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Having an alter ego can reduce anxiety, benefit confidence: research

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Re: Having an alter ego can reduce anxiety, benefit confidence: research

#41
post #7

I wonder how much this applies to furries. How often is a fursona “the real me” vs roleplay? I’ve witnessed both in different individuals, and also both within a single person (primary ‘sona and some other separate ones which are just role playing). Adjective Species probably had an article on this, though it also reminds me of the discussions about therianthropy, contherianthropes, and New Age discussions of the use…

[deleted]

Re: Having an alter ego can reduce anxiety, benefit confidence: research

#43
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What, John liked cold calls so much that he had to invent alter ego Jake, who didn't like cold calls, in order to get a girlfriend?

Few people in my family use their first and second name in different contexts (family/friends/work). Reasons probably vary. For my mum it just started that way when she was a kid. Family used her second name and when she started working people knew her by her first name.

Some people don't use any part of their legal names at all with their friends and family.

I used to have some extended family who all went by nicknames unrelated to their legal names. It was a cultural thing.

Re: Having an alter ego can reduce anxiety, benefit confidence: research

#44

Hip hop artists use alter egos to explore different stage personas and styles. e.g. Daniel Dumile as MF Doom, King Ghidra, Viktor Vaughn or Eminem as Slim Shady.

The Beatles — Sgt. Pepper

David Bowie... a different one practically every album.

Re: Having an alter ego can reduce anxiety, benefit confidence: research

#45

True Story: the guy who leads our sales team is a super star named John (legal name). He’s fearless, organized, focused, determined “and Canadian” as he would say. Any way, while he was a rising junior his GF came to the office one day and I heard her call him Jake (nowhere in his name legal name). I asked “who the hell is Jake?” to which she replied “oh, that’s what we call John back home”. I looked at him and he sa…

Lots of people named John choose to use another name. 'John' is common enough that having to negotiation which John on a team or group of friends uses the name is a common problem. I prefer to either use 'Jack' (a common alternate form of John, similar to Richard/Dick), or simply my last name by itself. I've also seen many Johns use their middle name, or 'John [LastName]' pronounced almost as a single word. Back home my family calls me by my middle name, since my father, grandfather and cousin are also named John.

Re: Having an alter ego can reduce anxiety, benefit confidence: research

#46
Anxiety-management tricks that I personally employ is to either refer to a group/class I find myself in as "we" or to use passive rather than active voice.

The former I borrowed as a kid watching Spider Man 1994, where Brock/Venom symbiont calls themselves "we"; the latter is an inspiration from David Bohm's rheomode.

Both shift the perspective from your ego to the environment that it is embedded into and is a part of: e.g. a company, a crowd, a body ("we" as a human microbiome), humanity, or nature itself; not as an object, but as an ongoing process, from being to becoming. A giving up of ontological primacy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_without_organs

Re: Having an alter ego can reduce anxiety, benefit confidence: research

#47

True Story: the guy who leads our sales team is a super star named John (legal name). He’s fearless, organized, focused, determined “and Canadian” as he would say. Any way, while he was a rising junior his GF came to the office one day and I heard her call him Jake (nowhere in his name legal name). I asked “who the hell is Jake?” to which she replied “oh, that’s what we call John back home”. I looked at him and he sa…

My name is.. my name is... my name is Slim Shady Edit: Don't know why the downvotes. Maybe the song 'all-solo-founders-please-stand-up' does not relate to as many of us as I thought.

Probably because this kind of comment fits better on reddit than here.

Re: Having an alter ego can reduce anxiety, benefit confidence: research

#48
post #37
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's often the other way around... Many times, salespeople use different names on the phone than in real life.

The story made explicit references to how John us the character‘s legal name and jake isn’t.

How does that affect what I wrote?

Actually, that's not exactly what the story contained. It said that John was the legal name, but it didn't say that Jake wasn't the legal name. That happens all the time, John Jake Johnson, for example.

Re: Having an alter ego can reduce anxiety, benefit confidence: research

#49

I got a nickname when I was 14, my life completely changed after that. I went from sitting alone at lunch, to having parties with over 100 people. Most of them only knew me by the nickname, or variants of the nickname. I went by it almost exclusively for over 10 years. I definitely feel like a different person than I was then.

Now this is interesting - I also got a nickname in highschool from a popular kid that helped me gain an identity in other people's minds and be much more social and involved, but I don't think it was an alter-ego. I think it helped make me memorable to other people while giving me a confidence boost (as the nickname was complimentary), but I think that it just brought out the real me. I don't go by that nickname sinc…

My nickname has followed me for about 23 years... I had never considered how it might have impacted my life.

Re: Having an alter ego can reduce anxiety, benefit confidence: research

#50
post #28

I've done a lot of this as a writer. I'll actually take an article from a favorite writer of mine and paste it on the page. Then'll I'll go through that article and write my own article on top of it paragraph by paragraph. None of the content or subject matter is the same. I'm not "rewriting the original article". But it helps keep the patterns similar. I can see how I might want to change pace, structure the story,…

I wonder if this would work for coding!
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