Everyone engages in self-talk. But much depends on the way we do
it. Scientists now find that the right words can free us from our fears
and make us as wise about ourselves as we often are about others.
By Pamela Weintraub, published on May 4, 2015 - last reviewed on May 7, 2015
Everyone engages in self-talk. But much depends on the way we do it.
Scientists now find that the right words can free us from our fears and
make us as wise about ourselves as we often are about others.
Psychologist Ethan Kross was coasting through the streets of Ann
Arbor, Michigan, in Spring 2010 when he passed a red light. “Ethan, you
idiot!” he said to himself, vowing to drive safely the rest of the way
home. Then, because he is, after all, a psychologist, he stopped to
reflect on his turn of phrase. He didn’t say, “I’m an idiot.” “I called
myself by my first name,” he noted to himself. “Why?”
A few months later, LeBron James, the future Hall of Fame basketball
player, was on television discussing his decision to leave the Cleveland
Cavaliers for the Miami Heat. Fans in Cleveland were burning his jersey
in effigy, but James explained his decision had come from a place of
calm. “One thing I didn’t want to do was make an emotional decision,” he
told the audience. “I wanted to do what was best for LeBron James, and
to do what makes LeBron James happy.” Many questioned his sanity, and
Kross himself might have chalked such language up to standard celebrity
narcissism had he not recalled his own moment of self-reference.
Then Kross heard Malala Yousafzai, the selfless Pakistani activist for women’s
education and the youngest person to win the Nobel Prize, on
The Daily Show,
recounting her approach to the Taliban. “‘If the Taliban comes, what
would you do, Malala,’” she described herself as having said at the
time. “Then I would reply to myself, ‘Malala, just take a shoe and hit
him.’”
That spurred Kross the psychologist into action. He knew that people
naturally talk to themselves, but he didn’t know whether the chatter
amounted to much or whether the words they used even mattered. So he
decided to look into things.
In a series of groundbreaking experiments, Kross has found that how
people conduct their inner monologues has an enormous effect on their
success in life. Talk to yourself with the pronoun
I, for
instance, and you’re likely to fluster and perform poorly in stressful
circumstances. Address yourself by your name and your chances of acing a
host of tasks, from speech making to self-advocacy, suddenly soar.
Indeed, along with addressing a body of research by others, Kross is
forcing a whole new take on what has long been ignored or relegated to
pop psychology—the use of self-talk to boost confidence. His work
elevates self-talk to something far more significant: a powerful
instrument of consciousness itself. When deployed in very specific ways
at specific times, it frees the
brain to perform its absolute best.
By toggling the way we address the self—first person or third—we flip
a switch in the cerebral cortex, the center of thought, and another in
the amygdala, the seat of
fear,
moving closer to or further from our sense of self and all its
emotional intensity. Gaining psychological distance enables
self-control, allowing us to think clearly, perform competently. The
language switch also minimizes rumination, a handmaiden of
anxiety and
depression, after we complete a task. Released from negative thoughts, we gain perspective, focus deeply, plan for the future.
Scientists studying the inner voice say it takes shape in early
childhood
and persists lifelong as companion and creative muse. It is so
intimate, so constant, says British psychologist Charles Fernyhough,
that it can be considered thought itself. “When asked by Theaetetus to
define thought,” Fernyhough explains, “Socrates replied, ‘The talk which
the soul has with itself.’” User beware: This talk may be misused or
pushed to extremes, becoming a source of painful rumination or even
psychosis. Yet it can also make us detached observers of our own life.
Inner talk is one of the most effective, least-utilized tools available
to master the psyche and foster success.
When We Were Young
Self-talk starts audibly during the toddler years. The incessant
self-talk of toddlers is conducted out loud as a kind of instruction
manual, a self-generated road map to mastery; your voice directs you to
build Lego houses, sound out words and sentences in big-letter books.
Here’s what it sounds like, as captured in the riff of a little boy
guiding himself through the construction of a Tinkertoy truck: “The
wheels go here, the wheels go here. Oh, we need to start it all over
again. We need to close it up. See, it closes up. We’re starting it all
over again.”
Dubbed private talk by the Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky, that
early out-loud self-talk “transforms the task in question, just as the
use of a screwdriver transforms the task of assembling a shed,”
Fernyhough says. “Putting our thoughts into words gives them a more
tangible form, which makes them easier to use.”
