I was a word nerd before I was a hypnotherapist – my degree is in English language (it was almost in linguistics), and I worked as a book editor for years. So I found this recent study in Psychological Science very interesting.
English, unlike some other languages, has a thing called “aspect”, which can be described as the shape of an action in time – whether it was instantaneous or continued for a while or was habitual, whether it’s still going on or is completed. This study, “What I Was Doing Versus What I Did: Verb Aspect Influences Memory and Future Actions”, looked at the difference between describing a past action in the imperfective aspect (“I was doing”) versus describing it in the perfective aspect (“I did”). They found that there was a small but significant effect: “An aspect marker that described experiences as ongoing rather than completed enhanced memory for action-relevant knowledge and increased tendencies to reproduce an action at a later time.”
In simpler terms, saying “I was Xing” rather than “I Xed” makes it more likely that you will remember things relevant to Xing, and that you will X again later on. According to their press release, the authors believe that these findings may be relevant to behavioral therapy. They suggest that “decreasing the frequency of unhealthy behaviors might be facilitated by discussing these behaviors in terms of what I did. In contrast, increasing the frequency of healthy behaviors might be facilitated by discussing these behaviors in terms of what I was doing.”
Taken together with the first- vs third-person contrast discussed in my earlier post, this study reminds us that the language we use can have a powerful effect on how we think. There’s a lot of nonsense talked about “hypnotic language patterns”, most of it the result of not understanding Milton Erickson, and of course language is not magic, but it would be worth using these different linguistic patterns when we want to change our behaviour.
Thanks to Seth-Deborah Roth for spotting this one.
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