Good Life Project - Why You Should Talk to Yourself (in 3rd person).

Episode Date: August 3, 2017

Good Life Riff: Ever wonder why the internet is littered with a bajillion feel-good quotables, when the reality of most people's lives is pretty far from the utopian mumbo-jumbo we so often see hand-lettered all over insta?Ever wonder what might happen if you changed those quotables to something that was a little less aspirational and a little more real? The short answer just might surprise you. That's what we're talking about today.Good Life Science: And, in our Good Life Science segment, we're diving into an eye-opening bit of new research. It's about how we talk to ourselves when we're anxious and under stress. Turns out, we just might get better faster when we do something just a little bit, well, weird. When we shift our self-doubt to the third-person. Details in today's Good Life Science brief. And, as always, for those want to go to the source, here's a link to the full study.Rockstar sponsors:I'm joining Honest Tea in celebrating the lighthearted ways we're less than perfect through the #RefreshinglyHonest Project. To hear my #RefreshinglyHonest moment, check out this week's episode. Are you #RefreshinglyHonest? Share the fun and funny ways you're less than perfect on social media and tag #RefreshinglyHonest. Want more honesty? You can learn more by visiting honesttea.com/podcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello, hello, hello. It's Jonathan. So as I sit here, it is very early in the morning in Encinitas, California. I'm looking out through the doors at the ocean off in the distance and this is the day before we leave to return to our home in Gotham in New York City after two weeks of transplanting here and taking a bit of a working vacation, environmental, psychological reset. I'm a little bit sad because, funny enough, this is one of the only places that we've been where after two weeks we want to stay longer. Normally we get pretty itchy and we want to go home. But anyway, recording the final Good Life Project riff from the beach to share with you Good Life Project updates, Good Life Project science update today.

I'm talking about how honest we get with what we share, especially when we're creating stuff deliberately for other people to experience. and kind of a fascinating new study on how talking to ourselves can help us out when we are struggling with emotions, which, you know, kind of may make those of us who talk to ourselves as we wander through the day feel a little bit better. Anyway, on to those two topics in today's Good Life Update. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch,

getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. On January 24th.

Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna die. Don't shoot him, we need him! Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk. So, hanging out, been doing a lot of creative work lately and trying to get back into a whole bunch of stuff.

And creating, it's funny, I like to sort of look at some of the things I've been thinking about and create ideas for postcards, for hand lettering, for t-shirts, for apparel, for Good Life Project merch, which we have out there, if you haven't seen it, by the way. And we've been thinking about things, especially because we have our Camp GLP coming up towards the end of August, and really excited to welcome people. We're always thinking of cool, fun, different things we can create for them. And one of the phrases that I actually put together, and then we turned into a design that was on our merch for the last few years was the word grateful, but spelled G-R-E-A-T, like great, and F-U-L-L, like full, and then combining them. So I was playing around with sort of like, how could we update this?

And I was playing with ideas. And then I had the word great really big and the word full really big. And then I added in tiny letters. I said, doing great, feeling full, life is good. And I was looking at it. I was like, oh, that's sweet. It kind of like brings this really nice feeling to it. And then I'm thinking to myself, hmm, am I really doing great? Am I really feeling full? Is life really good? My answer is sometimes, yeah. You know, that's my reality. That's my truth. Sometimes, no. Sometimes I'm feeling crappy. Sometimes my buckets, you know, I've been negligent in filling my good life buckets, and they're pretty damn close to empty. And other times, yeah, life is good, but I'm not feeling it. And so I started playing around.

I was like, you know, it's funny that we're constantly creating stuff like this to put into the world. You know, affirmations, quotes and quotables that are all about, like, everything is awesome. Shiny, happy life things. And people love them and share them around. But it's not reality. And I was wondering to myself, I'm like, you know, what if you actually just took things like this, and you got realistic, and you're like, you actually created art, quotable, shareable, things like this, that didn't reflect this utopian fantasy, hey, everything's awesome state, which sometimes it is. But what if you actually had things that reflected the reality of sometimes things are crappy, sometimes things are awesome?

What if you just told it like it is? Would people want to step into that state and turn around and share it publicly? And so I started thinking to myself about my friend Emily McDowell, who has been a guest on a past episode. And if you haven't listened to that, you definitely want to go check it out. Emily's an awesome human being who pretty early in life had cancer and moved through it and recovered and has since built a really extraordinary life and a really extraordinary business. And it started when she left her career as a creative director and sort of a big advertising firm and then decided that she wanted to turn her creative genius and a bit of snarky wit loose on her experience when she had cancer. And nobody around her could figure out what to say or what to do. And no one wanted

