Difficulty Level: Easy to moderate
Frequency: 2-3 times per week (4 weeks total)
Duration: 2-5 minutes at a time
How to do it
Distancing techniques are most relevant for dealing with past anxiety/stress. The following techniques can be used by themselves, or in combination with one another, depending on your unique situation and preferences. Try them all out to start and see which one(s) works best for you.
Objectively visualize the stressful experience from the perspective of a fly on the wall.
Understand the behaviors and feelings of your “distant self.” The automatic, and far less adaptive, response is to relive the anxiety and visualize the exact experience as it happened – to you and through your eyes. You don’t want this. Instead, assume the perspective of your distant self. Think and write about it NOT in the first person but in the third person.
No, first-person account: “The reason my coworker stressed me out was because of his overall lack of commitment to the project and his hostile attitude towards me.”
Yes, third-person account: “The reason Mike’s coworker stressed him out was because of his overall lack of commitment to the project and his hostile attitude towards Mike.”
Think about why, not what.
When recounting the stress/anxiety, ask yourself why certain negative emotions were felt as opposed to what they were. For example:
Yes, to the why: “Why did Mike [that’s you] feel stressed when thinking about his coworker’s lack of commitment?”
No, to the what: “What did Mike [that’s you] feel in the times when his coworker showed a lack of commitment?”
Reconstrue the event. Don’t recall it.
The mind has a natural tendency to recount past details (called episodic sequencing). You want to prevent this default response and instead shift your thinking to uncover insight from the event. Answer the following questions from an objective perspective to uncover insight. Write down the responses in your notebook:
- What would a person have learned in a situation like this?
- How would a person act a second time around if something similar happened again?
- What would a person do differently to prevent the situation from recurring?
- What new understanding would have come out of this situation?
Important: Distancing is NOT a type of distraction. Distraction would be you choosing to busy yourself with an unrelated task so that your mind doesn’t think about the initial anxiety. While distraction and distancing have similar short-term effects (usually less than a day), the science is clearly in support of distancing as the more adaptive response to stress. It has lasting benefits over multiple weeks. This is because distancing still deals with the stress, albeit from an outside-view perspective; distraction, however, fails to deal with it effectively (1).
Why you should try it?
- Reduces emotional distress of past events (1, 2, 3)
- Reduces emotional reactivity (4)
- Limits anger and aggression in the “heat of the moment” (7)
- Alleviates the brain’s processing of negative emotional stimuli while preserving flexible cognition (6)
- Enhances physiological recovery (heart-rate, blood pressure, etc.) after stressful events (5)
The research
To cope with anxiety, research suggests one potentially adaptive solution is to engage in some form of self-reflection (8). However, there is also evidence indicating that a person who turns inward during moments of stress is at greater risk of rumination, which, of course, can end up making stress worse (9). Why is there the discrepancy? How can it be that a person’s self-reflection can be both good and bad?
Research on psychological distancing came out of this question. What psychologists found is that the difference is due to the type of perspective a person takes while reflecting on the anxiety they feel (2). When thinking about stressful experiences, these researchers have discovered that you can take a perspective in one of two ways:
A self-distanced perspective: Seeing the stress through another view; focus is on the objective experience; more impartial.
A self-immersed perspective: Seeing the stress through your eyes; focus is on the subjective experience; more biased.
How it works
Engaging in distancing techniques has been shown to impact two distinct brain systems: First, the prefrontal regions (found in the “new” area of the human brain) show an increase in activation during distancing (10, 11, 12). The main job of this system is to cognitively control and override basic automatic (emotion-based) impulses. In other words, more activation during distancing = greater control over negative emotion.
And second, the limbic and amygdalar regions (found in the “old” area of the human brain) show a decrease in activation during distancing (13) – makes sense given this system is often called the seat of fear and anxiety in the brain. In other words, less activation during distancing = desensitization to anxiety-related inputs.
We know these patterns exist because people with clinically-significant emotional challenges find distancing difficult. They show the complete opposite pattern of what’s described above: Namely, a reduced prefrontal activation and heightened amygdala activation (14, 15). In other words, these individuals have less control over negative emotions.
The evidence
- Kross, E., & Ayduk, O. (2008).
Facilitating adaptive emotional analysis: distinguishing distanced-analysis of depressive experiences from immersed-analysis and distraction.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34, 924-938. - Kross, E., & Ayduk, O. (2009).
Boundary conditions and buffering effects: Does depressive symptomology
moderate the effectiveness of self-distancing for facilitating adaptive
emotional analysis?
Journal of Research in Personality, 43, 923-927. - Kross, E., Ayduk, O., & Mischel, W. (2005).
When asking “why”does not hurt: distinguishing rumination from reflective processing of negative emotions.
Psychological Science, 16, 709-715. - Strack, F., Schwarz, N., & Gschneidinger, E. (1985).
Happiness and reminiscing: The role of time perspective, affect, and mode of thinking.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 49, 1460-1469. - Ayduk, O., & Kross, E. (2008).
Enhancing the pace of recovery: Self-distanced analysis of negative experiences reduces blood pressure activity.
Psychological Science, 19, 229-231. - Moser, J. S., Dougherty, A., Mattson, W. I., Katz, B., Moran, T. P., et al. (2017).
Third-person self-talk facilitates emotion regulation without engaging cognitive control: Converging evidence from ERP and fMRI.
Scientific Reports, 7, 4519. - Mischkowski, D., Kross, E., & Bushman B. J. (2012).
Flies on the wall are less aggressive: Self-distancing “in the heat of the moment”
reduces aggressive thoughts, angry feelings and aggressive behavior.
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48 1187-1191. - Nigro, G., & Neisser, U. (1983).
Point of view in personal memories.
Cognitive Psychology, 15, 467-482. - Nolen-Hoeksema, S. B., Wisco, E., & Lyubomirsky, S. (2008).
Rethinking rumination.
Perspectives in Psychological Science, 3, 400-424. - Ochsner, K. N., Ray, R. et al. (2004).
For better or worse: Neural systems supporting the cognitive down- and up-regulation of negative emotion.
Neuroimage, 23, 483-499. - Ochsner, K. N., & Gross, J. J. (2005).
The cognitive control of emotion.
Trends in Cognitive Science, 9, 242-249. - Phan, K. L., Fitzgerald, D., Nathan, P. J., Moore, G., Uhde, T., & Tancer, M. (2005).
Neural substrates for voluntary suppression of negative affect: A functional magnetic resonance imaging study.
Biological Psychiatry, 57, 210-219. - Urry, H. L., van Reekum, C. M., et al. (2006).
Amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex and inversely coupled during regulation of negative affect and predict the diurnal pattern of cortisol secretion among older adults.
Journal of Neuroscience, 26, 4415-4425. - New, A. S., Hazlett, E. A., et al. (2007).
Amygdala-prefrontal disconnection in borderline personality disorder.
Neuropsychopharmacology, 32, 1629-1640. - Koenigsberg, H. W., Fan, J., et al. (2009).
Neural correlates of the use of psychological distancing to regulate responses to negative social cues: A study of patients with borderline personality disorder.
Biological Psychiatry, 66, 854-863.
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