Inner talk isn’t just mechanical,
Vygotsky contended—it
is the ultimate social act, an embrace and reinterpretation of
teachings picked up from knowledgeable elders, pushed back out in the
child’s own words. The more challenging the task, the more elaborate and
vociferous the talk, all the better to help children take control of
their actions and behavior.
Self-talk is the means by which the child navigates what Vygotsky
famously called “the zone of proximal development,” the realm of
challenges just beyond reach, too complex for a child to master alone.
Children build learning partnerships with adults to gain a skill and
then go off on their own, talking themselves through the task aloud. As
mastery is gained, self-talk is internalized until it is mostly
silent—still part of the ongoing dialogue with oneself, but more
intimate, no longer broadcast.
A generation of child psychologists, led by Laura Berk at the
University of Southern Illinois, has spent decades documenting the
nuances: In the best circumstances, the patient teacher or
caregiver
teaches children the unemotional, useful, step-by-step language for
mastering any task; the children, in turn, use such language in their
private speech to teach themselves other things. “You can do it—try
again,” the well-taught child might say to herself when she runs into
trouble, guiding herself through the most challenging problems, one
logical phrase at a time.
By contrast, an abrupt, angry teacher, prone to outbursts or
impatience, can set children up for an enduring pattern of
self-defeating self-talk. Children exposed to such teachers learn the
language of frustration, becoming inefficient self-guiders, getting mad
at themselves the minute they feel confused. “Idiot, you can’t do
anything,” a child might say to himself, tossing his book across the
room. To add injury to insult, the child also fails to master the task.
Private talk in childhood is also fuel for the imagination, Berk has
found. Pretending to be James Bond requires complexities of
coordination—arranging your “spy equipment,” finding a hideout in
Barcelona (under the staircase), foiling your enemy on her boat (the
bathtub), and getting your fake
identity
documents ready for the plane (your bed). All hinge on, and in turn
nurture, executive functions of the brain: controlling attention,
suppressing impulses in favor of situation-appropriate responses, and
combining various types of information in long-term memory, as well as
planning, organizing, and thinking flexibly—the very skills that
underlie later academic success.
Through self-talk, children plan out and activate their make-believe
characters. The more that children self-talk during make-believe play,
Berk discovered, the more likely they are to carry such a strategy into
adulthood, setting the stage for a lifetime of focused attention,
organization, and
self-regulation.
“It’s a myth that children with imaginary friends are somehow
disturbed,” Berk notes. “Children who talk to imaginary friends engage
in more self-talk as adults, and that makes them more self-controlled.”
Make-believe play, intrinsically tied to self-talk, gives children
psychological distance from their everyday lives, Berk says. And that
distance provides the psychic space they need to gain control over their
own impulses. If self-talk is one of the great achievements of
humanness, a gift from our evolutionary forebears and caretakers, who
soothed and stoked us with words, it is, in turn, one of the deep-seated
drivers of human evolution.
Now That We’re Grown
The blueprint for self-talk that is provided by caretakers and built
up during years of pretend play guides adult self-talk as well. Words
wired into the brain in the early years extend their influence beyond
the language centers of the thinking cortex into the primitive limbic
brain, seated in the amygdala, where emotional
memories
take shape and fears can tether us to the certain and the known. As the
words of self-talk reach the amygdala, they either mire us in anxiety
or free us of its constraints, allowing us to exert high levels of
self-discipline under all kinds of demanding circumstances (say,
athletic
competition or speaking in public).
In his initial studies of self-talk, conducted at the Emotion &
Self-Control Laboratory he directs at the University of Michigan, Ethan
Kross found that using one’s first name minimizes
social anxiety, the fear of being evaluated in a social context—the reason most people hate
public speaking.
It disables social anxiety not only before the stressful event but,
significantly, afterward too, when people tend to chew over their
performance and find themselves lacking—what scientists coolly call
“postevent processing.”
Kross asked 89 men and women to give a speech about why they were
ideally qualified to land their dream job. Each participant was given
five minutes to prepare. Half were instructed to use only pronouns to
describe themselves in a prep document; the other half were told to use
their given name. Those in the pronoun group wound up anchored in
anxiety, apt to see the task as impossible. “How can I possibly write a
speech in five minutes,” was a typical comment. Those who used their
names felt less anxiety approaching the task and felt highly confident.
“You can do it, Ethan,” was a typical exhortation in the run-up to a
speech.
But the acid test was what came afterward. Those using their name
performed better on the speech (judged by independent evaluators) and
engaged in far less rumination after it; they also experienced less
depression and felt less
shame.
