فصل 3

Chapter Three

Zooming Out

“Have you ever killed someone?” the examiner asked.

If she had been anywhere else, with anyone else, and if her future hadn’t been hanging in the balance with this absurd yet apparently crucial question, she would’ve rolled her eyes.

“Like I told you last time,” Tracey said. “No, I have never killed anyone.” Of course, I haven’t, she thought. I’m seventeen! I’m not a killer.

This was her second polygraph with the National Security Agency, the United States’ highly secretive intelligence organization. Tracey’s body—her heart rate and her breathing—had betrayed her when she was asked this question the first time around, and the squiggly readout indicated that she was lying. Now, two months later, she found herself sitting in the same nondescript office in the middle of Maryland undergoing a second polygraph test.

What if they don’t believe me again? she wondered, her inner voice providing an anxious running commentary as the examiner looked at her inscrutably. She knew the answer to her own question: If they didn’t believe her, the future she had been dreaming of would disappear.

—

For as long as Tracey could remember, she knew she wanted more than the life she was born into. School and learning had always come easy to her, even if lots of other things hadn’t. She grew up in a tough neighborhood in West Philadelphia, and although her family wasn’t poor, money placed limitations on her future.

During her freshman year in high school, Tracey learned about a program at a boarding school in the Northeast that allowed gifted students from across the country to complete the last two years of high school on an accelerated track that set them up for success in elite colleges. While the thought of leaving her family and uprooting her existence to a new environment was daunting, the prospect of meeting new people, being challenged intellectually, and escaping the life she had known until then appealed to her. She worked hard on the application and got in.

Boarding school exposed Tracey to a new world of friends and ideas that, for the first time in her life, truly tested her. Although she sometimes felt out of place amid her mostly white peers from privileged backgrounds, she was happy.

As one of the few African American students in her program, Tracey frequently found herself invited to events to help raise money for the school. Stories like hers tended to open the wallets of wealthy donors. During one such event, she met a man named Bobby Inman, the former director of the U.S. National Security Agency.

During their conversation, Inman told her about a highly selective undergraduate training program the NSA offered to the country’s most talented and patriotic students. He encouraged her to apply. She did and the NSA called her in for the interview in which she failed her first polygraph test, making her doubt that her dreams would become a reality. The second time around, however, she managed to control her nerves, and the NSA no longer suspected her of murder, if they even really had in the first place. Her life was about to change in dramatic ways, though her first polygraph experience would end up being a harbinger of things to come: the challenges of managing her inner voice.

At first blush, the terms of the scholarship were everything she wanted. The NSA would cover the entire cost of Tracey’s college education and provide her with a generous monthly stipend. Of course, there were conditions. She would have to spend her summers training to become a top secret analyst and then work for the NSA for at least six years after graduating. Still, it was an incredible opportunity, especially when she got into Harvard that spring. Tracey had earned herself a free Ivy League education and a thrilling future.

A few weeks before classes at Harvard began, she got her first taste of what working with the NSA would be like. During her weeklong onboarding, she received top secret clearances allowing her to access highly classified information. She also learned about the details of the restrictions that came along with her scholarship. She could major only in a handful of subjects that were central to the NSA’s interests: subjects like electrical engineering, computer science, and math. She couldn’t date or maintain close friendships with students from other countries. She couldn’t study abroad. She was discouraged from playing varsity sports. Slowly but surely Tracey’s scholarship, her golden ticket, was morphing into a pair of golden handcuffs.

While other freshmen in her dorm mingled freely, Tracey found herself on guard. In the past, she had been the one profiled. Now at mixers she was doing the profiling, quickly scanning people’s faces and vocal intonations for clues about where they came from out of fear that she might become friends with—or even worse, perhaps even feel attracted to—someone from a distant land. She felt likewise constricted by the math and engineering classes she was enrolled in, which were unlike the excitingly diverse courses so many of her peers were taking. As she hurried along the tree-lined paths of Harvard Yard between classes, her thoughts curled inward on all the not-great things about this supposedly great opportunity. She wondered if she had made a mistake.

