How much of your day is spent on autopilot?
You have your morning routines, your eating habits, your relationships, your moods, and your hobbies. Defaulting to our normal ways is often the easiest thing to do, even when those ways aren’t serving us.
If you find yourself struggling to make positive changes, the first and most crucial step in doing so is gaining self-awareness. Here’s why:
The Three Ways Self-Awareness Saves You
Self-awareness is not just being mindful of where you stand on a train or being able to read the room. It is the ability to understand what’s going on in your mind and body at any given time.
This is a psychological skill that can be developed in several ways. First, let’s look at why it’s valuable.
1. You Can Recognize Your Drives and Habits
Our habits are some of the most powerful forces in our lives.
When a bad habit tempts us, we find ourselves acting automatically, falling into the same familiar pattern of indulgence and regret.
So, the first step in changing a habit is to recognize our temptations, which in essence is becoming aware of ourselves.
We can learn to see which environments spark our bad habits, what moods cause us to slip, and what keeps us attached to habits that ultimately harm us.
When you become aware of your habits, you can view your life from a wider perspective and start becoming your own coach.
Awareness can help you put points of friction between you and your bad habits, like forgoing buying dessert every week to prevent unhealthy eating or disconnecting from individuals who don’t support your growth and desire to change.
2. You Can Recognize Your Moods and Emotions
When we try to make meaningful changes in our lives, certain feelings come over us in predictable ways. We might always have the same reactions toward a person or an activity and we don’t know why.
These feelings could contradict the truth, but we feel them anyway.
- Maybe you’re afraid to succeed when you know you’re capable.
- Maybe you’re afraid of telling someone how you feel about them.
- Maybe you always get angry around one person in particular.
Recognizing these automatic emotional reactions is the first step to finding their source, and to knowing what to do when you start feeling overwhelmed.
Self-awareness is the power to step back and recognize what’s behind those emotional hurdles. It allows you to see beyond how your subconscious mind has been conditioned to feel by past experiences.
3. You Can Recognize Your Thoughts and Beliefs
On the same token as emotional reactions, we may experience rote mental narratives when we’re struggling or trying to do something new.
We may think, “I’m not good enough for this” or “Everyone is going to hate my guts if I let myself be heard” or “I’m never going to get better.”
Behavior starts with thoughts, so once we find clarity in our thoughts, new behavior can follow.
These behaviors include how we treat ourselves in difficult moments and how we interact with others.
Instead of thinking “This person is disrespecting me”, we can practice thinking “What are they trying to say?” Self-understanding, in addition to taking the time to understand others, is a good place to start for creating harmony and well-being.
By becoming aware of your thoughts, you can see what your old beliefs are and update them with new, healthier beliefs that are grounded in reality.
What Do You Do Once You’re Self-Aware?
What do you do with your newfound power?
- Becoming self-aware allows you to see past your emotional barriers and change your false beliefs. If you learn to recognize them as they pop up, you can start to let them go over time.
- Sometimes, instead of resisting what you’re feeling, you need to let your feelings be felt. You can become aware of when you’re trying to numb or run away from what you’re feeling, and you can practice sitting with your feelings and letting them flow. This can help you move on.
- You can ACT despite your feelings. This is most true in cases of fear; you can choose courage in those critical moments when you want to run away or fall back into old habits. Or you can choose to not overreact when you feel yourself getting frustrated, and you can work through a problem without losing control.
- Most importantly, through self-awareness you can act from a greater place of freedom, not overly influenced by negative habits or ingrained thought patterns.
Modes of Gaining Self-Awareness
- CBT and DBT
Any behavioral therapy fosters self-awareness because it prompts you to look deeper at why you do what you do. You can develop tools that will allow you to stay in control and navigate difficult feelings. - Classic Meditation
Mindfulness meditation is solely about developing awareness of your physical, cognitive, and emotional states. Making this a regular practice will allow you to enhance your ability to take a step back and observe your experiences as they happen. - Free Writing
Free writing is the practice of writing out everything you’re feeling without stopping for a set period. This is a gateway for your subconscious mind to reveal itself and a means for you to process emotions. - Talking
Other people can see what we can’t. Revealing our feelings to a therapist or confidant can help us see our blindspots, and help us recognize where we’ve been falling short and what we can do better.
What Self Awareness Is Not
Self-awareness is not self-consciousness, self-preoccupation, or any kind of self-neuroticism.
It is simply being aware, and using that awareness to get you through emotional storms and make the best decisions for yourself and the people around you.
