Becoming a Fly on the Wall
Tracey's story, like the stories of most people whose internal conversations become pools of negativity, is an exercise in distance—the distance we do or don't have from our problems.
We can think of the mind as a lens and our inner voice as a button that zooms it either in or out. In the simplest sense, chatter is what happens when we zoom in close on something, inflaming our emotions to the exclusion of all the alternative ways of thinking about the issue that might cool us down. In other words, we lose perspective. This dramatically narrowed view of one's situation magnifies adversity and allows the negative side of the inner voice to play, enabling rumination and its companions: stress, anxiety, and depression. Of course, narrowing your attention isn't a problem in and of itself. To the contrary, it's often essential to helping us address challenging situations and the feelings that arise from them. But when we find ourselves stuck on our problems and lose the ability to flexibly zoom out—to gain perspective—that's when our inner voice turns into rumination.
When our internal conversation loses perspective and gives rise to intensely negative emotions, the brain regions involved in self-referential processing (thinking about ourselves) and generating emotional responses become activated. In other words, our stress-response hardware starts firing, releasing adrenaline and cortisol, flooding us with negative emotions, which only serve to further rev up our negative verbal stream and zoom us in more. As a result, we're unable to get a wider-angle view that might reveal more constructive ways of handling the emotionally trying situations we encounter.
But our brains evolved not just to zoom in when we confront difficulties but also to zoom out, though the latter is much more challenging during times of stress. The mind is flexible, if we know how to bend it. If you have a fever, you can take something to bring it down. Likewise, our mind has a psychological immune system: We can use our thoughts to change our thoughts—by adding distance.
Psychological distance, of course, doesn't eliminate a problem. If, for instance, Tracey had been able to step back from her high-pressured predicament and settle into a less anguished state, she nonetheless would still have been in debt to the NSA, with her future hanging in the balance. Similarly, even if Rick Ankiel had been able to retain his pitch, he still would've been standing on the mound pitching in the playoffs on national television. Distance doesn't solve our problems, but it increases the likelihood that we can. It unclouds our verbal stream.
The big question, then, is this: When chatter strikes, how do we gain psychological distance?
As it happened, around the same time that Tracey was sitting in her freshman dorm room at Harvard, I was three and a half hours south down the highway in Manhattan, a graduate student in psychology sitting in the basement of Columbia University's dingy Schermerhorn Hall thinking about a remarkably similar question. How can people reflect on their negative experiences, I wondered, without getting sucked down the rumination vortex? Answering that question was the reason I had decided to attend Columbia to train with my adviser, Walter Mischel, a groundbreaking scientist whom most people know as the Marshmallow Man.
Walter was akin to royalty in psychology for developing what the public now calls the marshmallow test, a paradigm for studying self-control that involved bringing kids into the lab for an experiment and presenting them with a simple choice: They could have one marshmallow now, or if they waited for an experimenter to return, they could have two. It turned out that children who waited longer ended up performing better on their SATs as teens, were healthier as they got older, and coped better with stress in adulthood than those who immediately grabbed the gooey marshmallow. But even more important than documenting these striking long-term outcomes, the so-called marshmallow test (its real name is the delay of gratification test) helped revolutionize science's understanding of the tools people have to control themselves.
By the time I arrived at Columbia, Walter and his then postdoctoral student Özlem Ayduk had already become interested in examining how to help people think about painful experiences without succumbing to chatter. At the time, one of the dominant approaches to battling inner-voice rumination was distraction. Several studies had shown that when people find themselves sucked into negative verbal thinking, diverting their attention away from their problems improved the way they felt. The downside of this approach, however, is that distraction constitutes a short-term fix—a Band-Aid that obscures the wound without healing it. If you go to the movies to escape the adversities of real life, your problems are still there waiting for you when you leave the theater. Out of sight, in other words, isn't actually out of mind, because the negative feelings remain, eagerly waiting to be activated again.
Oddly, at this time, the idea of distancing had fallen out of vogue in psychology. In 1970, Aaron Beck, one of the founders of cognitive therapy and an influential figure in mental health, proposed that teaching patients how to objectively scrutinize their thoughts, a process he called "distancing," was a central tool that therapists should employ with their patients. In the ensuing years, however, distancing had come to be equated with avoidance—with not thinking about your problems. But in my mind, there was nothing inherently avoidant about distancing. In theory, you could use your mind to frame your problems from a zoomed-out perspective.
This approach differed from the meditative practice of mindfulness in that the goal wasn't to stand apart and watch one's thoughts drift by without engaging with them. The point was to engage, but to do so from a distanced perspective, which isn't the same thing as an emotionally avoidant one. That was the essence of my dad's teachings and what I had spent so much time doing growing up. So, Walter, Özlem, and I began thinking about the different ways people could "step back" from their experiences to reflect on them more effectively. We landed on a tool we all possess: our ability to imaginatively visualize.
