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Have you ever tried talking about yourself in the third person? The practice, called illeism, goes at least as far back as the Ancient Greeks. (There’s still a lot we can learn from the Ancient Greeks.)
Several modern-day studies show that talking about yourself in the third person allows you to see past your personal biases and improve decision-making and emotional regulation.
How does it do that?
Illeism is a form of "self-distancing" that allows us to circumvent Solomon’s paradox: the idea that we are great at applying wise reasoning to others’ lives but terrible at applying it to our own. (Many studies validate Solomon’s paradox as social cognitive bias, though the psychological mechanism behind it remains unclear.) Distancing ourselves from our problems helps us to see them as clearly as we would another person’s.
That’s why illeism is a powerful method for breaking the cycle of rumination. It allows you to observe your thoughts and feelings objectively rather than getting caught up in an emotional storm. By referring to yourself as he, she, or they — or whatever third-person pronoun you prefer — you detach from the immediate experience and gain a broader perspective.
In this way, illeism is similar to talking to yourself as a friend would, another method for beating negative thoughts and self-talk.
Several studies — many conducted by psychologist Igor Grossmann at Canada’s University of Waterloo — have found that practicing illeism to defeat rumination makes us wiser.
According to Grossmann, wise reasoning includes intellectual humility, recognition of uncertainty and change, others’ perspectives and broader contexts, and compromise. He also found that wisdom is better than intelligence at predicting emotional well-being and relationship satisfaction.
Grossmann’s 2021 study shows that illeism can even help us build a long-term habit of being wise: For four weeks, almost 300 participants kept a daily diary describing a new social conflict or “irritating interaction.”
Half the group wrote in the third person, the other in the first person. Before and after the monthlong exercise, two psychologists scored each participant on wise reasoning.
The study found that those who wrote in the third person improved their “intellectual humility, open-mindedness about how situations could unfold, and consideration of and attempts to integrate diverse viewpoints.” According to Grossmann and his co-authors, “This project provides the first evidence that wisdom-related cognitive and affective processes can be trained in daily life.”
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