Why Saying Is Believing — The Science Of Self-Talk

From the self-affirmations of Stuart Smalley on Saturday Night Liveto countless videos on YouTube, saying nice things to your reflection in the mirror is a self-help trope that's been around for decades, and seems most often aimed at women. The practice, we're told, can help us like ourselves and our bodies more, and even make us more successful — allow us to chase our dreams!

David Sarwer is a psychologist and clinical director at the Center for Weight and Eating Disorders at the University of Pennsylvania. He says that, in fact, a mirror is one of the first tools he uses with some new patients. He stands them in front of a mirror and coaches them to use gentler, more neutral language as they evaluate their bodies.

"Instead of saying, 'My abdomen is disgusting and grotesque,' " Sarwer explains, he'll prompt a patient to say, " 'My abdomen is round, my abdomen is big; it's bigger than I'd like it to be.' "

The goal, he says, is to remove "negative and pejorative terms" from the patient's self-talk. The underlying notion is that it's not enough for a patient to lose physical weight — or gain it, as some women need to — if she doesn't also change the way her body looks in her mind's eye.

This may sound weird. You're either a size 4 or a size 8, right?

Not mentally, apparently. In a 2013 study from the Netherlands, scientists watched women with anorexia walk through doorways in a lab. The women, they noticed, turned their shoulders and squeezed sideways, even when they had plenty of room.

"Their internal representation — their brain perspective on their body — is that the body is much, much bigger than, in fact, it is," says Dr. Branch Coslett, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania. He says studies like this one aren't actually new.

At least as far back as 1911, for example, the aptly named Dr. Henry Head and Dr. Gordon Morgan Holmes — two neurologists — published a series of papers exploring the body-brain connection. But they didn't look at people with anorexia.

"They used an example of the kind of hats that were then in vogue, which were these big hats with big feathers at the top," says Coslett. Holmes and Head noticed that when women who habitually wore the big hats walked through doors, they ducked — "even when not wearing the hat," Coslett says.

Their mental self was wearing the hat, even if their physical self wasn't — just as anorexic women in the Netherlands study saw themselves carrying a bigger body. Neuroscientists are still trying to understand exactly how this works.

It's clear that we all have an internal representation of our own bodies, Coslett says. We need that very specific sense of ourselves to understand how much space we take up — so we can walk and not bump into things, or perform simple tasks, like reaching out a hand and picking up a coffee cup. Studies show that this internal sense of oneself is a powerful thing. Research on what neurologists call motor imagery indicates that the same neurological networks are used both to imagine movement, and to actually move. Andimagining a movement over and over can have the same effect on our brains as practicing it physically — as well as lead to similar improvements in performance.

What Coslett wants to understand — and he's just starting to study this now — is how people with eating disorders get their mental image of their body so wrong, adding inches to their thighs, butts and bellies. By understanding exactly how this misperception works, he hopes to gain insight into how to bring closer to reality the mental body image of someone struggling with anorexia or bulimia — or just a poor self-image.

So far, evidence that the words you say to yourself could change the way you see yourself is still limited to the self-reports of patients; and the effect on brain physiology hasn't yet been studied. But Coslett thinks self-talk probably does shape the physiology of perception, given that other sensory perceptions — the intensity of pain, for example, or whether a certain taste is pleasing or foul, or even what we see — can be strongly influenced by opinions, assumptions, cultural biases and blind spots.

So, maybe self-talk is more than a confidence booster. From a neuroscience perspective, it might be more like internal remodeling.

But to get the benefit, the specific words you use seem to matter, too, it turns out. Research published this year suggests that talking to yourself and using the word "I" could stress you out instead of bringing on waves of self-love and acceptance.

Solving the Mystery of Mother-Speak

Psychologist Ethan Kross of the University of Michigan led the work, studying the pronouns people use when they talk to themselves silently, inside their minds.

"What we find," Kross says, "is that a subtle linguistic shift — shifting from 'I' to your own name — can have really powerful self-regulatory effects."

In other words, it changes the way you feel and behave. Kross had this idea when he was driving in the car and did something "not smart," he says — like running a red light.

"And I immediately said to myself, 'Ethan, you idiot!' " he recalls.

But because he's a psychologist, "Ethan, you idiot!" turned into, "Huh, that's interesting. Why did I talk to myself in the third person, using my own name?" He soon noticed other people doing the same thing.

When LeBron James, for example, talked about his decision to leave Cleveland for the Miami Heat back in 2010, Koss noticed that James created distance from himself in his use of language.

