A shared universe › Blog › Talking to yourself as you would to someone else · Español
We all carry a voice inside that comments on what we do: it remembers, plans, encourages and, now and then, scolds. We almost never notice how it speaks to us. And a detail as small as the grammatical person it uses can change how you feel.
The psychologist Ethan Kross runs the Emotion and Self-Control Laboratory at the University of Michigan and has spent years studying this inner conversation. In a 2021 book on the subject, Chatter, he explains that this voice is very useful: it helps us hold a piece of information while we use it, rehearse what we are going to say, push ourselves when something is hard and make sense of what is happening to us.
The problem appears when it gets stuck on the bad. Kross calls it “chatter”: going over an argument, returning again and again to a mistake, running ahead to everything that could go wrong. It is very like what psychology knows as rumination. Then the voice that was meant to help us think no longer lets us think.
In 2014, Kross and his team published seven studies with 585 people in all. In one of them, a group of students had to prepare, in very little time, a speech for assessors about why they deserved the job of their dreams. Before speaking, they spent a few minutes thinking about how they felt. Half were asked to do it in the first person: “Why am I so nervous?”. The other half were asked to address themselves as “you” or by name: “Why are you so nervous, Marta?”.
Those who spoke to themselves as to another person felt less distress, the assessors gave their speeches higher marks and, afterwards, they went over how it had gone less. In other studies in the same series, talking to yourself this way made what was coming look more like a challenge than a threat. And the effects were the same in people with a lot of social anxiety as in everyone else.
Kross explains it with a simple idea. When you speak to yourself as “you” or by name, you look at yourself a little from the outside, as you would look at a friend. And with our friends’ problems almost all of us are more sensible than with our own.
The psychologist Igor Grossmann of the University of Waterloo and Kross himself tested this in 2014. They asked people who were in a relationship to imagine an infidelity: some, their own partner’s; others, the partner of their best friend. About the other person’s problem they reasoned more wisely: they took more points of view into account, sought agreement more and recognised better what they didn’t know. But when those thinking about their own case were asked to look at it in the third person, the difference disappeared.
In 2017, a study by Jason Moser of Michigan State University, with Kross and other colleagues, measured brain activity. When people reacted to unpleasant images by speaking to themselves in the third person, emotional activity fell within about a second, and with no more mental effort than speaking in the first person. The authors themselves presented it cautiously: more research is needed to know how far it goes.
There is another kind of distance that also helps: the distance of time. Emma Bruehlman-Senecal and Ozlem Ayduk of the University of California, Berkeley, found in 2015 that thinking about how a problem will look in a few years, and not tomorrow, reduces distress, because it reminds you of something that is forgotten in the moment: what hurts today will not hurt just as much for ever. With all this in mind, here are some things you can try:
It isn’t a magic formula. Almost all of these studies were done with students and on short laboratory tasks. But it costs nothing, takes a moment and you can try it today.
Sometimes the voice inside no longer comments: it attacks. “You’re a disaster”, “you always ruin it”, “nobody can stand you”. Speaking to yourself as “you” does little good if what you say with that “you” is insults. Here changing the pronoun isn’t enough; the tone has to change too: speaking to yourself with the kindness you would show someone you love. It is what the psychologist Kristin Neff calls self-compassion.
If that harsh voice doesn’t go away within weeks, takes away your sleep or your appetite for life, or tells you that you are worthless or that others would be better off without you, it deserves to be heard by someone else: your doctor or a person you trust. In Spain you can talk to a person at the Teléfono de la Esperanza, 717 003 717, at any time. If you are thinking of ending your life, call 024: it is free and answered 24 hours a day. If you are in another country, call your local emergency number or a helpline there.
When you keep a stranger’s star company, you choose kind phrases without thinking. Notice which ones they are. Perhaps tomorrow you can say one of them to yourself.