Should I talk to myself in the third person?
· Source: Kross et al., Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2014
You have a call at three that you’ve been dreading since Monday. At twenty to three you’re standing in the kitchen with a cold cup of tea, and your head is running the same lines: what if I freeze, what if they ask about the numbers, why did I agree to this. Every sentence starts with “I”, and each one pulls the knot a little tighter.
Now picture a friend standing in that kitchen instead. You would probably have something calm and useful for her in under a minute. “You know this stuff. You’ve done harder calls. Say the main point first.” Advice for someone else comes easily. Advice for ourselves, in the middle of the moment, is much harder to find.
What the experiments asked people to do
Kross and his colleagues studied a very small change in how people talk to themselves. Some people were asked to think about a stressful situation using “I”. Others thought about the same kind of situation using their own name or “you”, the way you would speak to someone else.
The researchers picked two moments most of us know well. One was getting ready to give a speech. The other came after an unpleasant conversation, when people thought back over what had happened.
In both, the people who used their name or “you” handled the stress better than those who used “I”. That is the finding, and it’s worth reading it as it is. People did this on purpose because they were asked to, and the researchers measured how they got through one specific stressful moment. It doesn’t show that talking about yourself by name will change your life, or that it helps with every kind of trouble.
Why a name might make a difference
The study tells us what happened. Why it happened is a separate question, so take what follows as our plain reading of it.
When you say “I”, you are inside the moment: the racing heart, the bad feeling, the worst case. When you say your name, you are describing a person in a situation. It is the same situation. You’re just talking about it from one step away, roughly the way you’d talk about a friend’s problem. That step is small, and it may be enough to make the next useful sentence easier to find.
Your name puts a little distance between you and the moment.
Going round in circles isn’t thinking it through
That loop in the kitchen is rumination, and it has a bad record. When Nolen-Hoeksema, Wisco and Lyubomirsky pulled the studies together in 2008, the picture was consistent: the more you go round, the darker the thoughts get, and the harder it becomes to do anything about the cause.
This matters because replaying feels like work. It seems that one more pass will finally turn up the answer. Mostly it turns up the same fear, a bit louder than before. Thinking a problem through has an end: you see what happened and decide what to do next. Replaying has no end at all.
Talking to yourself by name is one way to move from replaying to describing. “Mark is worried about the numbers. Mark has the numbers open in the second tab.” The second sentence is already a small plan.
Pushing the thought away tends to backfire
Telling yourself to stop rarely works, and there’s a famous experiment about why. Daniel Wegner’s team gave people one instruction: don’t think of a white bear. Afterwards, the people who had been trying to push the bear away thought about it more often, not less.
Later research has been mixed on how strong this effect is. One part of the work holds up as practical advice, though: when people put their attention on one specific thing instead, the effect went away. So you don’t have to choose between replaying a thought and forcing it out. You can say it fully, once, and then turn to something concrete.
Saying it is different from only thinking it
Only one study cited here had people speak out loud. In it, Lyubomirsky and her colleagues asked participants to revisit their worst life event by writing, by talking into a recorder, or by thinking alone.
Writers and talkers came out ahead of the thinkers on life satisfaction a month later. Nobody in that study used the third person, so it says nothing about names. It does suggest that sentences, written or spoken, do something that silent going-over doesn’t.
Put the pieces together and you get a simple order. Say the thing in full sentences, with your name instead of “I”, and then move on to something you can actually do.
Starting small
The first time you try this, it may feel like acting. That’s normal, and there are a few ways to make it easier. What follows is practical advice from us, not something the studies tested.
Start where nobody can hear you: a walk, the car, the kitchen before anyone else is up. Saying your own name out loud in front of colleagues is a much bigger step, and you don’t need it.
If your name feels too strange, use “you”. In the experiments, people used either their name or “you”, so you can pick whichever feels less odd. “You’ve prepared for this. You know the first three points.”
Keep it short. Three or four sentences is plenty: what is happening, how it feels, what comes next. You’re not giving yourself a speech. You’re taking one step back and then returning to the task.
Here is an invented example of how that can sound at twenty to three. “Mark has a call he’s nervous about. Mark is worried they’ll ask about the March numbers. He has those numbers open, and if he doesn’t know something, he can say he’ll send it by Friday.” Then he drinks the tea while it’s still warm and joins the call.
It works after the fact too. On the way home, you can go back over the call the same way: what happened, what went fine, what Mark would do differently next time. That’s the second moment the researchers looked at, the one after an unpleasant conversation.
What this does not promise
Talking about yourself by name is a small habit for a specific moment. In the research it was tested on getting through a speech and an unpleasant conversation, not on problems that last for months. It won’t make the call go well, and it may feel silly the first few times. That feeling usually passes after a sentence or two.
A worry that has circled for weeks, or one that takes your sleep or your work, needs more than a grammar trick. See a therapist or a doctor about it. Your diary can help you spot which thoughts return, and that’s all it claims to do.
Try it tonight
- Tonight, tell the hardest moment of the day using your own name instead of “I”.
- “Anna was nervous before the call. Anna said what she needed to say anyway.”
- Finish with one sentence about what Anna does next, and leave it there.
Say it out loud in Halflight, name and all. It writes it down under today’s date, so a week later you can read how you talked yourself through it.