Take it from the Fitness Master. If someone ever asks you how wise you are, don’t say a thing.

Just smile, wait to be asked why you won’t answer, and when you do finally respond, be pleasant, brief, and a bit enigmatic. Say the answer’s situational.

Go mum again to give those words even greater gravitas and then state the obvious. That you’re human — and that humans are only capable of wisdom if they do a seemingly simple thing that many seem incapable of.

Separate themselves from the situation at hand, particularly troubling ones.

Smile once more and ask the questioner to supply a specific situation, preferably a troubling one.

Take it from the Fitness Master once again. He won’t. He’ll say there’s no need because you’ve already answered his question.

And the answer is “very.”

But don’t take this from the Fitness Master because it happened to the Fitness Master. And don’t assume after all these years the Fitness Master’s excessive use of the third person means he’s become a narcissist.

I’ve only done so in this intro because last week’s column featured a narcissist fond of referring to himself in the third person. While doing research to write that column, I learned there’s a saving grace to doing something similar.

Thinking about yourself in this way.

For when you think of yourself in the third person, it allows you to separate yourself from the situation, which mitigates any painful emotions created by it and creates a more objective perspective, thereby increasing the chance you react to it with wisdom instead of something ... well, something somewhat less than that. In a 2023 article for the BBC, “Illeism: The ancient trick to help you think more wisely,” David Robson first explains that word is the proper term for speaking about yourself in the third person, and that illeism often employed by one group of supposed public servants (I’m editorializing here) that often display narcissistic tendencies.

Politicians.

He then explains how that while working in the psychology department at the University of Waterloo in Canada Igor Grossman, PhD., read the writings of the best philosophers and discovered they hold something in common: a belief that certain “metacognitive components” are “essential for wise decision making.” This led Grossman to conduct studies in an attempt to ascertain if this is true.

After a few related studies that showed wise decision making to be correlated to overall life satisfaction, Grossman fronted two other studies that led to the paper titled “Training for Wisdom” and published in February 2021 by Sage Journals.

In the month-long first one, American and Canadian adults kept a diary to write about each day’s “most significant” experience. Some did so in the conventional way: by using “I” to refer to themselves.

But the others wrote about themselves in the third person, by using “he” or “she” or even, as narcissists often do, their first name.

Grossman and his colleagues then compared these writings to ones done by the participants before the study, and that revealed that those who wrote in the diary entries in the third person “showed a significant increase in wise reasoning about interpersonal challenges.” The same was the case in a second similar, week-long study.

Which is all well and good, except you’re probably wondering why pronouns are being compared in a health and fitness column when what’s usually compared are the merits of a high-carb versus a low-carb diet or the benefits of aerobic versus anaerobic exercise. It’s because wisdom and health, especially mental health, go hand in hand.

And the recent decline in mental health in United States has become a big concern. According to one account, the National Health Interview Survey, adults experiencing “poor mental health” between 2011 and 2022 increased by nearly 10 percent.

A second, the National Survey on Drug Use and Health calculated the increase to be just over 15 percent for the same period of time. A third, the National Health Interview Survey, found the increase for that time to be 19 percent, as well as something the Fitness Master (sorry, but I love, not myself, but alliteration) finds hard to fathom.

That more than four in 10 U.S. adults suffered with poor mental health at some time in 2022.

In an attempt to absorb that, I’ll end with this bit of the obvious. That we all have problems.

Some are big, some are small, and some of us certainly have more than others. But regardless of the type or the amount, all problems share one thing in common.

They seem much worse to you if you fail to separate yourself from them.

So do whatever you can to gain distance from them.

A simple way to do so, it seems to me, and one that seems to be supported by science is this: When you think about your problems, think about yourself in the third person.