on language and emotion. What none of the volunteers knew until they arrived for the study was the method we would be using, one of the most powerful techniques scientists have at our disposal for stressing people out in the lab: We asked them to engage in public speaking in front of an audience without giving them sufficient time to prepare. In doing so, we hoped to gain a better understanding of how silently referring to ourselves using our own names (and other non-first-person pronouns like “you”) might help people control an inner voice agitated by circumstances like the ones we had concocted.
When they arrived, we told the volunteers that they would have to deliver a five-minute speech to a group on why they were qualified to land their dream job. Then we escorted them into a small windowless room, where they had five minutes to prepare their presentations without being able to take any notes. Our idea was that if we asked some participants to use non-first-person language while thinking to themselves before the speech, they would have more mental distance, which would help them manage their nerves.
Our theory wasn’t based only on my experience or the words of Malala, LeBron James, and others. Previous research had indicated that a high usage of first-person-singular pronouns, a phenomenon called I-talk, is a reliable marker of negative emotion. For example, one large study performed in six labs across two countries with close to five thousand participants revealed a robust positive link between I-talk and negative emotion. Another study showed that you can predict future occurrences of depression in people’s medical records by computing the amount of I-talk in their Facebook posts. All of which is to say, talking to oneself using first-person-singular pronouns like “I,” “me,” and “my” can be a form of linguistic immersion.
A natural question arose: What would happen if you not only reduced a person’s tendency to think about themselves in the first person but actually had them refer to themselves as if they were interacting with someone else? Our idea was that using your own name, while also employing the second and third person, created emotional distance because it makes you feel as if you were talking to another person when you’re talking to yourself. For example, rather than thinking to oneself, Why did I blow up at my co-worker today? a person could think, Why did Ethan blow up at his co-worker today?
After the five-minute speech preparation period was over, we randomly divided the participants into two groups: one in which they reflected on their anxieties surrounding their upcoming speech using the first-person pronoun “I”; and the other in which they did the same but only using non-first-person pronouns and their own name. After they were done, we took them down the hall to deliver their presentations in front of a panel of judges who were trained to maintain stoic facial expressions and a large video camera that was distractingly positioned right in front of them. It was showtime.
As we predicted, participants who used distanced self-talk reported that they experienced less shame and embarrassment after giving their speech compared with participants who used immersed self-talk. They also ruminated less about their performance afterward. In their descriptions of their mental experiences, instead of highlighting their nervousness or the difficulty of the task, they said that their inner voices focused on the fact that nothing of real consequence was actually at stake.
Remarkably, as we coded the videos and dug deeper into the data from the experiment, it wasn’t just the participants’ emotional responses that differed. Judges who watched videos of participant’s speeches indicated that people in the distanced self-talk group performed better on the task as well.
We had uncovered a novel distancing tool hidden in the mind: distanced self-talk. As our experiments and others later demonstrated, shifting from the first-person “I” to the second-person “you” or third-person “he” or “she” provides a mechanism for gaining emotional distance. Distanced self-talk, then, is a psychological hack embedded in the fabric of human language. And we now know that its benefits are diverse.
Other experiments have shown that distanced self-talk allows people to make better first impressions, improves performance on stressful problem-solving tasks, and facilitates wise reasoning, just as fly-on-the-wall distancing strategies do. It also promotes rational thinking. For instance, during the height of the 2014 Ebola crisis, some people were terrified about contagion in the United States. So we ran a study over the internet with people across the United States. We found that people who were anxious about Ebola and were asked to switch away from using “I” to using their own names to reflect on how the Ebola scare would play out in the future found more fact-based reasons not to worry, which predicted a decrease in their anxiety and risk perception. They no longer thought it was so likely that they would contract the disease, which was both a more accurate reflection of reality and a muzzle on their previously panicked inner voices.