to acknowledge this was kind of weird. So she created these things called empathy cards. And they were just like, okay, so this is what's really going on in my head, in your head. What would happen if we just put it out there and said it and made it public? And that's exactly what Emily did. And she created these empathy cards and has now built Emily McDowell's studio. And she's got lines of cards, all sorts of merch. And it's all built around really funny, cute art, built around phrases and quotables that are not shiny, happy, everything's awesome,

but are kind of like real world. So she'll have a card that says, you know, I know this day really sucks for you. I'm thinking of you. Rather than saying, oh, buck up, everything's awesome. When I think of stuff like this, I'm like, huh? You know, when she comes out with something like this, and these became massive viral hits, by the way, it kind of tells you, did these become massive viral hits? Because people are yearning so much for some way to show that they're feeling their humanity. They're not feeling the, you know, the glorious utopian, everything is awesome sort of aspiration and that they actually want to share the reality of their

not so perfect lives and nobody's actually giving them an opportunity to do it. So it's kind of funny because I looked back at what I was creating. I was like, you know what, this is not my truth. I'm not necessarily, you know, doing great and feeling full and life is awesome. So I kind of played with that phrase and I tweaked it a little bit. And what I changed it to was, some days I'm great, others I struggle. Some days I'm full, others I'm empty. But every day I'm here to feel whatever it is I feel, I'm grateful. And when I looked at that and I read it, that landed as my reality. And I wonder, you know, why don't we do more of this? Why are we so drawn to shiny, happy representations, which are not our reality, which tell the story of an aspiration that many of us don't feel and won't rise to? Is it that we kind of want to keep constantly putting it out there as public goals for us to aspire to and then to share for everybody else? Or is it that we want

to wear the facade of this is my life when in fact it isn't and hope that that convinces us that it is and others that things are really good? You know, I feel like we're missing a moment to allow for the deepening of connection. When we create things that don't reflect our reality and when we share things that tell the story of a reality that isn't true, we lose an opportunity to connect. And I think we're yearning for that connection. We are yearning to be more honest. We are yearning to be more

vulnerable. We are yearning to feel free enough to share the truth of our day-to-day reality and not have to share, feel like we're telling the story of everything is awesome. Because some days it is, and some days it outright sucks. And that's actually okay because a life well lived is an emo diverse life, meaning it is a life full of the entire sweep of emotion and experience, not a shiny, happy life. The research bears that out these days. So it was kind of a fun experiment for me, just writing out this thing. And I'm like, wait, that's not my truth. Even though that's what we see all over the place. And reflecting on Emily and the fact that when she got real and told the truth,

her ideas and her business exploded because so many more people wanted to connect with that level of depth and truth. And then inspired me to go back and say, what if I actually did this? What if I told the real story here? How would that change the way that I feel, what I create in the world, and how might it change the way that people relate to it? And maybe that's my invitation for you as you're listening to this. What if you shared more of the real story in your interactions with people. What would that look like? Anyway, that is what I'm thinking about on today's Good Life Project Drift. Be sure to stay tuned because after the break, we've got kind of a cool study in our Good Life Science update today. It is around how

talking to yourself may actually help you process some of those challenging emotions, which I'm sure you never do and nobody you know ever does. Of course, I never do, except when I do. Back with you in just a moment. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist whether you're running, swimming,

or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results

will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is?

You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. And welcome back to today's Good Life Science Update, where we kind of go out there and scour what's happening in the world of the sciences and looking for studies, for research, for things that are exploring, little tips, tools, ideas, strategies, science,

that just might allow us to live better lives. This week's science update actually is a study that comes out of the University of Michigan. It's a study that recently published findings in Scientific Reports, which is a journal put out by Nature. And as always, we will link to the full report in the show notes for those who like to dive deeper. This is kind of an interesting thing. It's about how we talk to ourselves and how a very subtle shift in that

may in fact help us process emotion much more effectively. So when we're struggling with something, when there's a trauma, when there's something, you know, that's causing anxiety or some sort of emotional reaction that we don't particularly want, many of us talk to ourselves. But usually we talk to ourselves in the first person, meaning don't get so upset, calm down, relax, breathe, let it go. This is stupid. This doesn't mean anything. You know, just let it go. We try and retell the story and put it in the context of something. We reframe it in a way that allows us to calm down, to relax, to let it go, to process and diffuse the emotion. And the thing is,

we generally talk to ourselves in the first person when we do that, because it would be a little bit weird not to. This research actually examined an alternative. What if you actually spoke to yourself why am I so upset? You know, like, I need to just calm down, just calm down. You know, I would say to myself, you know, like, Jonathan is going through something which is really challenging right now. And he's, you know, feeling anxious. And he's in this scenario. I would actually talk to myself in the third person as if I was somebody else. Largely the same conversation, but instead of using the first person, using the third person. Now this sounds a little bit weird. We've all

