While almost everyone experiences some negative self-talk, for some people, it can turn into rumination, in which these self-talk thoughts become repetitive and obsessive. But there’s a way to break through that pattern: self-talk in the third-person. According to Moser and his colleague Ethan Kross at the University of Michigan, this unconventional method could help to more easily evaluate and neutralize negative self-talk.¶The two researchers discovered that people who were instructed to self-talk in the third-person (“Angela is nervous about her deadline for this article”) were better able to control their emotions than those instructed to self-talk in the first-person (“I am nervous about the deadline for my article”). Because you often have better clarity, objectivity, and empathy when it comes to other people’s experiences than with your own, third-person self talk enables you to evaluate you thoughts as if they were another person’s.