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Hi, everybody welcome back once again to calm your caveman. Thanks for listening again to one more episode. A couple of episodes ago, we talked about the need to approach your anxiety instead of avoiding it. We talked about how avoiding your anxiety is only going to make it worse. And we talked about a three step approach to being able to approach your anxiety. The first step was to find a reason to approach it, find your why. Because if you have a why you can bear almost any how. Then we talked about how step two was to defuse from your anxiety, defuse from your emotions. And we talked about step three was to expose yourself little by little to those anxiety triggers. Well today, we're going to revisit and expand step two, a little bit, defusing from your emotions, because it's really important to understand that there is a right way to do it and a wrong way to do it. Or in other words, There's a way to do it, that can make your negative feelings worse, that can magnify them, just like avoiding your anxiety. And there's a way that you can do it, that can help you to manage and master your anxiety. So I want to talk about the wrong way and the right way to do it. And a lot of this information is, comes from a book called Chatter by Dr. Ethan Cross who's a professor of psychology at the university of Michigan. And I'll put a link to that book in the show notes if you want to look at it.
So, first of all, let's go back to talking about what defusing is. So defusing from your emotions is learning to distinguish between your anxiety and your ability to think about your anxiety. So it's being able to step back and observe your emotions. So when you're fused with your emotions, You are embedded in them. You are mired in them. You are subject to them. But if you can learn to defuse from your emotions, it's kind of like being able to climb out of the mud puddle of your emotions. When you're in the mud puddle you can't see very well. It seems enormous. It seems overwhelming and vague and not understandable. But if you can climb out of the mud puddle and sit by the side and look at it from the side perspective, from outside the mud puddle, then you can understand that there's a difference between you and your emotions. There is a part of you that is able to think about your emotions, to observe your emotions. And the more you do this, the more you're able to relax into being the you who is able to observe that anxiety instead of being embedded in it, instead of being fused with it. So you can move from someone who is subject to your anxiety to someone who has feelings of anxiety. Do you notice a difference? There it's a movement from a position of being subject to a position of possessing. So it's a, it's a process of differentiating from your anxiety and being able to emerge from the mud puddle and sit by the side of it and look at it. Ann Weiser Cornell who's a counselor talks about how it's the difference between saying I am anxious and saying part of me, part of me is anxious. That I have an anxious feeling or I'm aware of something that feels anxious inside of me. And so this allows you to be with your anxiety, instead of feeling it all over. Because it is just part of you. It's not all of you. And it's about being in a relationship with your inner experience, being with your feelings, instead of in them. So we're not trying to avoid the feelings. We're not trying to run away from the feelings or resist them. We are going to be with them, but we're not going to be mired in them. And this is the really important key.
We talked about the technique of labeling your emotions. And we cited various studies that talked about how this can be really effective in helping us to defuse from our emotions and not be so overwhelmed and overpowered by them. And how this can reduce those huge, painful, murky, endless feelings into a finite experience with boundaries and with a name. And this can give us this reassuring sense of control over what before was really an undefined emotion. So that's why it's important to describe your emotions. And and Russell Harris, who's a therapist, he authored an article that was published in the journal Psychotherapy in Australia, where he talks about how you can, one way that you can learn to describe your feelings is by trying to observe where it is that the sensation of anxiety is felt within your body and try and identify if it has edges, if it has a shape. Trying to identify the boundaries of it, right? If it has a vibration or a weight or a temperature or a pulsation. These are all different methods that you can use to be able to notice and observe the characteristics of your emotional experience and be able to climb out of the mud puddle and sit beside and look at it instead of just being uh, drowned in it.
