by Ethan Kross
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.
Get to It, Fred
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.
The Universal “You”
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 i
sn’t arbitrary. It’s one more emotion-management gadget that human language provides.
* * *
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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.
Chapter Five
The Power and Peril of Other People
Tragedy arrived swiftly and without warning on the campus of Northern Illinois University on a Thursday in February 2008, when a twenty-seven-year-old with a history of mental illness named Steven Kazmierczak kicked open the door to a lecture hall where a geology class was in session. Armed with a shotgun and three handguns, he stepped onto the stage that the professor was lecturing from. The 119 students sitting in the class watched in confusion, then disbelief, then terror, as the unexpected guest fired a shotgun at them, followed by another blast at their professor. Then he opened fire on them again. After discharging more than fifty rounds from different guns, he concluded his rampage by turning one of them on himself and taking his own life. Minutes later, the police descended on the gruesome scene. Twenty-one people were injured and five dead, not including Kazmierczak. The university and the small city of DeKalb, where it is located, were devastated.