Dr. Kentaro Fujita

So, you know, when you are tired and drunk and mad and everything else, one way, if you can't think about your whys and you're having trouble finding distance from the object in front of you, it's not about not being emotional.

It's really just finding some psychological space.

And one way to do that potentially is to take on someone else's perspective, someone that you really admire.

I think they can all have their place.

But as I mentioned before, I think different things will have better power over others for certain people.

So for example, if you tend to be the kind of person who already has a lot of self-talk going on and the self-talk means something to you, like they're meaningful voices to you that you listen to, then self-talk presumably would be very effective for you, right?

So if you're the kind of person where if you're positive self-talk, you literally feel better.

If it's negative self-talk, you feel worse.

then perhaps strategically trying to change that self-talk could potentially have a really powerful effect on you.

Some people talk about visualization.

One thing I forgot to mention with respect to distancing strategy, one distancing strategy is to take a third-person perspective versus a first-person perspective on the thing that you're looking at.

This doesn't work for me at all because I'm not a particularly visual thinker.

I think in words.

So for me, words are more effective than pictures.

But if you're a much more pictorial person and we know that this is a distribution, that some people are more pictorial and some people are more verbal, then perhaps like visualizing yourself engaging in the behavior would be more effective.

Let me add one more thing.

There is research that suggests that when you communicate something to somebody and then they respond in a way that makes it seem like you are on the same wavelength,

that that creates an experience known as shared reality.

People put a special premium in truth value to those interchanges than when you don't have that.

So let me just give you an example.