COMPLEMENTARY CARE
The Power of Self-Talk: Change a Word — Change Your Brain People naturally talk to themselves. Whether it’s the out-loud self-talk of young children as they learn to master a new task or our grownup unspoken private talk, it seems we have an almost continuous internal conversation with ourselves. Much of our inner dialogue is an attempt to manage how we think, feel and behave — how to get ourselves to do the things we need to do and stop doing things that are self-defeating or self-limiting. It’s the kind of self-talk we’re asking our patients to cultivate — self-talk that gets them to replace behaviors that are risky or self-destructive with healthier lifestyle and relationship choices. What we didn’t know until recently (at least not with scientific certainty) is that how people talk to themselves has an enormous effect on their success in life.
The Quick Fix
In a series of groundbreaking experiments at the Emotion & Self-Control Laboratory at the University of Michigan, psychologist Ethan Kross found that using first-name self-talk frees up your psyche to focus, think more clearly and perform more effectively than addressing yourself with pronouns like I or you. In his initial studies, Kross found that addressing yourself by first name minimizes social anxiety before a stressful event and also shuts down ruminating about it afterwards.
So changing one word can change your brain?
Jason Moser, a neuroscientist and clinical psychologist at Michigan State University, suggests the answer may be yes. Moser measured the electrical activity in the brain and observed a dramatic reduction in anxiety levels when participants referred to themselves using their first names in a stressful situation. Electrical activity in the frontal cortex, involved in problem-solving, judgment, impulse control and social and sexual behavior, reduced dramatically. In the primitive limbic brain, where emotional 24 MD-UPDATE
memories form, activity decreased by almost half. When our sense of self is threatened, it’s easy to take things personally and overreact -reflexively or BY Jan Anderson, PsyD, LPCC i m p u l s i v e l y. First-name self-talk appears to work by giving us just enough emotional and psychological distance to be a helpful, healthy coping mechanism -- a way to step back, calm yourself, keep the situation in perspective and make a more conscious choice about how to respond. Think about the potential to get anxious patients to undergo needed medical tests or procedures: “Jan, hundreds of people in Louisville get MRIs every day. No one has
are at odds with each other. Like with the quick fix, some detachment can be enormously helpful when we keep repeating the same old pattern or find ourselves chronically sidetracked from doing what matters most to us. Psychotherapist and author Kim Schneiderman — who claims that thinking about yourself in the third person is something many successful people do naturally — uses research-inspired techniques to get her clients to write about themselves in the third person. Schneiderman uses perspective-bending questions to help clients get a fresh outlook on a familiar story — their own — as a way to reinterpret and reclaim their personal narratives and help themselves get “unstuck,” whether it’s in a job, a relationship or a stage of life. One of my favorite approaches to issues that refuse to budge or that won’t go away and stay away, is voice dialogue facilitation (VDF). It’s a non-judgmental way
WHAT WE DIDN’T KNOW UNTIL RECENTLY IS THAT HOW PEOPLE TALK TO THEMSELVES HAS AN ENORMOUS EFFECT ON THEIR SUCCESS IN LIFE. ever gotten stuck in one and asphyxiated. You can get through it with the Calming Breath — and maybe a Xanax. Now pick up the phone, dial the number and schedule the appointment.” So a simple shift from a) personal pronoun to first name, coupled with b) some specific directives and c) a healthy dose of perspective is all it takes? Sometimes it is a quick fix. You read an article like this, give it a try and it does the trick.
The Not-So-Quick Fix
When the quick fix doesn’t work, we often have to drill down a little deeper to resolve a gridlock between two parts of ourselves that
of accessing our unspoken inner dialogue and giving a voice to different sides of the personality that often represent two very different, maybe even opposite, orientations to life. A classic relationship example is the part of us that is deeply in love with and totally dedicated to our significant other and the other more instinctual part of us that is not naturally monogamous and would like to be free to explore other relationships. These two parts of us are natural opposites, we can’t get rid of either of them, and VDF does a better job than anything I’ve encountered in helping us wrestle with the challenges of our human condition — how to find a way to integrate our two opposite natures into our one life.