Time passed. As she went from being a freshman to a sophomore and then a junior, Tracey felt increasingly lonely. She was drowning, as she put it, in her “inner dialogue.” She couldn’t talk about how she spent her summers—the training in cryptography and circuit-board building, or learning how to scale rooftops to splice antennas. But her feelings of isolation were only one source of stress. Another was the fact that engineering, one of the most challenging majors at Harvard, was proving to be the hardest academic struggle she’d ever faced, and if her grades dipped below a 3.0 GPA, she would be kicked out of the NSA program and required to pay the government back the money it had already paid her—a terrifying possibility.

The stream of her ever more negative inner voice consumed her. Ruminations about what would happen if she didn’t make the grades she needed would spike before her tests. Consumed by anxiety, she began compulsively chewing on the tip of her pencil and twirling her hair during exams. Her nervous tics provided her with a strange sense of comfort. Despite her best attempts to maintain the outward appearance that everything was okay, her body disappointed her once again, in a different way than it had during her first polygraph exam. Precisely when she began to stress out about her grades, she would develop cystic acne on her face, pus-filled pimples beneath the top layer of her skin that required cortisone injections. It was as though the chatter brewing beneath her surface were too extreme to contain. She didn’t know how much more she could take.

She felt as if she had two options: fail out or drop out.

Becoming a Fly on the Wall

Tracey’s story, like the stories of most people whose internal conversations become pools of negativity, is an exercise in distance—the distance we do or don’t have from our problems.

We can think of the mind as a lens and our inner voice as a button that zooms it either in or out. In the simplest sense, chatter is what happens when we zoom in close on something, inflaming our emotions to the exclusion of all the alternative ways of thinking about the issue that might cool us down. In other words, we lose perspective. This dramatically narrowed view of one’s situation magnifies adversity and allows the negative side of the inner voice to play, enabling rumination and its companions: stress, anxiety, and depression. Of course, narrowing your attention isn’t a problem in and of itself. To the contrary, it’s often essential to helping us address challenging situations and the feelings that arise from them. But when we find ourselves stuck on our problems and lose the ability to flexibly zoom out—to gain perspective—that’s when our inner voice turns into rumination.

When our internal conversation loses perspective and gives rise to intensely negative emotions, the brain regions involved in self-referential processing (thinking about ourselves) and generating emotional responses become activated. In other words, our stress-response hardware starts firing, releasing adrenaline and cortisol, flooding us with negative emotions, which only serve to further rev up our negative verbal stream and zoom us in more. As a result, we’re unable to get a wider-angle view that might reveal more constructive ways of handling the emotionally trying situations we encounter.

But our brains evolved not just to zoom in when we confront difficulties but also to zoom out, though the latter is much more challenging during times of stress. The mind is flexible, if we know how to bend it. If you have a fever, you can take something to bring it down. Likewise, our mind has a psychological immune system: We can use our thoughts to change our thoughts—by adding distance.

Psychological distance, of course, doesn’t eliminate a problem. If, for instance, Tracey had been able to step back from her high-pressured predicament and settle into a less anguished state, she nonetheless would still have been in debt to the NSA, with her future hanging in the balance. Similarly, even if Rick Ankiel had been able to retain his pitch, he still would’ve been standing on the mound pitching in the playoffs on national television. Distance doesn’t solve our problems, but it increases the likelihood that we can. It unclouds our verbal stream.

The big question, then, is this: When chatter strikes, how do we gain psychological distance?

As it happened, around the same time that Tracey was sitting in her freshman dorm room at Harvard, I was three and a half hours south down the highway in Manhattan, a graduate student in psychology sitting in the basement of Columbia University’s dingy Schermerhorn Hall thinking about a remarkably similar question. How can people reflect on their negative experiences, I wondered, without getting sucked down the rumination vortex? Answering that question was the reason I had decided to attend Columbia to train with my adviser, Walter Mischel, a groundbreaking scientist whom most people know as the Marshmallow Man.

Walter was akin to royalty in psychology for developing what the public now calls the marshmallow test, a paradigm for studying self-control that involved bringing kids into the lab for an experiment and presenting them with a simple choice: They could have one marshmallow now, or if they waited for an experimenter to return, they could have two. It turned out that children who waited longer ended up performing better on their SATs as teens, were healthier as they got older, and coped better with stress in adulthood than those who immediately grabbed the gooey marshmallow. But even more important than documenting these striking long-term outcomes, the so-called marshmallow test (its real name is the delay of gratification test) helped revolutionize science’s understanding of the tools people have to control themselves.

