Should you stop being the main character?

There’s a popular piece of advice: you’re not the main character, so stop taking yourself so seriously. There’s a popular reply too: everyone is the main character of their own story. Both have research behind them.

The case for stepping back

In a 2014 set of seven studies, Ethan Kross and colleagues gave students five minutes to prepare a five-minute speech on why they were right for their dream job, delivered to judges with no notes. Before it, half thought it through in the first person (“I”, “my”). The other half talked to themselves as “you” and by their own name.

The second group felt less shame afterwards, went over it less, and gave speeches that judges — who didn’t know who was who — rated better.

The same move makes people wiser. Grossmann and Kross (2014) found people reason more wisely about a friend’s partner cheating than their own partner cheating — more open to other views, more aware of what they don’t know. Thinking about their own case in the third person closed most of that gap. Older adults, aged 60 to 80, were no wiser about their own problems than young adults. “With age comes wisdom,” the authors suggest, applies to other people’s problems.

It isn’t only for small worries. Distanced reflection helped 51 adults with clinical depression feel less bad after recalling a sad memory, without making them avoid it. In a 2021 study of 555 adults, a week or a month of third-person diary writing made people’s reasoning about everyday conflicts wiser.

Why “don’t be so sensitive” doesn’t work

Nobody tells a friend to “analyse your feelings using your first name”. They say: don’t take it so seriously.

That’s distraction, and Kross and Ayduk (2008) tested it. 328 students recalled a time they felt overwhelmed by sadness, then either relived it, looked at it from a distance, or were given something else to think about. At first, distraction worked as well as distance. A day or a week later, the distracted group’s mood had gone back down, and the memory kept coming back — about 8 recurring thoughts against 4 for the distance group.

Distance isn’t ignoring. The people who did best were still looking straight at the memory — just from further back.

What distance costs

Distance cools everything. In a Belgian diary study, reflecting from a distance made bad feelings end sooner — and, in the second of two studies, good feelings too.

It may cool fairness. In three 2022 experiments, people who used distanced self-talk kept more of a pot of money they could have shared with an anonymous stranger — 73% against 68% — apparently because they thought less about what was fair. The effect is small and one of the three studies didn’t find it. But it’s a reason to be careful what you use distance for.

The case for being the main character

Rogers, Gray, McAdams and colleagues (2023) broke the hero’s journey into seven parts: you see yourself as the hero, something shifts, there’s a quest, you have allies, you face challenges, you’re changed, and you leave something for others. In about 600 American adults, the more people saw their life that way, the more meaning they reported and the less depression. Getting people to re-tell their life story along those lines raised meaning.

There’s a catch, and the authors report it themselves: afterwards, people saw more patterns in strings of random letters, without being more accurate. More meaning felt, not more meaning found.

Jonathan Adler (2012) followed 47 people through therapy, collecting a short written account after every session. What changed first was agency — writing about themselves as the one who could change things. That rise came a session or two before their mental health improved. Small, no control group, but the order is telling.

So what’s actually wrong with too much self?

Look again at what worked. Kross’s students turned themselves into a character — “you”, and their name. The hero’s-journey group re-told their life from outside it. Both are a kind of narrator: seeing the main character from a little way off, and wanting them to do well.

What hurts is being the audience — watching yourself the way others might.

• Mirrors. The theory of objective self-awareness (Duval and Wicklund, 1972) says seeing yourself makes you compare yourself with a standard and usually come up short. A 2000 review of studies that put a mirror in the room found a small rise in bad mood and self-blame. A larger 2002 review found self-focus goes with more anxiety and low mood — most of all when it’s rumination, and not when people focus on what’s good about themselves.
• Self-view. In a Stanford survey of about 10,000 people, 13.8% of women and 5.5% of men were very or extremely tired after video calls, partly from “mirror anxiety”. A small Irish study measuring brain signals in 32 people found self-view raised fatigue in men and women alike.
• The imaginary room. Feeling watched is often called a teenage thing. It isn’t only: in a 2000 comparison, teenagers scored no differently from adults aged 19 to 30.

Mirror time itself isn’t the enemy. Therapists use guided mirror exposure — describing what’s there in neutral words — to help people who strongly dislike how they look. And in a 2001 British study, three in ten people with no appearance worries spent about 20 minutes in front of the mirror on a typical day, with almost no rise in distress. They were getting ready, looking at the reflection. It’s what you’re looking for, not how long.

What to do with it

• When it’s bad, use your name. “Okay, [name], what’s going on here?” It takes a second and is well tested.
• Don’t use distance to stop feeling. That’s distraction, and it comes back.
• Stay inside the good moments. Distance shortens those too.
• Be the one who acts. Agency in your own story came before recovery.
• Hide self-view. It’s a flaw hunt that runs all day.

“Narrator, not audience” is our way of putting it, not a finding.

---

Sources and reporting notes: mostly American students and online samples, plus Canada, Belgium, Ireland and the UK; no New Zealand studies found. Most effects are measured within minutes; the longest study runs a month. The hero’s-journey paper was read via summaries; the Galway study via press report; the Stanford figures via the preprint’s coverage (published version, 2023, n = 9,787); Duval and Wicklund via later reviews.