Dr's Casebook: Talking to yourself may help to control stress

First person is good when you have constructive self-talk, because it boosts the positive. Photo: StockAdobe

It has been exciting to watch the Olympics as Great Britain and Northern Ireland continue to accumulate medals of all three colours. It has also been interesting watching interviews and hearing how athletes prepare for events or deal with the results, whether it is a win or a result less than hoped for.

Dr Keith Souter writes: Talking to yourself in the third person seems to be very effective in adverse situations, because it gives you a little distance from the emotion and allows more self-control.

A study from the University of Michigan has looked at the effect of talking to yourself, when using both first person and third person self-talk. For example, first person self-talk would be saying to oneself, ‘why am I feeling angry or upset?’ Third person self-talk would be, ‘why is he upset, or why is Jack angry?’

Using third person leads people to think about themselves in a similar way to the way they think about others. It creates distance.

Two experiments were done in the study. In the first, participants were shown images that were either neutral or disturbing. They were asked to react to them using self-talk in both first person and third person, all the while having their brain activity measured with an EEG. Remarkably, they found that participants’ emotional brain activity decreased very quickly when they referred to themselves in the third person.

In the other experiment they measured participants’ effort-related brain activity. They found that using third person required no more effort than using first person.

Self-talk is really the inner voice equivalent of a sports announcer commenting on players successes or failures during a sport. The thing is that the players never hear the commentator’s talk, yet you hear your own inner self-talk.

Sometimes the self-talk can be upbeat, which will boost your esteem. That is called constructive self-talk. On the other hand, if it is downbeat and critical, it can be destructive self-talk.

First person is good when you have constructive self-talk, because it boosts the positive. Third person, as the study shows, is better for destructive self-talk, when you are angry, stressed, jealous or anxious, because it distances you from the emotion and minimizes it. It is worth practicing and you may find that it gives you more self-control that you had before.