seen people talk about themselves in the third person as if they're not there or as if they're talking about someone else. And it's a little bit weird, sometimes perceived as a little bit pompous. We see this sometimes in public figures, and we're like, what is going on there? That's a little bit weird talking about yourself in the third person. But it turns out when you talk to yourself, using yourself in the third person, it actually allows your brain to process emotion and struggle a bit differently. According to one of the study leaders, Jason Moser at MSU, he said, essentially, we think referring to yourself in the third person leads people to think about themselves more similar to how they think about others. And you can see evidence in the brain that helps people gain a tiny bit of psychological distance from their experiences,

which can often be useful for regulating emotions. And the study kind of looked at this two ways. They took a group of people, and they did this in the clinical psychophysiology lab at MSU, and they showed them images. Some of them were neutral. Some of them were really upsetting. You know, they were images that were intended to provoke emotion, very often angsty, non-fun emotion. Then they had people react to them both in the first person and in the third person while their brains were being monitored by electroencephalographs, which are these machines that can see what's going on in your brain to a certain extent. And what they saw was that for the people who spoke to themselves using third person as if they were someone else, that particular study participants brain activity

dropped down to a baseline calm really quickly, much more quickly when they referred to themselves in third person than when they referred to themselves in the third person than when they refer to themselves in the first person. So really interesting bit of data there. Then there was a second experiment that was done. And that was similar to this. This is out of UM from their emotion self-control lab, where the people in the study actually were asked to think about,

to bring up experiences from their life that were not fun, things that cause a certain amount of anxiety or fear or unpleasant emotion. And they were asked to think about them and kind of process them using first person and then using the third person, you know, like either, well, I felt this, I feel this, this is my experience, or, you know, Jonathan felt this, Jonathan experienced this, you know, as if you were talking about somebody else. And the interesting thing is, instead of electroencephalograph, they were using something called fMRI, which can, which is short for functional magnetic resonance imaging. I have had a few of those for various injuries over the years, which allows you to look at the brain in a different way. And they found pretty similar

outcomes. What they found was that the people who were processing past experiences that were traumatic actually were able to sort of control their emotion and come back to baseline more effectively when they were in the third person than when you were in the first person. So what's really interesting about this is that it doesn't really take any more energy to talk about yourself one way or the other, but apparently it can really help you process it. And again, the two different experiments kind of back each other up with slightly different experimental setups and different measuring tools. But what's interesting is both show that when we try and process negative

emotion or negative experience, and instead of saying, oh my gosh, I feel this way, saying, wow, so like the third person person, you're like Jonathan, Susie, Ann, whatever it may be, just experience this, and he, she feels this Ann, whatever it may be, just experience this and he, she feels this way. And it actually helps us process the emotion, which is kind of a cool thing. So maybe it's an experiment to try, you know, next time. And you don't have to do this out loud, but maybe next time, you know, something is bothering you, something's making you a bit angsty and, you know, a moment where you normally try and quote, talk yourself down, maybe try the third person option and see how that works for you.

Be really curious whether any of you try this. And if you do, how you feel it works for you. Always interested in the responses. Feel free to share across social media. Let me know, let us know what you think of this and if you try it out, let us know how it actually works in your life as always, so much fun sharing these ideas, these little science updates with you, we're exploring

more ways to share different things with you and go deeper and offer ways to help you live a good life that's it for today. I'm signing off. Last update from the beach. We'll be back in Gotham, New York City for future updates. You may have heard we were battling a little bit of the sound of the beach dogs this morning recording. And of course, back in New York City, we will be battling the sounds of a little bit of background sirens and street noise over there. It's just a different soundscape.

So I'll talk to you guys next week. I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. If the stories and ideas in any way moved you, I would so appreciate if you would take just a few extra seconds for two quick things. One, if it's touched you in some way, if there's some idea or moment in the story or in the conversation that you really feel like you would episode with somebody who you think it'll make a difference for. Email it if that's the easiest thing, whatever is easiest for you. And then, of course, if you're compelled, subscribe so that you can stay a part of this continuing experience. My greatest hope with this podcast is not just to produce moments and share stories and ideas that impact one person listening, but to let it create a conversation, to let it serve as a catalyst for the elevation of

all of us together collectively, because that's how we rise. When stories and ideas become conversations that lead to action, that's when real change happens. And I would love to invite you to participate on that level. Thank you so much as always for your intention, for your attention, for your heart. And I wish you only the best. I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project. If you're at a point in life when you're ready to lead with purpose, we can get you there. The University of Victoria's MBA in Sustainable Innovation is not like other MBA programs. It's for true changemakers who want to think differently and solve the world's most pressing challenges. From healthcare and the environment to energy, government, and technology,

it's your path to meaningful leadership in all sectors. For details, visit uvic.ca slash future MBA. That's uvic.ca slash future MBA. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping.

And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary.