Why Is It So Hard To Be Self-aware?
A few tips to help you out
When you are trying to make a real, lasting, positive change in your life, self-awareness isn’t just important. It is essential. How can we change something when we aren’t even aware of the way our own thoughts and actions are affecting the situation?
Awareness is the path to results
For example, if you want to lose weight, but aren’t aware of how many calories you consume or burn off through activity every day, it’s hard to know exactly which thing to change in order to see the results you want.
This is one of the reasons weight loss is so hard: it’s easy to eat unconsciously, without awareness of the nutritional value of the food, and it’s easy to be sedentary without tracking activity.
Once you start to track both things, get honest about exactly what and how much you eat, as well as how often and how intensely you move, it becomes much easier to create a plan of action.
If you want to use the Law of Attraction to manifest the life of your dreams, then you need to become aware of your thoughts. You need to:
- Catch yourself indulging in negative thoughts and behaviors so you can replace them with positive actions.
- Stop being judgemental which pushes the things you’re asking for father away from you.
- Get clear on what you truly want, which allows you to manifest it faster and with more ease.
So what stops us all from being self-aware all the time? After all, most of us live inside our own heads. Shouldn’t we already know what we think and what we want all the time, naturally?
Yes, and no.
We no longer live in a natural environment. We live in an environment filled with novelty and distractions. Our lives are busier than ever and when you go into the getting-things-done mode, you’re focused on doing, not being.
Other people are constantly telling us what we’re supposed to do and who we’re supposed to be. I don’t just mean family, friends, bosses, and co-workers, which honestly would be more than enough.
I also mean the hundreds of ads we’re bombarded with every day, none of which have our best interest at heart. All of those ads are doing their best to make you feel less than, lacking, in some way unhappy, so you will buy whatever they’re selling to make you feel better.
Social Media encourages is to focus on how we want others to perceive us. This means emphasizing something but hiding others. By doing so we create a false sense of self that even we may start to buy into if we aren’t careful.
Being criticized by judgemental people from a young age can give anyone a distorted view of themselves. This view can cause a hyperawareness of faults and distract from even the most positive attributes.
The human brain has a wonderful ability to engage in both past-directed and future-directed thinking. These two types of thinking allow us to learn from past experiences and plan for what is to come but keeps us from being truly present in the now, which is where self-awareness is rooted.
Getting too focused on past-directed thinking can make people obsess over mistakes and also justify past actions. Too much focus on future-directed thinking can make people count their chickens before they’ve hatched and get caught in anxiety about things that may never happen.
Finally, in this busy, go-getter, achievement-focused society we live in, we are often made to feel self-indulgent for spending time in introspection or contemplation when we could be doing something productive instead.
Unless you are one of the rare exceptions, it is unlikely that anyone ever taught you to make space for this crucial practice of developing self-awareness as a child. So you will need to learn it for yourself as an adult.
One of the simplest ways to start practicing self-awareness is to set a reminder to go off on your phone several times a day. When it goes off, pause whatever it is you’re doing and ask yourself:
- What am I thinking right now?
- What am I feeling right now?
- What is actually happening right now?
Try to notice, without judging, how much of what you’re feeling is coming from what’s actually happening. And how much of it may be coming from:
Past-directed thinking, like feeling bad about past mistakes or resenting past wrongs.
Future-directed thinking, like worrying about whether something will or won’t happen.
Choose the better thought
Once you notice how much of your experience is actually rooted in the present, finish your self-awareness break by asking yourself: Is there a positive thought I could have right now that would make this moment better.
We always have a choice about what to think at any given moment. There is always a better or a worse way to look at something. You can always decide to choose the better, more positive, uplifting, and more helpful thought.
Use Mindfulness Apps
If you want to take this a step further, start tracking your check-ins. There are mood management apps that nudge you at desired intervals and ask you similar questions to stimulate your self-awareness. Some examples are Daily Mindfulness App or The Remindfulness App.
Journalling for self-awareness
Journalling will also make you more self-aware. A few minutes of contemplative writing in the morning or evening are enough to wrangle all of your self-sabotaging thoughts into the lights where they can be changed. Journalling doesn’t have to be complicated.
You can start out by just setting a timer for 10-minutes (or even 5 to start with if 10 seems too long. You can work up to 10 minutes if you need to), and just keep the pen moving, writing whatever you think about until the timer goes off. At first, it will probably seem like you are just rambling about the most mundane stuff.
But if you do it consistently, the negative thought patterns lurking in your subconscious will start to bubble up to the surface.
If you want to try a targeted journaling exercise that will root out the negative thoughts faster, you can answer these questions in your daily writing:
1. What is the number one thing on my mind right now?
2. What is one thing I’m grateful for or happy about right now?
Most people find that answering the first question helps them shift their feelings in a more positive direction, but just in case you’re dealing with something really heavy, the second question will bring you back into alignment if the first one threw you out.
If you start practicing these things daily, stopping throughout the day when your phone tells you to in order to check-in and journalling either every morning or night, you will feel yourself become more self-aware. As time goes on, you will start to notice that feeling even when the phone doesn’t ping and when you aren’t in the middle of a journaling session.
You will start to ask yourself what you are thinking and feeling when emotions arise during a business meeting or a discussion with a significant other or family member. You will start to catch yourself when you head into an emotional script and soon you will be able to choose the better thought with ease.
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