by Ethan Kross
This dampening quality of distancing could, however, have an unintended consequence. Distancing shortened both negative and positive experiences. In other words, if you got a promotion at work and stepped back to remind yourself that status and money don’t really matter in the grand scheme of things and that we all die in the end anyway, your well-deserved joy would decrease. The takeaway: If you want to hold on to positive experiences, the last thing you want to do is become a fly on the wall. In such cases, immerse away.
By this time, it had become clear that we are all prone to either psychological immersion or psychological distance when we reflect on emotional experiences, though we aren’t locked into either state. The tendency we have shapes the patterns of our inner voice, but fortunately so does our ability to consciously alter our perspective.
Along with our work and Verduyn’s, a slew of other studies published around the same time began to shift our understanding of the role distancing plays in helping people control their emotions. Researchers at Stanford, for example, linked adopting the perspective of a detached observer with less rumination over time. Across the Atlantic, researchers at Cambridge found that teaching people to “see the big picture” reduced intrusive thinking (the kind that drains executive functions) and avoidance of painful memories. Other experiments demonstrated that even shrinking the size of an image that causes distress in one’s imagination reduces how upset people become when they view it.
Still other work applied the concept of distancing to education, showing how leading ninth graders to focus on the big-picture reasons for doing schoolwork—for instance, emphasizing how doing well in school would help them land their desired jobs and contribute to society as adults—led them to earn higher GPAs and stay more focused on boring but important tasks. Distance, then, helps us deal better not only with the big emotions we experience from upsetting situations but also with the smaller yet crucial daily emotional challenges of frustration and boredom that come with the important tedium of work and education.
All of this taught us that taking a step back could be effective for helping people manage their chatter in a variety of everyday contexts. But we would soon learn that gaining mental distance also has positive implications for something else important: wisdom.
Solomon’s Paradox
It was around 1010 B.C.E. The maternal dreams of a woman in Jerusalem, named Bathsheba, finally came true. After the loss of her first child as an infant, she now gave birth to a second child: a healthy young baby boy whom she named Solomon. As the Bible tells us, this was no ordinary baby. The son of David (of Goliath fame), Solomon grew up and went on to become king of the Jewish people. A peerless leader, he was respected not only for his military might and economic acumen but also for his wisdom. People would travel from distant lands to seek his counsel.
The dispute he most famously settled was between two women who both claimed to be the mother of the same child. He suggested that they cut the child in half, and when one of the women protested, he was able to identify her as the true mother. In an ironic twist of fate, however, when it came to Solomon’s own life, he wasn’t so savvy. Amorous and shortsighted, he married hundreds of women from different faiths and went to great lengths to please them, building elaborate temples and shrines so they could worship their gods. This eventually alienated him from his own God, and the people he ruled, which would finally lead to his kingdom’s demise in 930 B.C.E.
The asymmetry in King Solomon’s thinking is a chatter parable that embodies a fundamental feature of the human mind: We don’t see ourselves with the same distance and insight with which we see others. Data shows that this goes beyond biblical allegory: We are all vulnerable to it. My colleagues and I refer to this bias as “Solomon’s Paradox,” though King Solomon is by no means the only sage who could lend his name to the phenomenon.
Take a little-known story about one of the wisest men in U.S. history, Abraham Lincoln, who, in 1841, was in a rut both professionally and romantically. He had yet to establish himself as a lawyer to the extent he desired. He was also anguishing over doubts about his feelings for his fiancée, Mary, because he had fallen in love with another woman. Immersed in his problems, he sank into depression, or what one historian has called “Lincoln’s melancholy.”
The following year, when the future president had begun to recover his hope and clarity, a good friend of his, Joshua Speed, fell into similar doubts about his own engagement. Now in a different role, Lincoln was able to offer Speed sound advice he hadn’t been able to marshal with regard to his own situation. He told Speed that his ideas about love were the problem, not the woman he was engaged to marry. Lincoln later reflected, as Doris Kearns Goodwin writes in her book Team of Rivals, that “had he understood his own muddled courtship as well as he understood Speed’s, he might have ‘sailed through clear.’ ”
Before we look at how distancing can lead to wisdom, it’s worth taking a moment to ask what wisdom actually is in practice. In a rigorous field like psychology, an amorphous-seeming concept like wisdom at first appears hard to define. Nonetheless, scientists have identified its salient features. Wisdom involves using the mind to reason constructively about a particular set of problems: those involving uncertainty. Wise forms of reasoning relate to seeing the “big picture” in several senses: recognizing the limits of one’s own knowledge, becoming aware of the varied contexts of life and how they may unfold over time, acknowledging other people’s viewpoints, and reconciling opposing perspectives.
Although we generally associate wisdom with advanced age, because the longer you live the more uncertainty you will have experienced and learned from, research indicates that you can teach people how to think wisely regardless of their age—through gaining distance.
