Changing a single word in an internal conversation may alter how people respond to pressure. In a series of experiments led by University of Michigan psychologist Ethan Kross, participants who addressed themselves by name, or used pronouns such as “you,” reported less distress and were rated as performing better during stressful social tasks than participants who used “I” and “me.”
The findings came from seven studies involving 585 participants, published in 2014 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The researchers described the technique as “non-first-person self-talk.” It is now more commonly called distanced self-talk.
This is not treatment advice. We are writers examining what the research does, and does not, show.
What the researchers actually tested
The research was not simply a questionnaire asking people how they usually spoke to themselves. Participants were assigned to use different kinds of language while thinking about situations designed to produce social stress.
In one experiment, 97 female undergraduates were told that they would have a videotaped conversation with another participant and should try to make a good first impression. They were also told that trained psychologists would assess their social skills.
Before the conversation, half were instructed to work through their feelings using first-person language. Their thoughts might take the form: “Why am I nervous? What can I do to make a good impression?”
The other participants were told to use their own names and non-first-person pronouns. Someone named Sarah, for example, might think: “Why is Sarah nervous? What can Sarah do to make a good impression?”
After exclusions for procedural problems and participants who guessed the purpose of the experiment, the analysis included 89 women. Independent observers who did not know which instructions each participant had received rated their eye contact, vocal quality, speech length, visible discomfort and general social performance.
Participants in the non-first-person group received better performance ratings. They also showed a sharper fall in self-reported anxiety after the interaction, although the overall interaction between condition and anxiety over time narrowly missed the conventional threshold for statistical significance. That detail matters because the headline version, “using your name lowers anxiety,” is cleaner than the statistical result.
The more restrained interpretation is that, in this experiment, distanced self-talk affected how anxiety changed after the stressful interaction and was associated with better observed performance. This is one research paper containing several experiments, not settled consensus about how everyone should speak to themselves.
The public-speaking experiment produced a similar result
A separate experiment placed 89 undergraduates in a more recognizable pressure situation. Participants were given five minutes to prepare a speech explaining why they were qualified for their dream job. They then delivered it to two evaluators while being recorded on video.
Before speaking, participants were randomly assigned to analyze their emotions using either first-person or non-first-person language. Two observers who were unaware of the participants’ assigned groups later rated the speeches for confidence, nervousness and overall performance.
Participants assigned to the non-first-person condition were rated more favorably. They also reported less shame and were protected against the increase in negative emotion seen in the first-person group. During a waiting period after the speech, they engaged in less brooding about how they had performed.
The performance difference was statistically significant, but it was not enormous. The experiment also involved a small, predominantly young undergraduate sample completing an artificial task in a laboratory. That makes it difficult to know whether the same effect would appear in older adults, in different cultural settings or during genuinely high-stakes events.
Why using a name might create psychological distance
Kross and his colleagues argued that pronouns can subtly change the perspective from which people consider a problem.
When someone thinks, “Why am I so nervous?” the person experiencing the emotion and the person trying to understand it occupy the same linguistic position. The question remains close to the immediate feeling.
“Why is Sarah nervous?” resembles the language that might be used when considering another person’s predicament. The problem still belongs to Sarah, but its wording may make it possible to examine the situation from a slightly more detached position.
The researchers tested this explanation in two preliminary experiments. Participants recalled either an anger-provoking conflict or a past anxiety-provoking experience and then reflected on it using first-person or non-first-person language. Those using their names and other non-first-person terms were more likely to report seeing the experience from an observer’s perspective.
The shift did not remove emotion or turn participants into neutral spectators. It appeared to alter their vantage point.
That distinction separates self-distancing from simple avoidance. The participants were not told to distract themselves, deny what they felt or force themselves to think positively. They were instructed to examine their thoughts and emotions while changing the language used to refer to themselves.
Later experiments reported in the same paper found that participants using distanced language described stressful events more as challenges they could handle and less as threats likely to overwhelm them. This difference in appraisal may help explain their behavior under pressure, although the studies could not establish the exact mechanism involved.
Later studies offer support, with qualifications
The 2014 paper is not the only published evidence for the effect. A 2020 paper led by University of Michigan researcher Ariana Orvell, published in Clinical Psychological Science, examined how people responded to negative experiences of varying emotional intensity. Across two experiments, distanced self-talk reduced participants’ reported negative emotional reactions compared with first-person self-talk.
In 2017, a team led by Michigan State University psychologist Jason Moser, working with Kross and other researchers, used electroencephalography and functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine emotional processing. Their paper in Scientific Reports found that third-person self-talk reduced certain neural measures associated with emotional reactivity without producing evidence of greater activity in the measures used to represent cognitive-control effort.
That result is sometimes summarized as proof that third-person self-talk regulates emotion “effortlessly.” The research supports that possibility, but brain activity is not a direct reading of effort, emotion or thought. The authors described the conclusion cautiously and called for further investigation.
More recent work also suggests that results produced by deliberate laboratory instructions do not translate neatly into everyday life. In a 2025 Scientific Reports study, 208 adults completed surveys five times a day for two weeks. Participants reported using distanced self-talk in 14.5 percent of the situations sampled, compared with immersed self-talk in 43.2 percent.
Spontaneous distanced self-talk predicted a small subsequent improvement in positive emotion when people were preparing what to do or say. It did not produce the same benefit in every situation. When participants were criticizing themselves or simply trying to feel better, distanced and immersed self-talk did not reliably differ in their later emotional effects.
Laboratory prompting, in other words, may create a more deliberate shift in perspective than occasionally using one’s name during an ordinary day.
What the research does not establish
These studies do not show that referring to oneself by name eliminates anxiety, guarantees a better presentation or replaces psychological treatment. Most of the early experiments had modest samples, and several relied heavily on university students.
They also tested a particular kind of self-talk. Participants were asked to reflect on their feelings and prepare themselves psychologically, not merely to repeat their names as part of a motivational slogan.
“Jeanette, you can deal with this” may create a degree of distance. Repeating “Jeanette must not fail” could just as easily preserve the pressure while changing the grammar. Tone and content still matter.
The research is strongest as evidence that small linguistic changes can influence perspective under controlled conditions. It is weaker as evidence about lasting mental health effects, severe anxiety or performance across different cultures, ages and genuinely high-stakes settings.
Anyone experiencing persistent anxiety that interferes with daily life would need individualized guidance from a qualified health professional rather than relying on a self-talk technique alone.
A useful next step would be a large, preregistered study comparing first-person, second-person, name-based and no-self-talk conditions in real-world stressful situations. That could help establish whether the effect comes specifically from using one’s name, from adopting any non-first-person perspective or simply from pausing long enough to organize a response.
For now, the research points to a modest but intriguing possibility: the words people use to address themselves may change the psychological position from which they meet a stressful moment. A name does not remove the pressure. It may, however, create just enough distance to think.
