This content is locked. Please login or become a member.
Zoom out
When we experience chatter, we zoom in on our problems really narrowly, tunnel vision. All we can think about is the issue at hand. This can be really problematic for our well-being because we’re spending all of our time turning over this negative problem in our head. And what that does is it keeps those negative feelings chronically activated over time. That leads to something that is called perseverative cognition. Research indicates that that chatter in the form of this perseverative thinking actually contributes to states of anxiety and depression. And one of the things that we’ve learned is that when that happens, the ability to take a step back and zoom out on our experience, the ability to focus on the bigger picture or adopt a broader perspective, can be a useful tool for managing our chatter. We call this tool distancing.
When we take a step back and we think about our experiences from a broader perspective, that makes accessible lots of other information that is out there, that is often really useful for helping us gauge just how extreme a problem we’re dealing with actually is. When we think about the bigger picture, we can also often find solutions for dealing with our problems that aren’t apparent to us when we’re stuck in that zoomed-in tunnel vision, immersed in our negative experiences.
Coach yourself
How do you distance? The good news is that there are lots of ways to do it. And one tool involves trying to think about your problems, trying to give yourself advice like you’d give advice to someone else. Human beings are much better at advising others than they are following their own advice. There’s actually a name for this phenomenon. It’s called Solomon’s paradox. It’s named after the Bible’s King Solomon who was world-renown for being a wise individual. People would travel from distant lands to seek his council. Yet when it came to his own life, he made a slew of terrible decisions. He was able to give advice to other people, but he couldn’t follow his own wisdom. When he was counseling others, he had distance from their experiences, but he didn’t have distance from his own problems.
One of the things that science has taught us is that we possess tools for helping us think through our problems like they’re happening to someone else. And we can actually use language to help us do this. When you’re experiencing a problem, try to coach yourself through that problem using your own name and the second-person pronoun “you.” So if I’m dealing with a difficult situation at work, I might think to myself silently (the silent here is important — you don’t wanna do this out loud), alright, Ethan, how are you gonna deal with the situation? If you think about when we use names and second-person pronouns, we use those parts of speech when we think about and refer to other people. So the links between names and thinking about others, that’s an incredibly tight association in your mind. The way this works is when you use your name to think about your problem, that’s turning on the machinery in your mind for thinking about others. It’s still you, but you have this different frame on how you’re thinking about the problem. So you’re coaching yourself through the problem like you would give advice to a close friend, and that often makes the difference between getting out of the chatter versus staying in it.
If you look around, there are lots of examples of people using distanced self-talk under stress to coach themselves through the situation. If you’re not familiar with Malala Yousafzai, she’s the youngest person to ever win the Nobel Peace Prize. And around the time that she won that award, she went on a talk show, and the host of that talk show, he asked her, what went through your head essentially when you found out that the Taliban were plotting to kill you? And she said
“If he comes, what would you do, Malala? Then I would reply myself that Malala, just take a shoe and hit him. But then I said … but then I said, if you hit a Talib with your shoe, then there would be no difference between you and the Talib.”
She’s contemplating what is arguably the most stressful experience that any human being could entertain, the prospect of a well-organized terrorist group plotting to kill you. And what does she do when she gets to that moment in her mind? She starts coaching herself through the situation using her name. She uses distanced self-talk.
LeBron James used distanced self-talk as well. So when he was contemplating moving from the Cleveland Cavaliers, his hometown team, during an interview, he said, “I didn’t want to make an emotional decision.” And in the moment he uttered that goal, he said, “LeBron James has gotta do what is best for LeBron James.” In that instance, LeBron was using distanced self-talk. It’s a perfect illustration of it, right? He doesn’t wanna make an emotional decision. So what does he do? He uses his own name to coach himself through the problem.