Take a study that Igor Grossmann and I did in 2015. We presented people with a dilemma and asked them to predict how it would unfold in the future. One group of participants was asked to imagine their partner had cheated on them, while the other group imagined the same exact thing happening to a friend—a practical method of creating psychological distance.
While some people may understandably think that outrage is the wisest response to discovering that your partner cheated on you, our interest was in whether distance would decrease rather than increase conflict by cultivating a wise response. As we expected, people were much wiser when they imagined the problem was happening to someone else. They felt it was more important to find compromise with the person who had cheated, and they were also more open to hearing that person’s perspective.
Another illustration of how people can use distance as a hatch to escape from Solomon’s Paradox comes from research on medical decision making. Few contexts are more chatter provoking—and consequential—than having to make an important decision about your health. Uncertainty surrounding physical pain or illness, never mind mortality, bloats the verbal stream with worry, which can cloud our judgment and lead us to make poor decisions that, ironically, further impair our health.
In one large-scale experiment, a group of scientists gave people a choice: do nothing and have a 10 percent chance of dying from cancer, or undergo a novel treatment that has a 5 percent chance of killing you. Obviously, the second option is better, because the risk of death is 5 percent less. And yet, consistent with prior research indicating that people often choose to do nothing rather than something when it comes to their health, 40 percent of participants chose the more life-threatening option. But—and this is a big but—when the same people were asked to make this decision for someone else, only 31 percent made the bad choice. When you frame this percentage difference in terms of the number of cancer diagnoses per year—18 million—that adds up to more than 1.5 million people who could sabotage their own best course of treatment. But this lack of wisdom, brought about by a lack of mental distance, can also influence other areas of our life.
Daniel Kahneman, the
Nobel Prize–winning psychologist and author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, has written that one of his most informative experiences involved learning how to avoid an “inside view” and adopt an “outside view.” As he frames it, an inside view limits your thinking to your circumstances. Because you don’t know what you don’t know, this often leads to inaccurate predictions about potential obstacles. The outside view, on the other hand, includes a broader sample of possibilities and thus more accuracy. You’re able to better foresee obstacles and prepare accordingly.
Although Kahneman’s views pertain to accurately predicting the future, research shows that the ability to step outside oneself—another way of saying mental distance—is helpful for decision making more generally. It can help us get past information overload—for instance, when we’re evaluating contrasting features and prices while car shopping—so that we can attain clarity. It can roll back “loss aversion,” the concept Kahneman popularized referring to the fact that people are much more sensitive to losses than they are to gains. Additionally, it can make people more compromising and willing to tolerate alternative views. In one study conducted right before the 2008 U.S. presidential election, Igor and I found that asking people to imagine a future in which their chosen candidate lost the election from a distanced perspective (we asked them to imagine that they were living in another country) led them to become less extreme in their political views and more open to the idea of cooperating with people who supported the opposing candidate.
These positive interpersonal and wisdom-enhancing effects of distancing make this skill invaluable to another area of life where we often experience inner-voice ranting: our romantic relationships. My colleague Özlem and I wondered how distance might factor into intimate-partner harmony. So over twenty-one days we profiled the tendency of people to distance each time they fought with their romantic partner. We found that whether people “distanced” or “immersed” when thinking about problems in their relationships influenced how they argued. When an immerser’s partner argued calmly, the immerser responded the same way—with similar patience and compassion. But once their partners began to show the slightest hint of anger or disdain, the immersers responded in kind. As for the distancers, when their partners talked calmly, they too remained calm. But even if their partner got worked up, they were still able to problem solve, which eased the conflict.
A subsequent experiment took this research even further by showing that teaching couples to distance when they focused on disagreements in their relationships buffered against romantic decline. Over the course of a year, spending twenty-one minutes trying to work through their conflicts from a distanced perspective led couples to experience less unhappiness together. If not exactly a love potion, distancing does seem to keep the flame of love from being extinguished.
All this research demonstrates how useful stepping back can be for changing the nature of the conversations we have with ourselves. Yet more broadly, it also shows how we can reason wisely about the most chatter-provoking situations we face—those that involve uncertainty, which requires wisdom. But what’s striking to me about all this work is that it demonstrates just how many ways there are to get psychological distance, how many options our mind gives us for gaining perspective. But sometimes we need more than wisdom. As Tracey would learn at Harvard, we need new stories—imagined narratives that also add distance—which we create by harnessing the power of the time machine in our own minds.
Time Travel and the Power of the Pen
There Tracey was, sitting in her dorm room each night, gnawing away at her pencil eraser, tormented by her acne, her inner voice spiraling into despondency with the split demands of being a covert agent in training and a lonely scholarship student at an elite university. Helplessly immersed in her anxiety, she finally spoke to therapists at Harvard and the NSA. Much to her disappointment, neither counselor really helped. She remained as alone as ever—or did she?