By the time I arrived at Columbia, Walter and his then postdoctoral student Özlem Ayduk had already become interested in examining how to help people think about painful experiences without succumbing to chatter. At the time, one of the dominant approaches to battling inner-voice rumination was distraction. Several studies had shown that when people find themselves sucked into negative verbal thinking, diverting their attention away from their problems improved the way they felt. The downside of this approach, however, is that distraction constitutes a short-term fix—a Band-Aid that obscures the wound without healing it. If you go to the movies to escape the adversities of real life, your problems are still there waiting for you when you leave the theater. Out of sight, in other words, isn’t actually out of mind, because the negative feelings remain, eagerly waiting to be activated again.

Oddly, at this time, the idea of distancing had fallen out of vogue in psychology. In 1970, Aaron Beck, one of the founders of cognitive therapy and an influential figure in mental health, proposed that teaching patients how to objectively scrutinize their thoughts, a process he called “distancing,” was a central tool that therapists should employ with their patients. In the ensuing years, however, distancing had come to be equated with avoidance—with not thinking about your problems. But in my mind, there was nothing inherently avoidant about distancing. In theory, you could use your mind to frame your problems from a zoomed-out perspective.

This approach differed from the meditative practice of mindfulness in that the goal wasn’t to stand apart and watch one’s thoughts drift by without engaging with them. The point was to engage, but to do so from a distanced perspective, which isn’t the same thing as an emotionally avoidant one. That was the essence of my dad’s teachings and what I had spent so much time doing growing up. So, Walter, Özlem, and I began thinking about the different ways people could “step back” from their experiences to reflect on them more effectively. We landed on a tool we all possess: our ability to imaginatively visualize.

A powerful optical device of sorts is built into the human mind: the ability to see yourself from afar. This mental home theater, it turns out, projects scenes when we think about unpleasant experiences from the past or imagine possible anxiety-producing scenarios in the future. They are almost like videos stored on a phone. Yet these scenes aren’t entirely fixed. Studies show that we don’t see our memories and reveries from the same perspective every time. We can view them from different perspectives. For example, sometimes we replay a scene happening through our own eyes as though we were right back in the event in the first person. Yet we can also see ourselves from the outside, as if transplanted to another viewpoint. We become a fly on the wall. Could we harness this ability to better regulate our inner voice?

Özlem, Walter, and I brought participants into the lab to find out. To do so, we asked one group to replay an upsetting memory in their minds through their own eyes. We asked another group to do the same, only from a fly-on-the-wall perspective, visually observing themselves like a bystander. Then we asked the participants to work through their feelings from the perspective they had been asked to adopt. The differences in the verbal stream characterizing the two groups were striking.

The immersers—the people who viewed the event from a first-person perspective—got trapped in their emotions and the verbal flood they released. In their accounts describing their stream of thoughts, they tended to zero in on the hurt. “Adrenaline infused. Pissed off. Betrayed,” one person wrote. “Angry. Victimized. Hurt. Shamed. Stepped-on. Shitted on. Humiliated. Abandoned. Unappreciated. Pushed. Boundaries trampled upon.” Their attempts to “go inside” and work through their internal conversations just led to more negative feelings.

The fly-on-the-wall group, meanwhile, offered contrasting narratives.

Where the immersers got tangled in the emotional weeds, the distancers went broad, which led them to feel better. “I was able to see the argument more clearly,” wrote one person. “I initially empathized better with myself but then I began to understand how my friend felt. It may have been irrational but I understand his motivation.” Their thinking was clearer and more complex, and, sure enough, they seemed to view events with the insight of a third-party observer. They were able to emerge from the experience with a constructive story. The experiment provided evidence that stepping back to make sense of our experiences could be useful for changing the tone of our inner voice.