Research also shows that distanced self-talk can have implications for helping people deal with one of the most chatter-provoking scenarios I’ve studied: having to choose between our love of others we care for and our moral principles. For instance, a person we know commits a crime, and we’re forced to decide whether to protect or punish them. Studies show that when this internal conflict occurs, people are considerably more likely to protect those they know rather than report them, a phenomenon that we see define decisions in everyday life time and again—for example, the university administrators and gymnastics officials who failed to stop the now-convicted child-molesting physician Larry Nassar.
If the reason why we are motivated to protect certain people is that we are so close to them, then it would follow that engaging in distanced self-talk should reduce these protective tendencies by allowing us to step back from ourselves and the relationships we share with others. Sure enough, across several experiments, this is exactly what we found. For example, in one study, my students and I asked people to vividly imagine observing a loved one commit a crime, like secretly using another person’s credit card, and then being approached by a police officer who asks if they saw anything. Participants who reflected on what they should do using their own name (for example, What facts is Maria considering when making this decision?) were more likely to report severe offenses to the police officer.
While these findings demonstrated the power of distanced self-talk, they didn’t explore another property that makes it so valuable: its speed. One of the things I found most interesting about saying my own name to calm myself down was how remarkably easy it was. Normally, it takes time to regulate our emotions. Just think of the effort involved in mentally traveling through time to imagine how you’ll feel differently about something in the future, or writing a journal entry to contemplate your thoughts and feelings, or even closing your eyes to picture a past experience from a fly-on-the-wall perspective. These are all empirically validated self-distancing tools. Yet, because of the effort they require, they’re not always easy to implement in the heat of the moment.
Now think about my experience. All I did was say my name, and it put my inner voice on a totally different trajectory, almost like switching the direction a train goes when it comes to a Y-juncture. Distanced self-talk appeared to be quick and powerful, unlike so many other emotion-regulation strategies. How could that be?
In linguistics, “shifters” refer to words, like personal pronouns (such as “I” and “you”), whose meaning changes depending on who is speaking. For example, if Dani asks, “Can you pass me the ketchup?” and Maya answers, “Sure, here you go,” the person that “you” addresses changes. It refers to Maya initially but then Dani. Most children figure out that language works this way by the time they are two years old and can switch perspectives in this way incredibly fast, within milliseconds.
The concept of shifters demonstrates how powerful certain words can be for switching our perspectives. Our idea was that distanced self-talk might operate through a similar mechanism, producing a virtual automatic shift in perspective requiring minimal effort. Using this lens on language and psychological distance, the Michigan State University psychologist Jason Moser and I designed an experiment to measure how quickly distanced self-talk works. But instead of listening to people’s inner voices, we looked at their brains.
In our experiment, we asked participants to think about how they felt each time they saw a disturbing photograph, using either immersed language (What am I feeling?) or distanced language (What is Jason feeling?). As they did this, we monitored the electrical activity of their brains using an electroencephalogram machine, which provides a useful means of determining just how quickly different psychological operations work in the brain.
The results indicated that participants displayed much less emotional activity in the brain when they used distanced language to reflect on their feelings after viewing the disturbing pictures. But the crucial finding was how long it took the participants to feel the relief of distance. We saw changes in emotional activity emerge within one second of having people view a negative picture.
One tiny second. That was it.
Equally exciting to us, we didn’t find evidence to suggest that this kind of self-talk overtaxed people’s executive functions. This was crucial, because more effortful distancing techniques create a Catch-22 of sorts: When our chatter is buzzing, it drains us of the neural resources we need to focus, get distance, and regain control of our inner voice. Yet distanced self-talk sidesteps this conundrum. It is high on results and low on effort.
If changing the words we use to think about ourselves offers a hyper-speed form of distancing for dealing with stress, it stood to reason that it should also influence the stream of our inner voice. As it turns out, distanced self-talk can do this by harnessing a capacity we all possess: the ability to interpret sources of stress as challenges rather than threats. To see how this works, let’s drop in on an old neighbor.