As a hobby, but seeming to sense it would aid her in some way, Tracey embarked on a family history project. She was fascinated by the long chain of people and events that had brought her into existence. So, during breaks from school, when she wasn’t required to be at the NSA, she chased down stories from her past. Doing so led her to ride on the backs of motorcycles with relatives around Lake Michigan and walk the shores of Lake Merritt in California, wander the sticky streets of New Orleans’s French Quarter with two aunts, and make grave rubbings from the family headstones that dotted the cemetery down the road from her ancestors’ burned-down farm in central Texas.
As her relatives opened up to her, Tracey heard about the struggles of being part of one of the first African American families living in Kalamazoo, Michigan. She discovered that her great-grandmother had been a voodoo practitioner in a relationship with a white man, her great-grandfather, and learned about the prayers she cast to ward off evil spirits. And after careful but persistent prodding, she eventually got different relatives to talk about the most painful and oppressive chapters of her family’s past in the United States. She confirmed that she was the great-great-grandchild of slaves and learned that one of her great-grandfathers had been lynched, while another had been conscripted into the Confederate army. She also discovered she was a descendant of George Washington’s.
The deeper Tracey delved into her family’s history, the calmer she noticed herself feeling when she returned to Harvard. On the one hand, as she tapped into the legacy of her forebears, she seemed to be demonstrating to the world that a descendant of slaves could achieve success at one of the most prestigious institutions in the world. In spite of her difficulties at Harvard, this historical perspective gave her a bird’s-eye view of how far she had come, even making her think her ancestors would be proud of her. At the same time, learning about the suffering that her forebears had endured also helped her put her trials and tribulations in perspective. In her mind, the anxiety surrounding not making grades and not being able to date whom she wanted paled in comparison to the torment her ancestors must have experienced toiling away as slaves. She had become a fly on the wall not just of her own life but of generations of lives—the long line of ancestors who survived the transatlantic slave crossing and eventually flourished in the United States over time. This dramatically calmed her inner voice.
Several studies back up scientifically what Tracey experienced personally, revealing that the ability to strategically time travel in one’s mind can be a tool for creating positive personal narratives that reroute negative inner dialogues. But the benefits of mental time travel aren’t restricted to adopting a bird’s-eye view of the past to weave together a positive story about the present. You can also benefit by mentally time traveling into the future, a tool called temporal distancing. Studies show that when people are going through a difficult experience, asking them to imagine how they’ll feel about it ten years from now, rather than tomorrow, can be another remarkably effective way of putting their experience in perspective. Doing so leads people to understand that their experiences are temporary, which provides them with hope.
In a certain sense, then, what temporal distancing promotes is one of the facets of wisdom: the understanding that the world is constantly in flux and circumstances are going to change. Recognizing that feature of life when it comes to negative experiences can be tremendously alleviating. It is what helped me, for example, cope with what was arguably the most chatter-provoking event of the past century: the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.
As schools closed, quarantines began to take effect and the world outside became quiet; chatter began to brew in my mind just like millions of other people. Will social distancing affect my children’s well-being? How am I going to survive without leaving the house for weeks? Will the economy ever improve? Focusing on how I would feel once the pandemic ends made me realize that what we were going through was temporary. Just as countless pandemics had come and gone in the long history of our species, so too w
ould the COVID-19 threat eventually pass. That buoyed my inner voice.
My colleague Özlem has found that temporal distancing helps people manage major stressors like the loss of a loved one but also more minor yet still critical ones, like looming work deadlines. And best of all, this technique doesn’t just make you feel better; it even improves your love life by making relationships and arguments fare better, with less blame and more forgiveness.
Alongside her family history project, Tracey also kept a journal as her college years progressed. This, too, became a medium for gaining distance. Although journaling has surely been around nearly as long as the written word, it is only in the past few decades that research has begun to illuminate the psychological consolation it provides. Much of this work has been pioneered by the psychologist James Pennebaker (yes, he has the word “pen” in his name). Over the course of a long and distinguished career, he has shown that simply asking people to write about their most upsetting negative experiences for fifteen to twenty minutes—to create a narrative about what happened, if you will—leads them to feel better, visit the doctor less, and have healthier immune function. By focusing on our experiences from the perspective of a narrator who has to create a story, journaling creates distance from our experience. We feel less tied to it. Tracey journaled for years, and it helped her immensely.
Thanks to her inventive ability to pacify her internal dialogues, by the end of Tracey’s senior year at Harvard her acne had abated, her nervous tics subsided, and her grades were stellar. She had subdued her chatter. After graduating from Harvard, she began her work for the NSA. She would spend the next eight years working on covert missions in conflict zones around the world. With hundreds of hours of advanced language training under her belt, she spoke French and Arabic fluently and blended seamlessly into her various assignments, many of which still remain confidential. The intelligence work she produced would be used to brief the highest levels of the U.S. government all the way up to the White House. In many ways, she would end up living the dynamic, cinematic life she had fantasized about when she first learned about the NSA scholarship in high school. To this day, Tracey still keeps a journal.