Can our self-talk affect how we handle stress?

One of the biggest challenges for many people this year has been the amount of time we have spent, and continue to spend, with ourselves. Me, myself and I.

Without the chatter and buzz of the office, trips to coffee shops over lunch or after work drinks, many of us have spent a large amount of time saying a lot less than usual to others... but our internal chatter and “self-talk” has been ever present. 

Much of this self-talk can be unconscious, but there are ways we can start to become conscious and aware of our self-talk to help support ourselves with daily stresses that may crop up.

For example, we might have negative self-talk when feeling down about a task at work and our internal voice may say “I’m not good enough, I can’t do this”, and on the flip side we might have more soothing, positive self-talk that may say “it’s ok to feel down right now it doesn’t mean I am bad at my job - I can do this”.

A recent study conducted by psychologists at the University of Michigan showed that self-talk in the third person to distance ourselves from the stressful task we’re facing could actually help us to cope better with stressful situations that we may find ourselves in.

So put into practice, distanced self-talk sees us reflecting on the challenging or stressful experience from an outside perfective - removing the “I” from the narrative and replacing it with your name or even second person by using “you”.

This act of practicing awareness of the way we talk to ourselves and shaping the messages we send to ourselves can help start to shift our perspective and notice when we might need to take a step back and look at what’s going on from a more distant viewpoint.

Let me know what you think of “distanced self-talk” and if you’ve noticed your self-talk more in recent months.

Kelly