If you grew up or had children in the United States between 1968 and 2001, you probably recall Fred Rogers’s soothing voice on his legendary thirty-minute television program, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. But beneath his serene persona, Rogers’s inner voice could torment him, just like the rest of us. We know this because his inner critic is on full display in a letter he typed to himself in 1979, shortly after returning from a three-year break from doing his show:
Am I kidding myself that I’m able to write a script again? Am I really just whistling Dixie? I wonder. If I don’t get down to it I’ll never really know. Why dan’t…I trust myself. Really that’s what it’s all about…that and not wanting to go through the agony of creation. AFTER ALL THESE YEARS IT’S JUST AS BAD AS EVER. I wonder if every creative artist goes through the tortures of the damned trying to create.?. Oh, well, the hour commeth [sic] and now IS when I’ve got to do it. GET TO IT, FRED. GET TO IT.
Rogers’s strikingly vulnerable letter provides us with a raw chatter artifact of sorts, a front-row seat to observe his shifting inner voice.
The first three-quarters of the letter presents an inner dialogue that is filled with self-doubt, self-criticism, and even despair. But as the note to himself progresses, you can see Rogers building toward another way of thinking about his situation. His inner critic begins to fade out as he recognizes that regardless of his insecurities he has to deal with the task at hand—“the hour commeth…I’ve got to do it.” And then he does it. He switches into using distanced language—using his own name—to convey to himself that he can in fact write his show. And with that shift in perspective he got back to work for another twenty-two years while at the same time illuminating the fork in the road we all face when confronting an overwhelming situation.
Psychologists have shown that when you place people in stressful situations, one of the first things they do is ask themselves (usually subconsciously) two questions: What is required of me in these circumstances, and do I have the personal resources to cope with what’s required? If we scan the situation and conclude that we don’t have the wherewithal needed to handle things, that leads us to appraise the stress as a threat. If, on the other hand, we appraise the situation and determine that we have what it takes to respond adequately, then we think of it as a challenge. Which way we choose to talk about the predicament to ourselves makes all the difference for our inner voice. And unsurprisingly, the more constructive framing of a challenge leads to more positive results. In Mr. Rogers’s case, it allowed him to acknowledge the difficulty of creation, and then keep creating.
Several studies back up what Mr. Rogers’s letter embodies. From taking math exams to performing in pressure-filled situations to coping with the toxic effects of stereotyping, people think, feel, and perform better when they frame the stressor at hand as a challenge rather than a threat. But as Mr. Rogers’s use of his own name to motivate himself suggests, distanced self-talk can be the pivotal shove that sends you down the path of the challenge mindset.
Research shows that distanced self-talk leads people to consider stressful situations in more challenge-oriented terms, allowing them to provide encouraging, “you can do it” advice to themselves, rather than catastrophizing the situation. In one study that my collaborators and I performed, for example, we asked people to write about their deepest thoughts and feelings concerning an upcoming stressful event using immersed or distanced self-talk. Seventy-five percent of participants whose essays revealed the highest levels of challenge-oriented thinking were in the distanced self-talk group. In stark contrast, 67 percent of participants whose essays revealed the highest levels of threat-oriented thinking were in the immersed self-talk group.
To see how this actually played out inside participants’ heads, consider what one person in the immersed group wrote: I am afraid that I won’t get a job if I mess up during an interview. And I always mess up in some way. I never know what to say, and I am always incredibly nervous. I end up in a feedback loop of nervousness causing bad interviews causing nervousness. Even if I got a job, I think I would still be afraid of interviews.
Meanwhile, the distanced-language group’s inner voices were notably different. One participant, reflecting on the insecurity he was feeling in anticipation of a date, wrote, Aaron, you need to slow down. It’s a date; everyone gets nervous. Oh jeez, why did you say that? You need to pull it back. Come on man, pull it together. You can do this.
You don’t, however, solely need to scrutinize the content of people’s thoughts to see how language influences our tendency to perceive experiences as challenges or threats: You can see it in people’s bodies as well. The psychological experience of challenge and threat have unique biological signatures. When you put a person in a threatening state, their heart starts pumping blood faster throughout his body. The same is true of a challenge. A key difference between the two states is how the tangle of arteries and veins that carry blood in the body responds. When a person is in a threat state, their vasculature constricts, leaving less room for their blood to flow, which over time can lead to burst blood vessels and heart attacks. In contrast, when people are in challenge mode, their vasculature relaxes, allowing blood to move easily throughout the body.