In other studies, Kross found that using a first name empowers
participants, so what others see as a threat, they see as a challenge.
In giving a speech, volunteers using I felt inadequate to the task.
“When dealing with strong emotions, taking a step back and becoming a
detached observer can help,” Kross explains. “It’s very easy for people
to advise their friends, yet when it comes to themselves, they have
trouble. But people engaging in this process, using their own first
name, are distancing themselves from the self, right in the moment, and
that helps them perform.”
Easy on the Brain
It also eases the workload of the brain, finds Jason Moser, a
neuroscientist and clinical psychologist at Michigan State University.
He measured electrical activity in the brain as subjects engaged in
different varieties of self-talk.
Moser showed two groups of women photographs of a masked man holding a
knife to a woman’s throat. One group of women was prone to chronic
worrying, the other was psychologically normal. Each group was then
asked to elaborate about a positive outcome through self-talk while
Moser measured electrical activity in the lobes of the frontal cortex
and in the limbic system.
When women naturally employed the pronouns I and me in their
self-talk, worriers had to work much harder than nonworriers to talk
themselves into a positive view—and even then they failed to calm
themselves down. They dwelled on fears that the woman under attack had
died. The harder their frontal lobes worked, the more anxious their
limbic brain became; the task pitched them into a vicious circle of
rumination, anxiety, and more rumination.
The same women were asked to repeat the self-talk exercise, only this
time deliberately using their first names instead of personal pronouns.
They reported a dramatic reduction in anxiety levels. Electrodes picked
up the psychic improvement by documenting a vast reduction in energy
consumed by the frontal lobes. What’s more, the frantic cries of the
amygdala quieted down as well, its activity reduced by just about half.
The anxiety of the worrywart women—charted in their brain activity—was
relieved.
The findings suggest that the standard therapeutic approach to anxiety reduction—exposure
therapy—may be all wrong. Typically,
cognitive
behavioral therapists ask patients to push through the irrationality of
their fear by immersing themselves in a situation that ellicits the
anxiety and discovering that nothing terrible happens. Afraid of walking
over a high bridge? Then walk over that bridge repeatedly until the
terror subsides. “Often people don’t stick with those therapies because
they are so painful,” Moser reports.
The torment may be needless. A change of language may accomplish much
more, much faster. Changing the way people talk to themselves—a simple
shift from personal pronoun to first name—may offer a far less painful
and more lasting way of obliterating the anxiety. Fear of elevators? I
might just conquer it with “Now, Pam, go in that elevator and push 6.”
Change a word and you change the brain.
“It is like an automatic switch, in which the brain turns the self on
and the brain turns the self off,” Moser explains.“It is programmed
into us by our own evolution, built into us by language. This is not the
way we have tried to calm ourselves down in the past, but the studies
show it is not necessary to scold the emotional brain. Language creates a
distance that is real.”
Kross contends that the psychological distance gained by using one’s
personal name confers wisdom. It resolves what he dubs Solomon’s
paradox: As exemplified by the biblical King Solomon, people reason more
wisely about the social problems of others than they do about their
own. First-name self-talk shifts the focus away from the self; it allows
people to transcend their inherent egocentrism. And that makes them as
smart in thinking about themselves as they typically are about others.
In a series of studies reported recently in
Psychological Science,
Kross asked student subjects to consider how the recession of 2008
would affect job search from an immersed perspective (whether it was
happening to them) or from a distant vantage point (whether it was
happening to someone else). Kross also asked subjects to discuss from
both vantage points how the future would unfold should their favored
political candidate lose the presidential election that year.
In each experiment, those with the fly-on-the-wall perspective had
more intellectual humility; they were more attuned to future changes,
more flexible, and more open to diverse viewpoints. They were, in
general, far more able to think things through in a wise and measured
way. “The psychologically distanced perspective allowed people to
transcend their egocentric viewpoints and take the big picture into
account,” Kross reports. “We usually have trouble with that in the West;
we need some kind of mechanism, a trick, to take us out of our own
head.”
Working together, Moser and Kross have recently obtained evidence
from brain scans that self-distancing through self-talk indeed confers
wisdom. They directed student volunteers to self-talk while they
monitored their brains with an fMRI machine. Among subjects who talked
to themselves in the third person, the brain scans resembled those of
other students in the act of giving advice to friends. Not so among a
control group of students addressing themselves with personal pronouns.
