by Ethan Kross
And she’s now a professor at an Ivy League university (and no longer works for the government).
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The strange thing about being a psychologist, especially one who studies how to control the inner voice, is that no matter what insights your research yields, you still can’t escape being yourself. Which is to say, when I “go inside,” I can still get lost, in spite of everything I know about how to distance. There’s no other way of explaining what happened to me when I received the threatening letter from my stalker. I was aware of a variety of distancing tools to calm my chatter: adopting a fly-on-the-wall perspective, assuming a detached observer’s perspective, imagining how I’d feel in the future, writing in a journal, and so on. And yet…
I was immersed.
I was all chatter.
I was living Solomon’s Paradox.
All I could do was verbalize my panicked inner voice. Naturally, this created tension between my wife and me, and even her distanced perspective couldn’t yank me out of my dialogue. My chatter was so intense it felt as if there were no way out—until suddenly I found the way.
I said my own name.
Chapter Four
When I Become You
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 t
he 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?
Say Your Name
“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 sel
f-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.