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Practice · Talk to yourself by name
You'll write down something that's upsetting you and rate how upset you are. Then you'll change how you talk about it: instead of "I", use your own name and look at it as an onlooker would, then picture how you'll see it a year from now. Last, you'll give yourself one line of advice, the way you'd advise a friend.
Stuck at any step? Tap the top-right corner and ask ForestSage.When a feeling floods in, we tend to get stuck inside it: "I'm so useless", "I can't take this". Distanced self-talk tries something else: instead of "I", you ask yourself by name, or as "you" ("Yan, why are you so upset?"), as if stepping back and watching yourself from the other side of the room.
It comes from research on self-distancing. Psychologists Ethan Kross (University of Michigan), Özlem Ayduk (University of California, Berkeley) and their colleagues found that people who talk to themselves by name or as "you" tend to feel less anxious and less ashamed under stress, and think things through more clearly; picturing looking back on today from the future works in a similar way.
The research also shows the effect is mostly gentle and short-term: it helps you steady yourself when a feeling is strongest; it doesn't make the hurt go away. Nor is it about not feeling. If it's about losing someone important, or something that hurt you badly, please don't use it to push the feeling away.
This exercise isn't therapy, and it isn't a crisis tool. If something won't let go of you, keeps getting heavier, or you're having thoughts of not wanting to live or of hurting yourself, please reach out: a counsellor, a psychologist, or one of the lines answered around the clock.
The method comes from years of research by psychologists Ethan Kross (University of Michigan) and Özlem Ayduk (University of California, Berkeley). The steps and wording here are our own, written to that method.
If you keep asking "why" and can't stop, try from "why" to "how", which turns the question into a concrete next step; if one line keeps going round your head, try defusion, and see it as just words. This exercise changes the voice you talk to yourself in, and where you stand.
In the studies, people mostly talked to themselves by name for a short while, in their heads or on paper. Here, two of the approaches the research used (asking yourself by name, and picturing looking back from the future) sit in one exercise, with one line of advice to yourself added so you have something to take away. The steps and wording are our own.