Lindsey Streamer, Mark Seery, and their colleagues at the University at Buffalo wanted to know whether distanced self-talk would lead to shifts like this in the way people’s cardiovascular systems functioned. Put more simply, through distanced self-talk, could you persuade not only your mind but your body to see a situation as challenging rather than threatening? Sure enough, participants who were asked to use their name to reflect on stress before giving a public speech displayed a challenge-mode cardiovascular response. People in the immersed-language group displayed a textbook biological threat response.
If distanced self-talk can help adults, it’s natural to wonder if it can benefit children as well. One of the great tasks of being a parent is teaching your children how to persevere in situations that are difficult but important, such as finding ways to help them study. With this question in mind, the psychologists Stephanie Carlson and Rachel White discovered what is known as the Batman Effect.
In one experiment, they had a group of children pretend they were a superhero as they performed a boring task designed to simulate the experience of having to complete a tedious homework assignment. The kids were asked to assume the role of the character and then ask themselves how they were performing on the task using the character’s name. For example, a girl in the study who was pretending to be Dora the Explorer was instructed to ask herself, “Is Dora working hard?” during the study. Carlson and White found that the kids who did this persevered longer than children who reflected on their experience the normal way using “I.” (Kids in a third group who used their own names also outperformed the I-group.)
Taking this phenomenon into even more stressful circumstances, other research with kids has linked distanced self-talk with healthy coping following the loss of a parent. For example, one child said, “No matter what, their dad loved them, and they have to think of the good things that happened…they can hold on to the good memories and just let the bad ones go.” Conversely, children who employed more immersed language had higher incidences of post-traumatic stress symptoms and more avoidant, unhealthy coping. One child heartbreakingly said, “I still picture it—how he looked at the end. I wish he didn’t have to be in pain. I’m upset that he died that way.”
All of these findings highlight how a small shift in the words we use to refer to ourselves during introspection can influence our ability to control chatter in a variety of domains. Given the benefits associated with this tool, it’s worth asking whether other types of distanced self-talk exist that are similarly effective in helping people manage their emotions. My colleagues and I would discover that such additional shifts exist, but their use is so subtle, pervasive, and seamless you could almost fail to notice them.
Although the chatter I experienced after receiving my letter felt unbearable before I said my own name to myself, there was one moment that brought me a sliver of relief, if only temporarily: when the police officer I met with told me that such threats were in fact a common occurrence for people with public-facing careers and they almost always blow over without incident. Plunged as I was in deep threat thinking—the letter did not feel like an exciting challenge—this information didn’t erase my fears. But it did provide a beam of hope.
It made me feel less alone.
There is a potent psychological comfort that comes from normalizing experiences, from knowing that what you’re experiencing isn’t unique to you, but rather something everyone experiences—that, unpleasant as it is, it’s just the stuff of life. When we are going through grief, relationship turbulence, professional setbacks, parenting struggles, or other types of adversity, we often feel agonizingly alone, zoomed in as we are on our problems. Yet when we talk with others and learn that they have faced similar challenges, we realize that as hard as the experience is, it happens to other people, which gives an immediate sense of perspective. If other people got through this hardship, our internal dialogue now reasons with us, then so can I. What felt extraordinary, it turns out, is in fact ordinary. This offers relief.
Now what if, instead of normalizing our experiences through hearing other people talk about overcoming adversity or benefiting from their expertise, we could find a form of distanced self-talk with the same effect? What I mean is, could there be something built into the very structure of language that helps us think about our own personal experiences in more universal terms?