"I wanted to do what was best for LeBron James," the star athlete said, "and what LeBron James was going to do to make him happy." Take a look:

Malala Yousafzai did the same thing in an interview with The Daily Show's John Stewart, when she recounted (around 4:22 minutes into this clip) wrestling internally with her decision to speak out against the Taliban.

Koss decided to do an experiment to see what would happen if nonfamous people were instructed to try the same technique.

He asked volunteers to give a speech — with only five minutes of mental preparation. As they prepped, he asked some to talk to themselves and to address themselves as "I." Others he asked to either call themselves "you," or to use their own names as they readied their speeches.

Kross says that people who used "I" had a mental monologue that sounded something like, " 'Oh, my god, how am I going do this? I can't prepare a speech in five minutes without notes. It takes days for me to prepare a speech!' "

People who used their own names, on the other hand, were more likely to give themselves support and advice, saying things like, "Ethan, you can do this. You've given a ton of speeches before." These people sounded more rational, and less emotional — perhaps because they were able to get some distance from themselves.

I actually tried this. And I noticed, when I talked to myself using my own name, I got some visual distance, in my mind's eye: As I talked, I actually saw myself in the room where I was sitting, from a fly-on-the-wall perspective.

The same thing happens to other people. "We've done studies that look at exactly that phenomenon," says Kross. "And your experience is borne out by our data. It's almost like you are duping yourself into thinking about you as though you were another person."

Being an "outsider" in this way has real benefits: As LeBron James might tell you, with some distance, it's a lot easier to be kinder to that other person.

By LAURA STARECHESKI

Covering Up With The Hijab Aids Women's Body Image

Some see the hijab as a way to identify with the Muslim community or to assert themselves as a human being instead of a sexual object. 

"The reasons why women wear the hijab are incredibly complex," says psychologist Viren Swami at the University of Westminster in London. "They can't be boiled down to one or two things."

Last year Swami and one of his graduate students wondered if the hijab might have a positive influence on how women view their bodies. "There had been three or four previous studies showing that more modest or conservative clothing is associated with a healthier body image," he says.

So the team surveyed nearly 600 Muslim women in Britain. About 200 said they never used the hijab. The others said they wore it at least sometimes. Swami and his colleagues also asked the women a whole slew of questions to measure how they felt about their bodies.

The difference between the two groups was small. But across all parameters, the women who wore the hijab, at least some of the time, had more positive views of their bodies on average. They had less desire to be thin. They appreciated their bodies more. And they weren't as influenced by media messages about beauty standards.

"The take-home message, I think, is maybe that individuals who challenge society's norms of beauty seem to have better body images," Swami tells NPR. "The hijab allows you to do that in a certain way [in Britain]. ... Feminism does the same thing."

The study, published in the August issue of the British Journal of Psychology, couldn't tell whether the hijab was the cause of the improved self-esteem. And previous studies had suggested that women who are more religious have better body images.

Swami thinks the hijab could protect women against dangerous pressures to be thin.

"The hijab seems to have a buffer on body image," he says. "If somebody is objectifying a woman, the hijab might offer a sort of protection. ... Any clothing like this would help to reduce sexualization of the body."

Tabassum Ruby, who studies gender and women's issues at Western Michigan University, says she's not surprised the hijab is linked to a better body image.

"Wearing the hijab eliminates many of the hassles women have to go through — such as dyeing their hair," she says. "For example, you're getting old, and gray hairs, when you wear the hijab, you might not think about dyeing your hair because nobody sees it anyway."

So wearing the hijab can be very liberating for some women, she says. It allows them — and others around them — to focus on their minds, not their bodies.

"There is a stereotype that women who wear the hijab are oppressed," Ruby says, "that we [Muslim women] have no agency or power."

But all societies and cultures have their own dress code, she says. They all have a way to construct femininity and masculinity. "Muslim societies aren't exceptional in that respect," she says. "But we don't see them in that way because of the tension between the West and the Middle East."

"We don't question why woman in the West wear miniskirts and plunging necklines," she says. "So why do we question the hijab?"

By MICHAELEEN DOUCLEFF

Your Body Language Shapes Who You Are

By Amy Cuddy,

Body language affects how others see us, but it may also change how we see ourselves. Social psychologist Amy Cuddy shows how "power posing" -- standing in a posture of confidence, even when we don't feel confident -- can affect testosterone and cortisol levels in the brain, and might even have an impact on our chances for success.