Resolve Stress by Escaping Yourself
Avoid getting lost in negative emotions by writing about your experiences in the third person
Negative emotions disrupt your ability to think clearly. They make you judge yourself too harshly and obscure solutions to problems. To resolve a social conflict or stressful event, you often need to get out of your own head. According to new research, it helps to put yourself in another person’s shoes.
The power of journaling
Journaling is a good way to put stressful events into a rational perspective. When we write, we think carefully about a situation as we translate our abstract thoughts into concrete words. Rather than getting lost in catastrophic thoughts about impossible scenarios, we start to reason more analytically because good writing requires clear communication. So putting words down on a page is useful when you’re feeling sad, anxious, or angry.
A great study from almost 20 years ago found that journaling helped people to respond positively after a stressful event. In particular, writing about both thoughts and emotions was the best way to understand and learn from stress. People using this approach experienced greater personal growth and better health following emotional hardship.
Write in the third person
It’s likely that journaling reduces stress by distancing you from your normal egocentric perspective, allowing you to analyze a situation more rationally. If this kind of self-distancing is truly important, then journaling about your experience in the third rather than first person may be particularly effective because it turns you into an external observer. Instead of using first-person pronouns such as “I”, “me”, “my” when describing your thoughts and emotions, you could write using third-person pronouns such as “he”, “she”, “their”, or even your name. A new research paper published in 2021 tests exactly this question.
The researchers recruited hundreds of people and asked them to keep a daily diary about their social interactions for a week or month. Some people were asked to write about their experiences in the first person (e.g. “I think…”, “I feel…”) while others were asked to write in the third person (e.g. “He thinks…”, “She feels…”).
Before and after this extended journaling, participants wrote a couple of paragraphs about a recent social conflict they had experienced and any specific thoughts or feelings they had about the event. Researchers rated the quality of the reasoning within these paragraphs to see whether journaling practice would improve people’s reactions to social conflict. Quality was rated according to five evidence-based themes:
Intellectual humility: understanding the limits of your knowledge.
Uncertainty and change: recognizing that the world is dynamic and nuanced and simple explanations often don’t work.
Other perspectives: acknowledging that people can have alternative but equally valid interpretations of events.
Compromise: looking for opportunities to bring different perspectives together to find effective solutions.
Conflict resolution: finding ways to remedy interpersonal conflict.
Over time, reasoning quality improved more for people who journaled about their experiences in the third person than in the first person. Their strongest improvements were in intellectual humility, acknowledging other people’s perspectives, and resolving conflict. Judging a personal problem from the perspective of an external observer helped people strengthen their viewpoint. They were no longer lost in their own heads and were less swayed by personal emotional states and biases.
The takeaway
Clear, rational reasoning helps you overcome emotional hardship and social conflict. It lies at the heart of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), which is all about challenging irrational or maladaptive thinking patterns and how they connect with your emotions and behavior.
Journaling improves the quality of your reasoning. You can then better understand a problem and how to deal with it. When you have a social or emotional difficulty, try writing a couple of paragraphs about it, referring to yourself in the third person.
A final quote
“Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.”
~ Cyril Connolly
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Until next time,
Erman Misirlisoy, PhD
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