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Hi, everybody welcome back once again to calm your caveman. Thanks for listening again to one more episode. Last time , 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 Kross 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. 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 a couple of episodes 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 Russell Harris, who's a therapist, 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. Kross'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, 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. Kross, where he talks about people that relate to their emotional experiences by immersing themselves in them, by using the I language to describe their emotions, the more they talk about their emotions, the more they actually zero in on the hurt 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. And this is accomplished through speaking about it in the third person. 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.
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.

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. 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 . They also ruminated less about it afterwards. And, judges who watched the videos of the participant speeches after the fact, indicated that the people in the distanced self-talk group, 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.

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, they were trying to measure how quickly that self-talk in the third person could work. And it was interesting to see that it did not take long. In fact, they saw changes in the person's emotional reactivity emerge within one second. That's how quickly it can affect, how quickly it can regulate the emotion of the person. And it also didn't seem to overtax their executive functioning. 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, or the distanced 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.

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.

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 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 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. 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.