You can feel better by giving yourself the advice you'd give someone else

Subjectivity is what separates us from other people. Meaning, each of us knows our self as a subject, a person we know from the inside, while we know someone else as an object, a person we know from the outside. 

I recall that Sartre discussed this at some length in Being and Nothingness, a book that I devoured as a college student during my existentialism phase, but which, when I looked at it fairly recently, gave me more of a headache than inspiration.

Still, Sartre was on the right track when he spoke about being the Other to a friend who enters a coffeehouse where they agreed to meet. The gaze of the friend is toward Sartre as an object, while Sartre, in gesturing to the friend, views him as the object. 

Mostly we want to be viewed as having the rich inner life that we experience directly through our subjectivity. If someone doesn't do this, we might say, "Hey, don't treat me like an object!" 

However, in his book Shift: Managing Emotions So They Don't Manage You, Ethan Kross says that treating ourselves as an object, doing our own self-objectifying, can be a useful means of dealing with difficult emotions and situations.

Here he's speaking about tennis player Novak Djokavic using a bathroom break as an opportunity to give himself a talk after he'd lost two sets to a younger player.

To me, the most remarkable thing about this story isn't the incredible comeback. It's not even the fact that Djokovic gave himself a pep talk. It's the pronoun usage. He doesn't say, "I can do it." He says, "You can do it."

This small, seemingly insignificant change in language is consequential. Why? As you've no doubt experienced, and as I wrote about in Chatter, it's much easier for us to give advice to other people than it is to give ourselves advice.

The name for this phenomenon is Solomon's paradox, eponymously named after the Old Testament's King Solomon, who was famously adept at doling out wisdom to others but often stumbled when it came to his own life (he got involved in several extramarital affairs that ultimately led to his downfall).

Using the word "you" to silently refer to yourself is called distanced self-talk, and it works like this:

"You" is a word we almost exclusively use to think about and refer to other people. So, when you use that word to refer to yourself, as Djokovic did, it gives you distance and shifts your perspective. It gets you to think about yourself the way you would think about someone else. 

This slightly weird, seemingly tiny linguistic shift is consequential because the difference between "I am stressed out" and "You are stressed out" is big. If I'm stressed out, I might feel panic, a racing heart, and a looping anxiety.

If someone else is stressed out, I might feel compassion, empathy, and a desire to soothe their nerves. By talking to myself using the word "you," I am casting myself in the role of "someone else." I'm able to see and to feel my situation from a different perspective.

Using your own name (instead of "I") or even the third person "he" or "she" also works as a linguistic shifter in much the same way that "you" does. Come on, Ethan, you can finish writing this chapter!

This makes a lot of sense. I've used this technique myself frequently, talking to myself as if I was someone else when I'm stressed or facing a tough situation. It's a valuable way to gain some distance from painful emotions while still keeping in touch with what's happening in a realistic fashion.

Comments

[Donald]

Most people are doing that already Since we see life as we are and not as it is

[Appreciative Reader]

"This makes a lot of sense. I've used this technique myself frequently, talking to myself as if I was someone else when I'm stressed or facing a tough situation."

Yep, me too.

That is, I don't actually *talk* to myself. But I do journal extensively. And although these days my journaling tends to be more impersonal, more about abstractions, but when I was younger I'd end up writing to myself about ...personal things, things happening in my life. ...So well, regardless of which period of my life this pertains to, but in my journaling I have indeed done this, and done this entirely instinctually, used the second person to address myself in my journals.

[Appreciative Reader]

Heh, right, now that I think back to my journaling back then, I do remember sometimes mixing up first person and second person. Addressing myself in the second person, then getting conscious/embarrassed about it, and then reminding myself this is a private journal that no one other than me will read. And sometimes simply getting generally mixed up with the weird grammatical implications arising out of oneself addressing oneself in the second person.

Just an amusing --- well, kind of amusing --- detail, that comes back to me as I think back to talking to myself, in my journal, while addressing myself as "you".

[Jimmy]

I can guarantee you will fell better by watching the new Jurgen Ziewe YT video.
The visuals are all based on his experiences. These are the experiences that the gurus and all religions hint at but never provide.