A new study seems to show that addressing yourself in the third person can relieve anxiety without you doing any other work.
Third person means your name or your third-person pronoun of choice.
Jason Moser, lead author of the study, says of it:
Essentially, we think referring to yourself in the third person leads people to think about themselves more similar to how they think about others, and you can see evidence for this in the brain.
That helps people gain a tiny bit of psychological distance from their experiences, which can often be useful for regulating emotions. (Talking to yourself in the third person can help you control emotions)
The study is here: Third-person self-talk facilitates emotion regulation without engaging cognitive control: Converging evidence from ERP and fMRI.
