Hey there, it's Susan Peirce Thompson, and welcome to the Weekly Vlog.
Oh, I'm so excited about this week's topic. It's a tool that I've started to use since I just learned about it in the last week, and it's been so, so helpful for me. I can't wait to pass it on to you, especially because I'm aware that we have a whole crop of new Boot Campers who've just signed up for the all new Bright Line Eating Boot Camp 2.0. And that means that there's hundreds and hundreds of people, well, thousands really, who are going through this Boot Camp now, and either facing Bright Line Eating for the first time or recommitting to it. And that first couple weeks, that first month is filled with intensity because you're breaking a lot of bad habits, maybe breaking some addictions, and setting up a whole bunch of new behaviors, which is very willpower depleting. And all through the day, you come face to face with difficult situations and you need to remember to get your groceries and do all the shopping, chopping, and chewing, and fit it all in.
And when your willpower is depleted like that, because until you have automatic habits, you're doing it all on willpower, when your willpower is depleted, it feels like the dial is turned up on life. So things just feel more intense, and that means challenging situations are going to be harder to get through. So this tool is going to be really, really helpful, and I'm so excited to share it with you.
It all comes from a book that I'm reading right now, and it's called 'Chatter' by Ethan Kross, 'Chatter.' And the subtitle is 'The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It.' The voice in our head, right? 'The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It.' And so in the first couple chapters, three chapters, he describes this notion of distancers versus immersers and how research has shown that people really differ in how the voice in their head works when it comes to challenging situations. Some people get really immersed in the situation, and you can see this in the eye language that they use.
Now, when you're talking through a fight with your partner or friend or family member using "I" language like, "I feel this," as opposed to, "you did this and you did that." It's very healthy. But when we're just talking about self-talk, a lot of "I" language and personal pronouns--I, me, mine--reflects someone who's very immersed in their story, in their circumstance. And actually, researchers have shown that if you look at people's Facebook posts and you just count the "I, me, my" personal pronoun usage, you can predict whether this person suffers from clinical depression, seriously. When someone is that caught up in their head about what's going on with them and how they feel about this and "my this did that," and then "my this did that," and then "I was this," it's not a healthy state of mind. Whereas people who are more distant from their circumstances tend to be more level-headed, they have more perspective, they tend to be healthier mentally.
So researchers started doing experiments some time ago to try to create distance, psychological distance in terms of how people would think about their situation in their head. And this notion of psychological distance actually goes back to Aaron Beck, who was, many say, the father of cognitive therapy back in 1970. Aaron Beck was talking about distance. And it fell out of favor after that for a little bit because psychologists, I guess, started to think about it as avoidance, but really, distance is not avoidance. It's just addressing the situation from greater distance, from a fly on the wall perspective or a bird's eye view perspective as opposed to right up in it.
And so researchers ran experiments, for example, asking people to imagine their situation as if they were in a different country thinking about this person in a different country or as if they were far in the future or far in the past, just different tools to create distance. And it worked. It totally worked.
For example, here are some of the benefits. It enabled people to see challenging situations as challenges as opposed to threats. When we feel we're threatened, then we've got a physiological arousal, our cortisol goes up, our adrenaline goes up, our focus narrows, and we don't have perspective. We're not able to make wise, good decisions. As opposed to seeing the situation as a challenge that could be surmounted as something that they could navigate that might be difficult, but might have its rewards, a challenge to get through as opposed to a threat that's going to take them out. So people made wiser decisions. People had more compassion for themselves and others. Their bodies didn't get all jacked up physiologically, more parasympathetic nervous system activation, as opposed to sympathetic nervous system activation--the flight fight or flight response. And they recovered from their emotional challenges more quickly. So they got over things faster, their bodies got back to baseline faster. So just all kinds of benefits of having this distance.
But the challenge is, it turns out, that it's really hard to use those strategies. When people are up in the moment feeling threatened by something, they're not going to do it. They're not going to actually think to themselves, "How would I think about this if it were 10 years from now? Or how much is this going to be bothering me in 10 years? Or how could the wisdom of my ancestors and all that they've been through be brought to bear for me in this situation? Or what if I were sitting in Albania right now looking over at me? How would I think about..." They just don't do it, right? Because, when we're threatened, our cognitive resources are tapped. And it takes a lot of mental effort to successfully put yourself mentally in any one of those temporal or spatial distanced situations. So people don't do it, which makes sense.
It turns out that there's an easier way to get that distance, and it is to talk about yourself or to yourself in the second or third person. I guess it would be third or second person. And what's cool about this strategy is it's easy and it's fast, and they've actually done brain scan studies showing that it takes literally only one second, not any more, for the brain to register this change and for the body and the brain to show all the benefits of the distance, like the brain areas related to heightened arousal and emotion, calm down, the body calms down. Suddenly, all you have to do is, for example, use your name.