A powerful optical device of sorts is built into the human mind: the ability to see yourself from afar. This mental home theater, it turns out, projects scenes when we think about unpleasant experiences from the past or imagine possible anxiety-producing scenarios in the future. They are almost like videos stored on a phone. Yet these scenes aren't entirely fixed. Studies show that we don't see our memories and reveries from the same perspective every time. We can view them from different perspectives. For example, sometimes we replay a scene happening through our own eyes as though we were right back in the event in the first person. Yet we can also see ourselves from the outside, as if transplanted to another viewpoint. We become a fly on the wall. Could we harness this ability to better regulate our inner voice?
Özlem, Walter, and I brought participants into the lab to find out. To do so, we asked one group to replay an upsetting memory in their minds through their own eyes. We asked another group to do the same, only from a fly-on-the-wall perspective, visually observing themselves like a bystander. Then we asked the participants to work through their feelings from the perspective they had been asked to adopt. The differences in the verbal stream characterizing the two groups were striking.
The immersers—the people who viewed the event from a first-person perspective—got trapped in their emotions and the verbal flood they released. In their accounts describing their stream of thoughts, they tended to zero in on the hurt. "Adrenaline infused. Pissed off. Betrayed," one person wrote. "Angry. Victimized. Hurt. Shamed. Stepped-on. Shitted on. Humiliated. Abandoned. Unappreciated. Pushed. Boundaries trampled upon." Their attempts to "go inside" and work through their internal conversations just led to more negative feelings.
The fly-on-the-wall group, meanwhile, offered contrasting narratives.
Where the immersers got tangled in the emotional weeds, the distancers went broad, which led them to feel better. "I was able to see the argument more clearly," wrote one person. "I initially empathized better with myself but then I began to understand how my friend felt. It may have been irrational but I understand his motivation." Their thinking was clearer and more complex, and, sure enough, they seemed to view events with the insight of a third-party observer. They were able to emerge from the experience with a constructive story. The experiment provided evidence that stepping back to make sense of our experiences could be useful for changing the tone of our inner voice.
Soon after, in more studies, we and others discovered that zooming out in this way also reined in people's fight-or-flight cardiovascular response to stress, dampened emotional activity in the brain, and led people to experience less hostility and aggression when they were provoked—the kind of situation that is fertile ground for stoking chatter. We also found that this distancing technique worked not just with random collections of college students but also with those struggling with more extreme forms of inner-voice torment. For example, people with depression and even highly anxious parents grappling with their children's undergoing painful cancer treatments. Yet our findings were, at this point, still limited. They related only to how distancing affects us in the moment. We also wanted to know whether it would have lasting effects, shortening the amount of time people spent ruminating.
It turned out we weren't the only ones interested in exploring this question.
Not long after we published our initial work, a research team at the University of Leuven in Belgium, led by Philippe Verduyn, devised a clever set of studies to look at whether people's tendencies to distance in daily life, outside a laboratory setting, influenced how long their emotional episodes lasted. They found that distancing by adopting an observer perspective shortened the duration of people's negative moods after they experienced events that led them to feel angry or sad. Distancing could put out chatter brush fires before they grew into longer-lasting conflagrations.
This dampening quality of distancing could, however, have an unintended consequence. Distancing shortened both negative and positive experiences. In other words, if you got a promotion at work and stepped back to remind yourself that status and money don't really matter in the grand scheme of things and that we all die in the end anyway, your well-deserved joy would decrease. The takeaway: If you want to hold on to positive experiences, the last thing you want to do is become a fly on the wall. In such cases, immerse away.
By this time, it had become clear that we are all prone to either psychological immersion or psychological distance when we reflect on emotional experiences, though we aren't locked into either state. The tendency we have shapes the patterns of our inner voice, but fortunately so does our ability to consciously alter our perspective.
Along with our work and Verduyn's, a slew of other studies published around the same time began to shift our understanding of the role distancing plays in helping people control their emotions. Researchers at Stanford, for example, linked adopting the perspective of a detached observer with less rumination over time. Across the Atlantic, researchers at Cambridge found that teaching people to "see the big picture" reduced intrusive thinking (the kind that drains executive functions) and avoidance of painful memories. Other experiments demonstrated that even shrinking the size of an image that causes distress in one's imagination reduces how upset people become when they view it.
Still other work applied the concept of distancing to education, showing how leading ninth graders to focus on the big-picture reasons for doing schoolwork—for instance, emphasizing how doing well in school would help them land their desired jobs and contribute to society as adults—led them to earn higher GPAs and stay more focused on boring but important tasks.