Soon after, in more studies, we and others discovered that zooming out in this way also reined in people’s fight-or-flight cardiovascular response to stress, dampened emotional activity in the brain, and led people to experience less hostility and aggression when they were provoked—the kind of situation that is fertile ground for stoking chatter. We also found that this distancing technique worked not just with random collections of college students but also with those struggling with more extreme forms of inner-voice torment. For example, people with depression and even highly anxious parents grappling with their children’s undergoing painful cancer treatments. Yet our findings were, at this point, still limited. They related only to how distancing affects us in the moment. We also wanted to know whether it would have lasting effects, shortening the amount of time people spent ruminating.

It turned out we weren’t the only ones interested in exploring this question.

Not long after we published our initial work, a research team at the University of Leuven in Belgium, led by Philippe Verduyn, devised a clever set of studies to look at whether people’s tendencies to distance in daily life, outside a laboratory setting, influenced how long their emotional episodes lasted. They found that distancing by adopting an observer perspective shortened the duration of people’s negative moods after they experienced events that led them to feel angry or sad. Distancing could put out chatter brush fires before they grew into longer-lasting conflagrations.

This dampening quality of distancing could, however, have an unintended consequence. Distancing shortened both negative and positive experiences. In other words, if you got a promotion at work and stepped back to remind yourself that status and money don’t really matter in the grand scheme of things and that we all die in the end anyway, your well-deserved joy would decrease. The takeaway: If you want to hold on to positive experiences, the last thing you want to do is become a fly on the wall. In such cases, immerse away.

By this time, it had become clear that we are all prone to either psychological immersion or psychological distance when we reflect on emotional experiences, though we aren’t locked into either state. The tendency we have shapes the patterns of our inner voice, but fortunately so does our ability to consciously alter our perspective.

Along with our work and Verduyn’s, a slew of other studies published around the same time began to shift our understanding of the role distancing plays in helping people control their emotions. Researchers at Stanford, for example, linked adopting the perspective of a detached observer with less rumination over time. Across the Atlantic, researchers at Cambridge found that teaching people to “see the big picture” reduced intrusive thinking (the kind that drains executive functions) and avoidance of painful memories. Other experiments demonstrated that even shrinking the size of an image that causes distress in one’s imagination reduces how upset people become when they view it.

Still other work applied the concept of distancing to education, showing how leading ninth graders to focus on the big-picture reasons for doing schoolwork—for instance, emphasizing how doing well in school would help them land their desired jobs and contribute to society as adults—led them to earn higher GPAs and stay more focused on boring but important tasks. Distance, then, helps us deal better not only with the big emotions we experience from upsetting situations but also with the smaller yet crucial daily emotional challenges of frustration and boredom that come with the important tedium of work and education.

All of this taught us that taking a step back could be effective for helping people manage their chatter in a variety of everyday contexts. But we would soon learn that gaining mental distance also has positive implications for something else important: wisdom.

Solomon’s Paradox

It was around 1010 B.C.E. The maternal dreams of a woman in Jerusalem, named Bathsheba, finally came true. After the loss of her first child as an infant, she now gave birth to a second child: a healthy young baby boy whom she named Solomon. As the Bible tells us, this was no ordinary baby. The son of David (of Goliath fame), Solomon grew up and went on to become king of the Jewish people. A peerless leader, he was respected not only for his military might and economic acumen but also for his wisdom. People would travel from distant lands to seek his counsel.

The dispute he most famously settled was between two women who both claimed to be the mother of the same child. He suggested that they cut the child in half, and when one of the women protested, he was able to identify her as the true mother. In an ironic twist of fate, however, when it came to Solomon’s own life, he wasn’t so savvy. Amorous and shortsighted, he married hundreds of women from different faiths and went to great lengths to please them, building elaborate temples and shrines so they could worship their gods. This eventually alienated him from his own God, and the people he ruled, which would finally lead to his kingdom’s demise in 930 B.C.E.

The asymmetry in King Solomon’s thinking is a chatter parable that embodies a fundamental feature of the human mind: We don’t see ourselves with the same distance and insight with which we see others. Data shows that this goes beyond biblical allegory: We are all vulnerable to it. My colleagues and I refer to this bias as “Solomon’s Paradox,” though King Solomon is by no means the only sage who could lend his name to the phenomenon.