And I've been doing this. I'm like, "Susan, you're going to get through this evening just fine. You're going to breathe. You're a good mom. Your daughter's having some feelings right now, and here's what you're going to do. You're not going to get reactive, you're not going to take anything out on her. You're not going to make her do this thing that she clearly doesn't want to do. You're just going to breathe for a second and you're going to figure out another way to interact with your kiddo in this moment because getting all upset about this isn't going to help at all. Susan, you've got this." And so that's a second person type thing. Talking to myself, you are going to this and that, that second person.
Third person would be, "Susan is a good mom. She is going to handle this just fine, I'm sure, because she always manages to get through things."
So second person or third person, and this is called illeism. There's a long literary history of people talking about themselves in the third person. Julius Caesar, a long time ago, wrote his account of the Gallic Wars that he had participated in, and he wrote about himself in the third person as if he were were distant from himself. So there's a long history of this.
And what's interesting is the author here, Ethan Kross, stumbled on this, as many scientists stumble on some of their most valuable insights accidentally. He has this very vivid account of how he was threatened. One of his research findings got huge, huge publicity. It just caught on in the news, and he was interviewed all over the place and stuff, and he started getting this fan mail, and he got amidst the piles of fan mail, a threatening letter. For some reason, someone took huge offense to what he had published, which is ridiculous. I don't even see how that is possible. But anyway, someone took offense to it. God bless people that could take offense to anything. And they wrote him a death threat letter, I'm going to come after you and your family letter. And he received this letter and he got really, really affected by it.
For a couple weeks, he wasn't sleeping. He was spending all night with his Little League baseball bat behind the front door, listening for intruders, even though he had an alarm system and so forth. And as the sleep deprivation wore on, he found himself about to Google "how do I hire a private detective who specializes in protecting academics who've been threatened?" And it was days and days and days and days and days and days into this state that he'd been in.
And he said to himself, "Ethan, this is crazy. What are you doing? There's no bodyguards that specialize in protecting threatened academics. And Ethan, keep in mind, you haven't received any more threats. I'm sure lots of people receive empty threats. This is probably nothing. You need to think about how you're not showing up for your family. You need to get back to your life. Do the things that you enjoy. Ethan, you're going to just stop this now." And that night, he had his first good night's sleep in weeks.
And then he started noticing all through the news and different places, these instances where people would talk about themselves in the third person. He noticed LeBron James who switched basketball teams very famously and got a lot of news coverage for this, and how LeBron James said, "I didn't want to make an emotional decision. I wanted to do what LeBron James needed to do for that was in his best interest." And he thought, "Look at that."
And more instances of it kept cropping up of people, not like the caricature of someone who's either emotionally inept or potentially even mentally ill, or something like the Dobby in 'Harry Potter' who says, "Dobby just wanted to do what is best for Harry Potter because Dobby wants to..." And there's that kind of talking about yourself in the third person. I saw a mug picture on social media the other day that said, "I'm not crazy. Well, maybe I am. I think I better go talk with myself about this for a minute." So there's that kind of notion of using distanced language, but the research on it has now weighed in, and the reality is that it works.
So that fast, by talking to yourself in the second or third person, you can reap all the benefits of a distant perspective. And it comes on within one second. So you'll be wiser, you'll be more calm, you'll make better decisions, you will be way more likely to interpret your current challenge as a challenge, not a threat, which again, will affect how you handle it. It means you'll be more likely to perform better, more likely to succeed, more likely to persevere, all by just coaching yourself, essentially, using a loving coaching second person voice of "Susan, you're going to get through this night. You're going to get through this moment. Here's what you're going to do."
I've been using it all the time, and I really like it. It doesn't have to be out loud. I can do it in my own head. And I'm a good coach. I like to coach. And so I've started to coach myself through my day and it's so, so helpful, and the research is astounding. And I think I might reach out to this guy, Ethan Kross, and see if he would be willing to get on Zoom with me and record a little interview. I'd be really interested to hear more about his research.
Again, the book is 'Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It by Ethan Kross.' And the tool is to talk to yourself in the second or third person to create the emotional distance that will help you overcome and be resilient and stay Bright for one more meal, one more moment, one more day, to do the things that are needed to set you up, to have a Bright day tomorrow, to do the things now that will establish your Bright life and give you the Bright Transformation that you want. Even when it's hard, even when it feels like circumstances are not aligned, there is a way to talk your way through it.
And that's the Weekly Vlog. I'll see you next week.