But there is a really important aspect to how to do this in a way that is effective. And this is where we come to the information from Dr. Cross's book Chatter. And he talks about the importance of being able to use third person pronouns instead of first person pronouns. So this is the transition from talking about your feelings by using the pronouns I, me, my, talking about it in the first person, we want to get away from that and we want to get toward being able to talk about it with, by using your own name, talking to yourself, using your own name and using third person pronouns like you, he, she. So, this is important because when we talk about our feelings with the first person singular, I, me, my, this is a form of immersing ourselves in the, in the emotion. This is us being in the mud puddle. We are fusing ourselves with the emotion, because it is my experience, my personal experience. If you can instead get a little bit more distance climb out of that mud puddle, sit by the side and talk to your emotion with third person pronouns- you, right, and using your name- then this helps you to feel in a sense, like you're talking to another person. We tend to be a lot more perceptive about how to deal with other people's emotional problems than we are with our own. And it is maybe precisely because of this, because when we are having the emotional experience, we tend to get mired in it and fused in it. And we can't see it from a third person perspective. But if you simply use this technique, Of beginning to talk about your emotional experience in the third person. For example. Instead of asking, why did I blow up at so-and-so today? You can say, why did Adriana blow up at so-and-so today? And that helps you to see things from that third person perspective and be able to talk to yourself as if you're talking to a friend that you value and that you would give advice to. And this has been born out in research, many different studies, a lot of them headed up by Dr. Cross. Where he talks about people that relate to their emotional experiences by immersing themselves in them, by fusing themselves with them, by using the I language to describe their emotions, viewing the event from the first person perspective- I me, my- the more they talk about their emotions the more they actually zero in on the hurt and the negativity and just inflame the negative emotions. And their attempts to go inside and work it out. Just lead to more negative feelings. And so you can actually end up getting trapped in your negative emotions, in your anxiety, if you describe it in a way that fuses, that immerses yourself in the, in the emotion. So, if we're going to approach our emotions, this is a difficult process, we don't want to avoid, we don't want to escape, we want to approach, but we have to approach it in a way that allows us to maintain our clarity. That doesn't just inflame the feelings and make them even worse. We need to do it in a way that gives us more clarity and allows us to see things in a more complex way and a more constructive way. And this is accomplished through speaking about it in the third person. And this has been shown over and over again in studies by Dr. Cross and colleagues. Those who are able to climb out of the mud puddle and sit by the side, and be with their feelings instead of in them, that this, instead of inflaming the negative feelings, it helps them to feel better. And it actually helps them to move from a threat appraisal to a challenge appraisal. And I'll detail a little bit more about how the studies have shown this, how it has tracked that people's appraisals, their internal invisible appraisals have shifted from threat to challenge simply by using this language, using their language in a different way. Instead of saying, I saying, you. Now, remember we talked about the threat response, the challenge response we've referred to it many times, if anybody missed it, you can go back to that episode called Is Stress Good or Bad For You, and I'll put a link in the show notes, that describes in more detail the difference between the threat response and the challenge response. But remember that the threat response is associated with anxiety. The challenge response, on the other hand, is where we feel like our resources are up to the demands and our body, our physiology rises to the occasion. It facilitates our cognitive performance.
And one really important difference between the challenge and the threat response that we haven't talked about for a while. Is that with the threat response, that stress reaction that physiological stress in your body, that response lingers even after the stressor has gone. So even after you're no longer in that stressful situation, The feelings of stress and the response of stress linger in your body. Whereas with the challenge, not so much. With challenge, your body's able to return much more quickly to baseline. The stress response doesn't linger. And this is shown in studies specifically related to this linguistic technique of speaking of yourself in the first versus the third person. And how people's negative moods after they experienced the event that led them to feel that negative mood, they are shorter when they can adopt this way of speaking about the event, which is in the third person. When they can defuse by talking about it as you, rather than I. And It's also been shown in other studies to help people to make better first impressions, and to improve performance in stressful problem solving tasks, and to facilitate wise reasoning and rational thinking. And these are all things that show us evidence that the people in these studies were able to shift to a challenge response, because we're seeing improved cognitive performance, more reasoning and rational thinking, and so that means that the blood flow is getting to your brain. You have access to those higher thinking powers. And so this is what we want. We want the challenge response. What a great thing to have this hack, this linguistic hack that can help us to shift from threat to challenge and help us to shift from being embedded and mired in those emotions, being overpowered by those emotions and unable to see them clearly, to being able to climb out by the side and observe them and be with them in a third person capacity.
So, let me tell you about one study that Dr. Kross and his colleagues did, where they subjected people basically to a situation that would trigger performance anxiety. They made the participants give a five minute speech in front of an audience. And they only had five minutes to prepare for that speech. They only had five minutes warning about the speech. And so it was a situation that was pretty much guaranteed to trigger some kind of performance anxiety in the participants, because they had high demands and low resources. They don't have a lot of time to prepare, right? So the people were divided into two groups and they were instructed to reflect on their anxieties about their upcoming speech in one of two ways. One group was instructed to use the first person pronoun "I". And the other group was instructed to use non-first person pronouns and their own name. So they would talk to themselves with their own name. Adriana, you are feeling this way, or Adriana she is feeling this way. So they were given five minutes to prepare for this speech without being able to take any notes. And the difference between the two groups was notable. So those that used the third person pronouns, that were able to distance themselves a little bit, to defuse from their emotions by using you, and third person pronouns and their name, they experienced less shame and embarrassment after giving the speech compared to the participants who use the immersed self-talk, the first person pronouns, the I. They also ruminated less about it afterwards. And, importantly, judges who watched the videos of the participant speeches after the fact, indicated that the people in the distanced self-talk group, those that are saying you and using their own name, actually performed better on the task than those who use the immersed self-talk. So there was actual evidence in the way that they performed, it facilitated their performance to speak to themselves, to speak about their nervousness in this way. To be able to defuse a little bit from their emotions.