Take a little-known story about one of the wisest men in U.S. history, Abraham Lincoln, who, in 1841, was in a rut both professionally and romantically. He had yet to establish himself as a lawyer to the extent he desired. He was also anguishing over doubts about his feelings for his fiancée, Mary, because he had fallen in love with another woman. Immersed in his problems, he sank into depression, or what one historian has called “Lincoln’s melancholy.” The following year, when the future president had begun to recover his hope and clarity, a good friend of his, Joshua Speed, fell into similar doubts about his own engagement. Now in a different role, Lincoln was able to offer Speed sound advice he hadn’t been able to marshal with regard to his own situation. He told Speed that his ideas about love were the problem, not the woman he was engaged to marry. Lincoln later reflected, as Doris Kearns Goodwin writes in her book Team of Rivals, that “had he understood his own muddled courtship as well as he understood Speed’s, he might have ‘sailed through clear.’ ” Before we look at how distancing can lead to wisdom, it’s worth taking a moment to ask what wisdom actually is in practice. In a rigorous field like psychology, an amorphous-seeming concept like wisdom at first appears hard to define. Nonetheless, scientists have identified its salient features. Wisdom involves using the mind to reason constructively about a particular set of problems: those involving uncertainty. Wise forms of reasoning relate to seeing the “big picture” in several senses: recognizing the limits of one’s own knowledge, becoming aware of the varied contexts of life and how they may unfold over time, acknowledging other people’s viewpoints, and reconciling opposing perspectives.

Although we generally associate wisdom with advanced age, because the longer you live the more uncertainty you will have experienced and learned from, research indicates that you can teach people how to think wisely regardless of their age—through gaining distance.

Take a study that Igor Grossmann and I did in 2015. We presented people with a dilemma and asked them to predict how it would unfold in the future. One group of participants was asked to imagine their partner had cheated on them, while the other group imagined the same exact thing happening to a friend—a practical method of creating psychological distance.

While some people may understandably think that outrage is the wisest response to discovering that your partner cheated on you, our interest was in whether distance would decrease rather than increase conflict by cultivating a wise response. As we expected, people were much wiser when they imagined the problem was happening to someone else. They felt it was more important to find compromise with the person who had cheated, and they were also more open to hearing that person’s perspective.

Another illustration of how people can use distance as a hatch to escape from Solomon’s Paradox comes from research on medical decision making. Few contexts are more chatter provoking—and consequential—than having to make an important decision about your health. Uncertainty surrounding physical pain or illness, never mind mortality, bloats the verbal stream with worry, which can cloud our judgment and lead us to make poor decisions that, ironically, further impair our health.

In one large-scale experiment, a group of scientists gave people a choice: do nothing and have a 10 percent chance of dying from cancer, or undergo a novel treatment that has a 5 percent chance of killing you. Obviously, the second option is better, because the risk of death is 5 percent less. And yet, consistent with prior research indicating that people often choose to do nothing rather than something when it comes to their health, 40 percent of participants chose the more life-threatening option. But—and this is a big but—when the same people were asked to make this decision for someone else, only 31 percent made the bad choice. When you frame this percentage difference in terms of the number of cancer diagnoses per year—18 million—that adds up to more than 1.5 million people who could sabotage their own best course of treatment. But this lack of wisdom, brought about by a lack of mental distance, can also influence other areas of our life.

Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize–winning psychologist and author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, has written that one of his most informative experiences involved learning how to avoid an “inside view” and adopt an “outside view.” As he frames it, an inside view limits your thinking to your circumstances. Because you don’t know what you don’t know, this often leads to inaccurate predictions about potential obstacles. The outside view, on the other hand, includes a broader sample of possibilities and thus more accuracy. You’re able to better foresee obstacles and prepare accordingly.

