Summary: In the Bible, King Solomon was an incredibly wise man and people came from all over the world to ask for his advice. His wisdom, however, only applied to matters that did not concern him directly. His life was a succession of bad decisions and inordinate passions.

This is why having an internal dialogue in the third person can help. Because we are better at giving advice to others than to ourselves, and it should not be confused with narcissism.

But above all, what you choose to do after the distancing strategy that really matters and that distinguishes adaptive emotional control from denial. When you reach psychological distance, you can escape from your emotions. Or, you can go deeper and elaborate on them, but from a detached perspective, Kross clarifies.

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In the Bible, King Solomon was an incredibly wise man, and people came from all over the world to ask for his advice.
His wisdom, however, only applied to matters that did not concern him directly.
His life was a succession of bad decisions and inordinate passions, wrote Wray Herbert in The Association for Psychological Science.
He had hundreds of pagan wives and concubines, loved money and neglected the education of his son, who later became an incompetent tyrant.
This is known as Solomon's paradox.
Regardless of its historical veracity, Solomon's story shows how, often, we are better at giving advice to others than to ourselves, because the distance you place between yourself and others allows you to evaluate a situation more objectively. and to control your emotions.
But there may be an incredibly simple way to apply this same Solomonic distance to your emotions and problems: to talk to yourself in the third person.
Now, this proposition may seem strange at best and annoying, narcissistic and idiotic at worst.
Yet decades of research show that talking to yourself in this way in your head in so-called distanced self-talk can help build psychological distance, a phenomenon that leads to better emotional control.
The study published in Clinical Psychological Science is part of a long list produced by University of Michigan psychology professor Ethan Kross, Bryn Mawr College psychology professor Ariana Orvell, and others.
It confirms that when people talk to themselves using words they would typically reserve their third and second person names and pronouns for others, they are able to handle negative emotions better, even in intense situations and even if they have a history of difficult relationship to their emotions.
A distanced inner dialogue emphasizes the importance of psychological distance in general.
Human beings have the gift of introspection, which helps solve problems and make plans for the future.
But when something bad happens or intense negative emotions are created, introspection can turn into obsessive brooding.
When we are faced with this type of discomfort, we tend to close ourselves, as if to exclude everything else.
We lose the ability to look at things as a whole, Kross explains.
And we struggle to regulate our emotions.
Psychological distance has long been known, explains Kevin Ochsner, professor and director of the Psychology department at Columbia, and there are several strategies for creating distance: you can imagine, for example, a person or a scene moving away from you, such as the opening credits of Star Wars.
And it has been shown that even the act of lying back physically can help to perform an action considered difficult.
Kross learned of the practice about ten years ago while exploring other methods of distancing from the s.
He quickly discovered that by talking to themselves in the third person, or even in the second person (using the you), people got over the wall that kept them from changing their perspective.
The idea that the tools needed to change perspective are already part of the structure of the language we speak, adds Kross.
The technical term of third person speaking is illeism.
Many of us have an inner monologue that intervenes when we reason about decisions to make or reflect on the past, but we use pronouns like me, me, mine more frequently.
In 2017, in The Cut, Breena Kerr wrote about how she started talking about herself in the third person at the beginning of her divorce.
I made an action plan like I was recommending a friend someone I knew and loved, who coincidentally had the same name as me.
It worked.
One of the most intriguing aspects of distant internal dialogue is that it requires minimal effort.
In brain imaging studies in collaboration with the University of Michigan, Kross and colleagues found that it not only reduced emotional overload, but also that areas of the brain associated with cognitive control were not overexploited.
When you talk about yourself in the third person, Orvell explains, don't forget that you are reflecting on yourself.
All the details of your emotions and situations remain accessible, you simply get to see them more objectively.
We are so used to constantly changing perspectives when it comes to interpreting certain pronouns [think of English you, which can be singular, plural and generic depending on the context, ndt], that it may be that when we use them for ourselves, we instigate the same sliding from a self-centered point of view to a more distant one, explains Orvell.
She adds that she does not adopt a spaced out perspective 24 hours a day, not even internally: a strategy to be applied in moments of intense emotional distress, not always.
It is important to underline that the research done so far is all about inner dialogue, not the way we talk about ourselves aloud.
But Kross theorizes that Lilleism, although culturally associated with narcissism, is actually far more complex.
For example, writing a resume or bio in the third person is less distressing than doing it in the first person.
easier to talk about someone else's results, Kross says.
If that were the case, and we're speculating for now, this is the opposite of narcissism.
And he demonstrates that Lilleism is a complex phenomenon.
Orvell thinks that while people may use the third person in different ways, there may be constants.
There is an effort to distance yourself from the self when Trump tweets his name and when Jennifer Lawrence, in an interview with the New York Times, becomes anxious and says Calm down, Jennifer.
Like many mental health tools, Orvell explains, distanced inner dialogue isn't the magic bullet for complex ailments like social anxiety, but just a helping strategy.
And not necessarily the right one for everyone.
But above all, what you choose to do after the distancing strategy that really matters and that distinguishes adaptive emotional control from denial.
When you reach psychological distance, you can escape from your emotions.
Or, you can go deeper and elaborate on them, but from a detached perspective, Kross clarifies.
Many cognitive behavior therapy approaches include distancing methods, just as mindfulness practices are, at a basic level, focused on creating a distance between oneself and one's thoughts.
Ochsner adds that a component of Buddhism is precisely cultivating the space between an impulse and an action.
Many meditation practices are based on observing oneself from the outside.
When you distance yourself, not that you don't feel anything, she specifies her.
Not that it turns off your emotions.

From Vice