The pronoun you use when you talk to yourself under stress changes how well you actually perform. Research on self-distancing found a small, specific shift, using your own name or the word you instead of I, with a real, measured effect on both performance and recovery afterward.
Advice is easier to give than to take
Ethan Kross, a researcher at the University of Michigan, studies why it is so much easier to give a friend good advice than to take your own. His research on self-talk found that the specific words people use internally change the answer. First person self-talk, I am so nervous about this, keeps a person fully immersed inside the feeling. Talking to yourself using your own name or the word you creates just enough psychological distance to think more like an advisor and less like the person in the middle of it.
What the distance actually does
In studies on public speaking and high stakes first impressions, people who used this distanced self-talk were rated as performing better by independent observers who did not know which version of self-talk each person had used. They also reported less distress, ruminated less afterward, and their bodies recovered from the stress faster, blood pressure returning to baseline sooner than for people who stayed in the first person.
The content of what you are telling yourself barely has to change. Only who it is addressed to.
Before the moment and after it
This works in both directions. Used before something stressful, it functions as preparation, coaching yourself the way you would coach someone you cared about. Used after something that did not go well, it functions as recovery, the same distance that helps in anticipation also helps in looking back without spiraling.
Where to start
Notice the next time you catch yourself deep in first person self-talk before or after something stressful. Switch it, silently, to your own name or you. Something closer to naming yourself and saying you have prepared for this, rather than repeating how nervous you are.
Try it once somewhere lower stakes first, so the shift feels available to you when it actually matters, rather than being something you are attempting for the first time under real pressure.
Which version of this feels natural to you, your first name, a nickname, a plain you, is something only you will know once you try it, no article can choose it for you. What this gives you is the mechanism, so you have something to reach for instead of just noticing the spiral without a way out of it.
There is a specific pairing move for the moment right before something stressful starts, distinct from this one, and the two work well used together.