Although Kahneman’s views pertain to accurately predicting the future, research shows that the ability to step outside oneself—another way of saying mental distance—is helpful for decision making more generally. It can help us get past information overload—for instance, when we’re evaluating contrasting features and prices while car shopping—so that we can attain clarity. It can roll back “loss aversion,” the concept Kahneman popularized referring to the fact that people are much more sensitive to losses than they are to gains. Additionally, it can make people more compromising and willing to tolerate alternative views. In one study conducted right before the 2008 U.S. presidential election, Igor and I found that asking people to imagine a future in which their chosen candidate lost the election from a distanced perspective (we asked them to imagine that they were living in another country) led them to become less extreme in their political views and more open to the idea of cooperating with people who supported the opposing candidate.

These positive interpersonal and wisdom-enhancing effects of distancing make this skill invaluable to another area of life where we often experience inner-voice ranting: our romantic relationships. My colleague Özlem and I wondered how distance might factor into intimate-partner harmony. So over twenty-one days we profiled the tendency of people to distance each time they fought with their romantic partner. We found that whether people “distanced” or “immersed” when thinking about problems in their relationships influenced how they argued. When an immerser’s partner argued calmly, the immerser responded the same way—with similar patience and compassion. But once their partners began to show the slightest hint of anger or disdain, the immersers responded in kind. As for the distancers, when their partners talked calmly, they too remained calm. But even if their partner got worked up, they were still able to problem solve, which eased the conflict.

A subsequent experiment took this research even further by showing that teaching couples to distance when they focused on disagreements in their relationships buffered against romantic decline. Over the course of a year, spending twenty-one minutes trying to work through their conflicts from a distanced perspective led couples to experience less unhappiness together. If not exactly a love potion, distancing does seem to keep the flame of love from being extinguished.

All this research demonstrates how useful stepping back can be for changing the nature of the conversations we have with ourselves. Yet more broadly, it also shows how we can reason wisely about the most chatter-provoking situations we face—those that involve uncertainty, which requires wisdom. But what’s striking to me about all this work is that it demonstrates just how many ways there are to get psychological distance, how many options our mind gives us for gaining perspective. But sometimes we need more than wisdom. As Tracey would learn at Harvard, we need new stories—imagined narratives that also add distance—which we create by harnessing the power of the time machine in our own minds.

Time Travel and the Power of the Pen

There Tracey was, sitting in her dorm room each night, gnawing away at her pencil eraser, tormented by her acne, her inner voice spiraling into despondency with the split demands of being a covert agent in training and a lonely scholarship student at an elite university. Helplessly immersed in her anxiety, she finally spoke to therapists at Harvard and the NSA. Much to her disappointment, neither counselor really helped. She remained as alone as ever—or did she?

As a hobby, but seeming to sense it would aid her in some way, Tracey embarked on a family history project. She was fascinated by the long chain of people and events that had brought her into existence. So, during breaks from school, when she wasn’t required to be at the NSA, she chased down stories from her past. Doing so led her to ride on the backs of motorcycles with relatives around Lake Michigan and walk the shores of Lake Merritt in California, wander the sticky streets of New Orleans’s French Quarter with two aunts, and make grave rubbings from the family headstones that dotted the cemetery down the road from her ancestors’ burned-down farm in central Texas.

As her relatives opened up to her, Tracey heard about the struggles of being part of one of the first African American families living in Kalamazoo, Michigan. She discovered that her great-grandmother had been a voodoo practitioner in a relationship with a white man, her great-grandfather, and learned about the prayers she cast to ward off evil spirits. And after careful but persistent prodding, she eventually got different relatives to talk about the most painful and oppressive chapters of her family’s past in the United States. She confirmed that she was the great-great-grandchild of slaves and learned that one of her great-grandfathers had been lynched, while another had been conscripted into the Confederate army. She also discovered she was a descendant of George Washington’s.

The deeper Tracey delved into her family’s history, the calmer she noticed herself feeling when she returned to Harvard. On the one hand, as she tapped into the legacy of her forebears, she seemed to be demonstrating to the world that a descendant of slaves could achieve success at one of the most prestigious institutions in the world. In spite of her difficulties at Harvard, this historical perspective gave her a bird’s-eye view of how far she had come, even making her think her ancestors would be proud of her. At the same time, learning about the suffering that her forebears had endured also helped her put her trials and tribulations in perspective. In her mind, the anxiety surrounding not making grades and not being able to date whom she wanted paled in comparison to the torment her ancestors must have experienced toiling away as slaves. She had become a fly on the wall not just of her own life but of generations of lives—the long line of ancestors who survived the transatlantic slave crossing and eventually flourished in the United States over time. This dramatically calmed her inner voice.