In May 2015, David Goldberg, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur and husband of Facebook’s COO, Sheryl Sandberg, had an accident on a treadmill while on vacation in Mexico and died tragically. In the aftermath, Sandberg was devastated. Her life with Goldberg had disappeared, as if her future had been ripped out of her hands. In the wake of his death, she looked for ways to withstand the fierce tide of grief that threatened to suck her under. She began journaling about what she was going through—an understandable choice because, as we know, expressive writing is an effective means of gaining helpful emotional distance. Yet with the words she used in at least one entry—which she decided to publish on Facebook—she also did something curious. Notice the exact words in Sandberg’s post (my italics),
I think when tragedy occurs, it presents a choice. You can give in to the void, the emptiness that fills your heart, your lungs, constricts your ability to think or even breathe. Or you can try to find meaning.
At first glance, her repetitive use of the second-person “you” and “your” might seem odd. She’s writing about one of the most painful personal experiences imaginable without using the most natural word for recounting her own experience: “I.” Instead, she relies on the word “you,” but not in the sense we’ve previously discussed, as if addressing herself directly like she were talking to someone else. She’s using the word instead to invoke the universal nature of her hardship. It’s as if she were saying, “Anyone can give in to the void, the emptiness that fills everyone’s heart, everyone’s lungs, constricts everyone’s ability to think or even breathe. Or anyone can try to find meaning.”
Sandberg is by no means alone in using the word “you” this way. If we look around, we can find similar usages—in everyday speech, on talk shows and radio, in song lyrics. Indeed, once you notice this phenomenon, it’s hard to read interviews with athletes talking about bad games or politicians doing interviews about obstacles without noticing their use of “you” in this fashion to frame their experience more broadly.
The question, of course, is why we do this. Why do we use a word that is typically used to refer to someone else—you—to talk about our own deeply emotional experiences? My colleagues Susan Gelman and Ariana Orvell and I call this specific usage “generic ‘you’ ” or “universal ‘you.’ ” And we’ve found that it is another type of linguistic hack that promotes psychological distance.
The first thing we know about the universal “you” is that people use it to talk about norms that apply to everyone, not personal preferences. For instance, if a child holds up a pencil and asks, “What do you do with this?” an adult will typically respond, “You write with it” (not “I write with it”). In contrast, if that same child holds up a pencil and asks, “What do you like to do with this?” an adult will typically respond in a personal first-person fashion, saying, “I write with it.” In other words, the generic usage of the word “you” allows us to talk about how things function generally, not our specific idiosyncratic proclivities.
We also know people use the universal “you” to make sense of negative experiences, to think about difficult events as not unique to the self but instead characteristic of life in general, as Sandberg did in her Facebook post. For example, in one study we instructed people to either relive a negative experience or think about the lessons they could learn from the event. Participants were almost five times more likely to use the universal “you” when they were trying to learn from their negative experience than when they simply rehashed what happened. It connected their personal adversity more generally to how the world works. Participants who were asked to learn from their experience wrote statements like “When you take a step back and cool off, sometimes we see things from a different perspective,” and “You can actually learn a lot from others who see things differently than you.”
These kinds of normalizations provide us with the perspective we lack when mired in chatter. They help us learn lessons from our experiences that contribute to us feeling better. In other words, our use of the universal “you” in speech isn’t arbitrary. It’s one more emotion-management gadget that human language provides.
So, what happened after I talked to myself and fell asleep?
The next morning, I woke up and life was back to normal. I chatted over breakfast with my wife about what she had planned for the day, played with my daughter before leaving for work, and got back to all the students and research that I had neglected over the past three days. Distanced self-talk had transformed my ability to manage my chatter. And, as if my tormentor saw that he or she could no longer upset me, the letter writer never bothered me again. And yet a troubling thought stayed with me.
I had spoken to numerous people after receiving the letter, when I was at the height of my rumination. I reached out for help. And without exception, the conversations I had with friends, family, and colleagues made me feel supported. But they didn’t make me feel better about the situation. They didn’t soothe my inner voice the way distanced self-talk had.
The reason for this discrepancy brings us to another one of the great mysteries of the human mind. Just like the inner voice itself, other people can be a tremendous asset, but more often than we realize, they can be a liability too.