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This dissertation examines how subtle shifts in language can affect how people construct meaning from their experiences. I present evidence from eight experiments (N’s range from 49 - 193) that focus on two related, but distinct, linguistic mechanisms that allow individuals to adopt a broader, more distanced perspective: distanced self-talk (i.e., using one’s own name or second or third person pronouns to refer to the self; e.g., “Ariana, you can do this”) and generic-you (i.e., ‘you’ that refers to people in general; e.g., “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”). Chapter 1 provides a brief review of the existing literature on distanced self-talk and generic-you, highlighting their functionality for promoting psychological distance and emotion regulation. Chapter 2 consists of two experiments illustrating that distanced self-talk promotes emotion regulation when people reflect on intense, personal experiences, and among individuals who score high on trait-like measures of anxiety, brooding and depressive symptoms. The third chapter presents one study demonstrating that young children spontaneously use generic-you to express generalizations about negative experiences, suggesting that this may be a foundational meaning-making mechanism. Chapter 4 examines whether generic-you is functional for the addressee, focusing on how it operates in normative contexts. I present five experiments demonstrating that people endorse unfamiliar behaviors as more normative when they are expressed with generic-you (vs. I). This effect persists even when participants are told that the individuals providing the information are highly knowledgeable, and information expressed with “I” should be equally valid. In the final chapter, I propose that both of the linguistic shifts reviewed in the previously mentioned chapters may operate relatively effortlessly, which has implications regarding when and for whom linguistic routes to emotion regulation may be adaptive. Specifically, it suggests that distanced self-talk and generic-you should be effective even when individuals are experiencing high levels of distress, and among populations whose cognitive control capacities are less efficient (i.e., those with depression or anxiety) or still developing (i.e., children).