Several studies back up scientifically what Tracey experienced personally, revealing that the ability to strategically time travel in one’s mind can be a tool for creating positive personal narratives that reroute negative inner dialogues. But the benefits of mental time travel aren’t restricted to adopting a bird’s-eye view of the past to weave together a positive story about the present. You can also benefit by mentally time traveling into the future, a tool called temporal distancing. Studies show that when people are going through a difficult experience, asking them to imagine how they’ll feel about it ten years from now, rather than tomorrow, can be another remarkably effective way of putting their experience in perspective. Doing so leads people to understand that their experiences are temporary, which provides them with hope.

In a certain sense, then, what temporal distancing promotes is one of the facets of wisdom: the understanding that the world is constantly in flux and circumstances are going to change. Recognizing that feature of life when it comes to negative experiences can be tremendously alleviating. It is what helped me, for example, cope with what was arguably the most chatter-provoking event of the past century: the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.

As schools closed, quarantines began to take effect and the world outside became quiet; chatter began to brew in my mind just like millions of other people. Will social distancing affect my children’s well-being? How am I going to survive without leaving the house for weeks? Will the economy ever improve? Focusing on how I would feel once the pandemic ends made me realize that what we were going through was temporary. Just as countless pandemics had come and gone in the long history of our species, so too would the COVID-19 threat eventually pass. That buoyed my inner voice.

My colleague Özlem has found that temporal distancing helps people manage major stressors like the loss of a loved one but also more minor yet still critical ones, like looming work deadlines. And best of all, this technique doesn’t just make you feel better; it even improves your love life by making relationships and arguments fare better, with less blame and more forgiveness.

Alongside her family history project, Tracey also kept a journal as her college years progressed. This, too, became a medium for gaining distance. Although journaling has surely been around nearly as long as the written word, it is only in the past few decades that research has begun to illuminate the psychological consolation it provides. Much of this work has been pioneered by the psychologist James Pennebaker (yes, he has the word “pen” in his name). Over the course of a long and distinguished career, he has shown that simply asking people to write about their most upsetting negative experiences for fifteen to twenty minutes—to create a narrative about what happened, if you will—leads them to feel better, visit the doctor less, and have healthier immune function. By focusing on our experiences from the perspective of a narrator who has to create a story, journaling creates distance from our experience. We feel less tied to it. Tracey journaled for years, and it helped her immensely.

Thanks to her inventive ability to pacify her internal dialogues, by the end of Tracey’s senior year at Harvard her acne had abated, her nervous tics subsided, and her grades were stellar. She had subdued her chatter. After graduating from Harvard, she began her work for the NSA. She would spend the next eight years working on covert missions in conflict zones around the world. With hundreds of hours of advanced language training under her belt, she spoke French and Arabic fluently and blended seamlessly into her various assignments, many of which still remain confidential. The intelligence work she produced would be used to brief the highest levels of the U.S. government all the way up to the White House. In many ways, she would end up living the dynamic, cinematic life she had fantasized about when she first learned about the NSA scholarship in high school. To this day, Tracey still keeps a journal.

And she’s now a professor at an Ivy League university (and no longer works for the government).

—

The strange thing about being a psychologist, especially one who studies how to control the inner voice, is that no matter what insights your research yields, you still can’t escape being yourself. Which is to say, when I “go inside,” I can still get lost, in spite of everything I know about how to distance. There’s no other way of explaining what happened to me when I received the threatening letter from my stalker. I was aware of a variety of distancing tools to calm my chatter: adopting a fly-on-the-wall perspective, assuming a detached observer’s perspective, imagining how I’d feel in the future, writing in a journal, and so on. And yet… I was immersed.

I was all chatter.

I was living Solomon’s Paradox.

All I could do was verbalize my panicked inner voice. Naturally, this created tension between my wife and me, and even her distanced perspective couldn’t yank me out of my dialogue. My chatter was so intense it felt as if there were no way out—until suddenly I found the way.

I said my own name.