So another interesting aspect of this linguistic technique is that it seems to be able to regulate emotions quickly. Often it takes a long time for us, or at least some time to regulate our emotions, but researchers found in a particular study, this is another study that Dr. Cross and colleagues did. They were trying to measure how quickly. That self-talk in the third person could work. And in this study, they had people, uh, look at disturbing photographs and use either first person language, I, me my, to describe what they're feeling, or distanced language to describe what they're feeling. And to, to think about how they felt as they looked at these photographs, either using the immersed language or the distance to language. And as they did this, the researchers were monitoring the electrical activity in their brains. And what they found was that there was actually a lot less emotional activity in the brain when the people used the distanced language to reflect on their feelings after seeing these disturbing pictures. And it was interesting to see that it did not take long for the people to feel some relief through this verbal distancing. In fact, they saw changes in the person's emotional reactivity emerge within one second of having viewed the negative picture. That's how quickly it can affect, how quickly it can regulate the emotion of the person. They see the picture, they begin to talk to themselves in the third person, and already they are seeing a shift in the emotional activity in the brain. And so it is very quick. It can be very quick. And it also didn't seem to overtax their executive functioning. So it seemed also to not be something that relies on a lot of heavy thinking power. This is something that can be done fairly easily. Of course, the more we practice it, the easier it gets. But it's important also to recognize that we have certain tools that are appropriate for situations when we don't have a lot of brain power. When we're feeling very distressed, for example, we want to have some tools that don't require a lot of executive functioning. And so from this study, anyway, it appears that this technique doesn't require a whole lot of brain power to execute. So it's high on results and low on effort. That makes it a tool that is useful in a wide variety of situations, even when we're already in a threat state, and we already have reduced cognitive powers. We can access it, perform it fairly easily and regulate our emotions.
In another study, these researchers asked people to write about their deepest thoughts and feelings about an upcoming stressful event. And they were supposed to either use the immersed self-talk, meaning I, me and my, or the distance to self-talk, meaning you third person self-talk. And the, the researchers looked afterwards and analyzed the content of what people wrote. And they were able to separate it as challenge oriented or threat oriented, right. Challenge oriented thinking, or threat oriented thinking. And they found that the people who engage in this distanced self-talk, who speak to themselves in terms of you, third person, using their own name, that they demonstrated a lot more challenge oriented thinking than those who were using the immersed self-talk. So when the researchers looked at the essays, and the identified which had challenged oriented thinking, 75% of those that wrote challenge oriented thinking essays were using that distanced self-talk. So it was still possible to generate a challenge response for some people, a very small group of people who were using that immersed self-talk, but by and large, the majority of people who are able to attain that challenge type of thinking, challenge oriented thinking were using this distanced self-talk. And on the other hand, Those who demonstrated threat, um, threat appraisal thinking in their essays, those tended to be people that were using immersed self-talk, people that were instructed to think about their stressor in terms of the first person, I, me and my. So in this group That demonstrated threat response, thinking, in their essays, 67% of those people were using immersed self-talk. So the majority of people who demonstrated um, threat type thinking we're employing a method of thinking about their stressor that was immersed, that was fused with the feeling and this led to them feeling threatened. So it shows that by and large if we use this distanced self-talk it is much easier, much more likely that we will be able to generate a challenge response, challenge oriented thinking. Whereas if we use the embedded self-talk, we're more likely to end up with a threat response. That's what this study showed.
And the researchers got into how this actually played out in people's heads. Of course, they're looking at the essays that people wrote. And the people who were writing in the immersed group, here's one example, someone who wrote, "I'm afraid I won't get a job if I mess up during an interview. And I always mess up in some way. I never know what to say. And I am always incredibly nervous. I end up in a feedback loop of nervousness, causing bad interviews, causing nervousness. Even if I get a job, I think I would still be afraid of interviews." So can you see the threat thinking in this person's essay? They're feeling that their resources are really weak in comparison with the demands. In fact, they are feeling that it's already a given that their resources are not going to be up to the demands. So that is definitely a threat appraisal that was written by this person, uh, speaking in a fused way with their experience using the words I, me and my.
