Why Talking to Yourself Can Make You Happier

NeuroNation
Sep 3, 2018 · 3 min read

Talking to yourself in third person
can ease up your emotional tension

A quite unexpected thesis, don’t you think? What might look as a bold psycho-trick at first glance is a promising self-management technique and a shortly revealed paper in the Nature Journal, one of the most prestigious scientific journals worldwide.

Get more distance to stay calm

We all have an internal monologue we engage in time to time. We use this kind of introspective to prepare for an intense moment, to structure our thoughts or just clear things up in our head. But can we qualify this approach scientifically? Why does it help, to engage in self-talk and what are the important underlying processes?

Prof. Jason S. Moser et al. from the University of Michigan, USA investigated the scientific part of self-talk and found out, what really works. The team of scientists asked participants to watch aversive images and recall painful autobiographical memories and reflect on them in words using either “I” or the name of the participant while measuring neural activity via event-related brain potentials (ERPs and functional magnetic resonance imaging — fMRI).

The scientists discovered, that using one’s own name to refer to the self during introspection, rather than the first-person pronoun “I”, increases peoples’ ability to control their thoughts, feelings, and behavior under stress.

“This prediction is motivated by the observation that people almost exclusively use names to refer to other people […] to refer to the self would virtually automatically lead people to think about the self similarly to how they think about someone else. That helps people gain a tiny bit of psychological distance from their experiences, which can often be useful for regulating emotions. Because of its simplicity and effectiveness, third-person self-talk could prove useful for promoting emotion regulation in daily life.” — Prof. Jason M. Moser

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It is in our nature to focus sometimes on negative or worrying events. However, the secret of a happy life is hidden in the ability to resist this impulsive, instinctive reactions and keep our emotions in balance. Through scientific working memory training, you can improve your self-regulation muscles and gain more control over your reactions.

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