Self-Talk by Name: How Talking to Yourself as “You” Helps Before a Speech

By Noam Shemla · The Studies

TL;DR Before a stressful social task, people were asked to reflect on their feelings, either in the first person (“why do I feel this way?”) or using their own name and “you”. That small change in words gave them distance from their own feelings. In a public-speaking test, the people who used their name gave better speeches, felt less shame afterwards and dwelt on the speech less. The benefit was the same for highly anxious people as for everyone else.

• Paper: Kross, E., Bruehlman-Senecal, E., Park, J., Burson, A., Dougherty, A., Shablack, H., Bremner, R., Moser, J., & Ayduk, O. (2014). Self-talk as a regulatory mechanism: how you do it matters. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 106(2), 304–324.
• Studies 1a and 1b: 56 students and 93 online participants reflected on an angry or anxious memory in the first person or by name, then rated how distanced their viewpoint was.
• Study 2: 97 women reflected before trying to make a good first impression on a stranger.
• Study 3: 89 students reflected before a surprise five-minute speech to two evaluators, on camera.
• Studies 4 and 5: Students before a speech, and online participants thinking about any socially stressful event, were rated on whether they saw it as a threat or a challenge.
• Study 6: A meta-analysis across Studies 2 to 5 testing whether the effects depended on how socially anxious people were.

Everyone talks to themselves before something stressful. Ethan Kross and colleagues asked whether how you do it matters, down to the pronoun. The paper opens with a sports interview: a basketball player describing a hard decision switched from "I" to his own name at the moment he said he did not want to decide emotionally.1

The manipulation

The difference between the two conditions was a handful of words in the instructions. One group was asked to understand their feelings using "I" and "my". The other was asked to use "you" and their own name instead, asking themselves, in the paper's example, "Why did Jane feel this way?"

The public-speaking test

Study 3 used one of the most reliable ways of stressing people in a laboratory, a version of the Trier Social Stress Test. Participants were told they would give a speech on why they were qualified for their dream job to trained evaluators, on video, with five minutes to prepare and no notes.

The name group did better on every measure. They were rated as giving better speeches. Their mood did not drop from before the task to after it, while the first-person group's did. They felt less shame. And when they were left alone for five minutes afterwards, they spent less of it replaying the speech and criticising themselves, which the authors call post-event processing, a habit that feeds social anxiety.

Study 3: the effect of self-talk by name before a speech (n = 89)

Across all seven studies

The same pattern ran through the whole paper: better performance when trying to make a first impression (Study 2), a quicker fall in anxiety after it, and in Studies 4 and 5, upcoming stressful events described more as challenges and less as threats. The effects are moderate and remarkably consistent.

Does it work for anxious people?

A technique that helps calm people and fails the anxious would be of limited use. Study 6 pooled Studies 2 to 5 to test whether trait social anxiety changed any of the effects. It did not: on anticipatory anxiety, challenge versus threat, performance and mood after the task, people high and low in social anxiety benefited alike. About one in ten participants scored in the range seen in people diagnosed with social phobia, so the samples did include the people the question is about.

Has it held up?

The technique has been tested at the level of the brain. Measuring brain activity while people viewed upsetting images, researchers found that talking to themselves by name reduced an electrical marker of emotional reaction within the first second, without increasing a marker of effortful control; an fMRI study of painful memories found the same pattern.2 A direct replication of the brain-activity result, published in 2022, reproduced it.3 The conclusion of that line of work is that distanced self-talk is a relatively effortless form of self-control, which matters most in the moments when effort is in short supply.

What this study cannot tell you

• The samples were mostly students, with two online samples; Study 2 was women only.
• The effects were measured in the short term, minutes after the task. Whether a habit of distanced self-talk changes anxiety over months is a different question.
• Some outcomes were self-reported. The speech ratings and the coded writing were not, and they showed the same pattern.
• The comparison is with first-person self-talk, not with no self-talk at all.

What a speaker can take from it

This is the rare finding that turns directly into a technique. In the minutes before you speak, if you are going to talk to yourself, do it by name. Not "why am I so nervous?" but "why is [your name] nervous? [Your name] has done this before." It costs nothing and takes seconds.

It also helps afterwards. The name group spent less time replaying the speech, and that replaying is what makes the next one harder. When you catch yourself going over what went wrong, try describing it as you would describe a friend's talk.

This article summarises a published paper. The test statistics, p values and partial eta squared values are the authors’ own, from the results of Studies 1a to 6. The Cohen’s d values are our approximate conversion. The instructions are paraphrased, with one short example quoted.

Measured

• Self-reported distance, mood, shame, anxiety and rumination
• Speech and interaction performance, rated by coders blind to condition
• Challenge and threat appraisals, self-reported and coded from writing

Inferred, not measured

• Self-distancing as the mechanism: shown to follow from the language change in Studies 1a and 1b, and assumed to carry the later effects

References

1. Kross, E., Bruehlman-Senecal, E., Park, J., Burson, A., Dougherty, A., Shablack, H., Bremner, R., Moser, J., & Ayduk, O. (2014). Self-talk as a regulatory mechanism: how you do it matters. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 106(2), 304–324. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0035173
2. Moser, J. S., Dougherty, A., Mattson, W. I., et al. (2017). Third-person self-talk facilitates emotion regulation without engaging cognitive control: converging evidence from ERP and fMRI. Scientific Reports, 7, 4519. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-04047-3
3. Webster, C. T., Berg, M. K., Kross, E., & Moser, J. S. (2022). An event-related potential investigation of distanced self-talk: replication and comparison to detached reappraisal. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 177, 122–132. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2022.05.003