On the other hand, the people who use the distanced language tended to have a very different way of talking about their stressor. And so here's an example of someone, he wrote, "Aaron, you need to slow down. It's a date. Everyone gets nervous. Oh, geez. Why did you say that? You need to pull it back, come on, man. Pull it together. You can do this." So you can see here already, this sort of friend to friend type speaking, the person is able to see their situation as they, as if they're speaking to a friend, and the type of language that they're using is encouraging. And it's trying to show that the person's resources are up to the demands. "You can do this. Everyone gets nervous. It's normal. It's not too much for you." It's trying to minimize the way the demands look, and it's trying to build up the person's resources. So, as we've said so many times, it's really difficult sometimes to conceptualize, how can we switch our brains from a threat appraisal to a challenge appraisal, because as we've said, Much of the appraisal process is unconscious. So sometimes it can be very difficult to simply switch it because we want to. But this is really useful to know that simply using this type of language creates this switch and our brains and the, we already begin to have a little bit more distance to be able to climb out of that mud puddle, sit by the side and see the situation more clearly, and give advice to ourselves the way that we would to a friend.
Another study looked at a specific physiological indicator of whether or not people were in threat or challenge in using these two ways of speaking about their emotional experience. So one aspect, physiological aspect that we have talked about before in this threat response is that we have reduced cardiac efficiency. And one of the reasons for this is that in a threat response, our vasculature constricts. And so it makes it harder for our blood to circulate. Our blood tends to be concentrated in core areas of our body. We get less blood flow to the brain. On the other hand, when we're in the challenge mode, our vasculature relaxes, we have increased cardiac efficiency. And this allows the blood to move more easily through the body. So this study researchers were specifically looking at this marker. And they were, they asked participants to use their own name and speak in the third person to reflect on their stress before giving a public speech. This is another public speech, performance anxiety study. And those who were asked to use the third person in talking about themselves displayed a challenge cardiovascular response. In other words, their vasculature relaxed. And those who use the immersed language, the I, me and my, displayed a textbook threat response, meaning that their vasculature constricted. So all of these different indicators that show what's happening in the brain, what's happening on the level of appraisals. How it affects participants' physiology, how it affects their performance, how much the stress response lingers, or how quickly it goes away, all of these different things are showing that there is a big difference in the way that one type of language affects us and another affects us.
So yes, we do need to learn to label our emotions and label them with nuance. But it's important for us to remember that we need to do it in a way that allows us to climb out of the mud puddle and sit by the side and be with our emotions rather than immersed in them and the language that we use will very much influence the perspective that we take in our own situation, whether or not we are fused with our emotions, or we are defused from our emotions.
So that is the importance of defusion. It can quantify, it contains it, defines it, differentiates yourself from the emotional response. So you have your self which appraises and you have your self which is having the emotional response, and defusion helps you to separate the two. It helps you to identify that you have a resource, which is this resource of this self, which has a consciousness larger than the emotional response that you're experiencing. You have a self that can observe and examine and understand what it is that you're going through, that can understand your emotional response that can, uh, feel where it is in your body and notice the edges of it and notice where it ends and where it begins, it can help you to have that feeling of control and power over the situation. At least strengthen your feelings, have a control and power because it can help you to see both your resources and your demands from a little bit of distance, the way that you can see it when you look at someone else's problems. And defusion is essential because we can only regulate our emotions once we have distinguished between our emotional response and the appraisal that created it. Once we can observe and examine and understand our emotions. Then we can go about managing them in a way that is more beneficial for us.
So I would encourage you to try one of these exercises that I spoke about in the study. If you find yourself sometime this week at a point where you're experiencing a lot of negative emotion. Go ahead. And start to write about it. And I encourage you to write rather than just speak about it, because what we're trying to do is defuse, right? We don't want to be fused with the emotion. As long as it's in your head, it can still be difficult to separate your thoughts from your feelings. But if you can actually write it, then it really gets it out into that third person space, that space where you could convey, you can tell a story about the emotion to someone who is not you. And so this practice of writing really helps you to climb out of that mud puddle. You could also do it, as an alternative, by recording it into a recording app on your phone. But if you're going to do it that way, in order for it to be beneficial, like writing, I would advise that you listen to the recording afterwards. Because what you really need is not just the experience of actually expressing the feelings, but the experience of being able to look at the expression of the feelings. So to be able to listen after it's been recorded, to be able to read after it's been written. And go through this exercise and see what kind of inner wisdom you uncover as you start to begin to see this problem as you might see it from a third person perspective. As if you were giving advice to a friend with the same problem. It's a very useful skill. So it's important to practice it because the more you practice it, the easier it gets. And remember, it's something that can quickly change your emotions. It's a quick regulator and something that doesn't require a lot of executive functioning. So it's a tool we always want to have on hand, especially for those moments when we're feeling particularly distressed.
So that's the challenge and the informational tidbit I wanted to give to you today so that you can understand better how your brain works and how to regulate your emotions. Thanks again for listening.