The findings are applicable to the entire range of social
relationships, Kross contends, because asymmetry pervades the way people
think about all problems—better at dealing with others’ than with their
own. Self-distancing, he believes, can bring clarity in thinking about
social conflicts, whether in business or romance.
The Infinite Stream
We all carry on an internal monologue. We all engage in self-talk,
maintaining a lifelong stream of consciousness and running commentary
about ourselves and the world, much of it silent and in our own private
shorthand. It turns out to be important to a broad array of mental
processes.
Yet much as it can boost self-regulation and unleash cognitive
capability, self-talk is not without its dark side. Fernyhough suggests
that some glitch in internalization of the toddler’s private speech may
underlie auditory hallucinations in the adult. And people could use the
self-distancing of self-talk to actually avoid their emotions, Kross
notes.
But the science of self-talk is just getting under way. There may be
specific words, aside from our names, that can take us higher, faster,
further. That possibility awaits study.
In the meantime, the self-talk we’re already capable of points to the
deep roots of language and its power to affect the most primitive parts
of the brain, putting a brake on emotions that narrow our
possibilities. By teaching people how to self-talk effectively, Kross
says, “We can reach those depths through easy interventions, and that is
very important news.”
How to Talk Yourself Through a Challenge
Used correctly, inner language can focus thinking, enhance planning, and prevent the poison of later rumination.
“Jennifer( 1), what are you nervous about? It’s not the first
date you’ve ever been on. I know you like this guy, but take it slow
(2), and stay calm. Even if it doesn’t go perfectly, it won’t be the end
of the world. You’re capable (3), intelligent, accomplished, beautiful.
Just do your best and let the chips fall. Chill, Jen.”
1: Jennifer distances herself from the
stress
of a first date by addressing herself by name, seeing herself as she
would a friend. The distance confers wisdom, confidence, and calm she
would never have if immersed in the situation as
I or
me.
2: She also taps the kinds of strategies children use when engaging
in activities like building with blocks, only instead of instructing
herself to put the small square on top of the big rectangle, she now
tells herself to be calm. Her self-direction is precise.
3: Not least, Jennifer alleviates the gravity of the situation with a
few self-affirmations, allowing her to see the date in the context of
her whole being. She will not be devastated or ruminate endlessly on the
experience if the date doesn’t work out.
AFFIRMATIVE ACTION
It turns out that affirmations work—but not the way you think.
Switching from pronouns to names isn’t the only path to wise
perspective. There’s a kind of self-talk that has long been looked on as
hokey—self-affirmations, positive statements (“You are brilliant,” “You
are beautiful”) that have that 1970s, New Age aura and seem like
shortcuts to
self-esteem.
But researchers now find that they, too, serve a purpose. Just like
using given-name self-talk, such affirmations have the power to defuse
threats and confer perspective.
Psychologists Clayton Critcher and David Dunning of the University of
California at Berkeley have found that such feel-good ego boosts can
undercut criticism, providing a cushion against blasts of harshness from
the world. They can help us stand up to outside threats and persevere
in negotiations, in difficult jobs, and in the face of
health problems. They don’t work by seducing us into feeling great. I
t’s
not that we swallow them whole. They widen our perspective on our self,
help mitigate bad blows, and alleviate defensiveness. They are cognitive expanders.
To determine what it is that affirmations do, the
team
looked through the opposite end of the telescope—at what threats do
that affirmations may serve to counter. They hypothesized that threats
give us tunnel vision, narrowing our focus to one facet of the self so
that we see only the hungry bear and not the beautiful forest.
In one study, the researchers set up Ivy League students to fail on a
test, and prepped some of them with affirmations like “I feel proud”
and “I currently feel confident.” After all failed the fake test, the
affirmed reported a better sense of self-worth, even though the
affirmations had nothing to do with their
intelligence.
“Self-affirmations broadened perspective, bolstering self-worth by
undoing an otherwise constricted perspective under threat,” the team
reports.
In another study, the duo gave students a phony
personality
test, then delivered 36 statements of feedback, 24 of which were
negative. Those inoculated by affirmations were able to spend more time
poring over the negative feedback, a sign they were less defensive.
Those who were not pre-affirmed put the personality-decimating results
aside quickly, too defensive to consider them.
Affirmations are very efficient defocusers that help us to avoid the tunnel vision that threats encourage. Bolstered by an affirmation or two, we can more easily transcend a threat and see ourselves more fully.
Like 
some woman, their immediate knee-jerk reaction
is to put themselves down rather than to just accept it and show 
