As a child, if I sat around feeling sorry for myself, my mother would gently rap her knuckles on the top of my head and admonish me. “So selfish,” she would say. “Go clean toilet.” To Mom, who was born and raised in the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau of China, a person should not nurture neurotic thinking or dwell on the tiny things that are wrong in life. This would allow catastrophizing and overgeneralizing to take control.
I would not admit it back then, but my mother was right. Ruminating over petty resentments isn’t at all helpful. Extended cogitating over minor gripes can lead to pessimism and mood disorders. Certainly, bad things do happen—say, a death in the family or losing a job—but that doesn’t mean we need to fall into a negative cycle of self-talk set on phrases such as, “I am so terrible, I lost that job.” “I am a failure.”
Psychologist Albert Ellis, the father of rational emotive behavioral therapy and the author of books including How to Control Your Anxiety, coined the term “awfulizing”—when we think a scenario or situation is 100 percent worse than it really is. Learning how to regulate our emotions is key to combating this type of bleak outlook.
Many of us focus on the self, but not on how we should—as in self-care, like getting proper sleep. Instead, we focus on negative deliberations that can actually shorten our lives. A paper in the journal Neurobiology of Aging showed that highly anxious and worried older adults had brains with much less gray matter. Essentially, anxiety can lead to shorter telomeres—structures of DNA sequences and proteins at the end of chromosomes. Telomeres shorten when cells divide. In effect, they get shorter as we age. When telomeres are too short, they cannot divide, and this leads to cell death, a sure sign of accelerated aging. This reduces longevity, impairs stem cell and tissue function, and increases the risk of heart and infectious diseases.
We Can Observe Our Suffering
Ethan Kross, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, has conducted many studies on distancing oneself from the self, a useful technique that may promote healthy self-regulation. He found that we can distance ourselves from negative thinking by referring to ourselves in the third person. Third-person thinking is a rhetorical device called illeism. It helps us distance ourselves from negative thoughts, and it can help regulate our emotions to a more even-keeled reflection.
We can act like a fly on the wall in the movie called My Life, and sometimes we might watch ourselves mope in misery: Jane is feeling sorry for herself because she didn’t get that party invitation. Observing ourselves at an arm’s length may help us reduce the emotional reactivity we can feel. This objective observation can help lessen rumination and see our negativity as a passing thought.
This third-person perspective may help us to observe a situation from afar. When I was younger, I heard this third-person usage and had to stop and listen. My aunt said, “The shop clerk was not kind to Auntie Lin.” My aunt addressed herself by her first name, and she had a funny, knowing smile on her face like she knew she didn’t have to buy into the negativity—her own or anyone else’s. I learned a lot by watching and listening to this wise aunt.
Adapted from the book How to Be Less Miserable. Blackstone Publishing, 2025.
