The next time you are feeling anxious, irritable, angry, or impatient, notice it, observe it, hold it, and pay attention to it. Notice how your feelings keep fluctuating. Keep watching them, until your dissatisfaction becomes more tolerable.
This is what self-awareness is.
You don’t have self-awareness in the conventional sense of the word until you can see the person as a whole—yourself and your partner, the child, the loved one, the coworker, the friends, the family, and everything in between.
To gain self-awareness, you have to be the one who develops it. In can't be done from a mental or emotional place of comfort. It requires a free-moving, self-reflective, mental state to be able to perceive yourself and everyone else as a whole person.
EXCERPT
The simplicity and the refinement of our lives have given us an abundant, robust, and enjoyable way to live. But some days, we might even wish we had less, or that we had more.
At any moment, we can take a few minutes to re-calibrate and re-train our self-awareness and perception of reality. The process is easy. It is so simple that we might forget that it is even happening.
Self-Calibrating Stopping and Going is a simple, easy way to re-train your perception of reality and to re-tune your thoughts.
I'm not suggesting that you must aim for some success in a specific area, but rather, that you should be constantly evaluating your state of awareness and understanding of reality. If you have struggled with depression, you are likely to experience it all the time. Why? Because you are suffering from a chronic perspective bias that allows you to perceive reality in a certain way.
This bias is what makes us cling to our ideals and ideologies instead of discovering a better way.
We should be constantly striving to become more aware of our mindset, which will, in turn, allow us to live more intuitively, more consciously, and more in harmony with reality.
Knowing that the universe is not indifferent can help you recognize when you are being used. Likewise, recognizing the positive qualities of yourself can also help you appreciate them even more. For a lot of women, this is something they’ve been taught from a young age.
It’s easy to think that gratitude is a good idea, but it is not always the best emotion in the world.
Gratitude can sometimes feel like sour grapes. It may feel like “damn you, you suck at this” or “You ruined my life.”
It is easy to be too self-critical (self-awareness) for a woman’s comfort. It is easy to think “Oh, I am bad, so it must be you who is bad.” This feels especially “acceptable” when your life experience is relatively recent.
“My life is not that bad, it’s just your life” is not a very helpful attitude. She needs to help herself reflect on it and be proud of what is going well in her life; without the criticism, why even bother?
It’s easy to get too negative, too often. It feels like there’s always someone wrong in your life.
Here is an example:
I know that sometimes when I am angry I obsessively check my phone. It’s like an endless loop of checking things to see if there are new messages or even if I have missed text messages or emails. I do this because I want to feel as much information as possible in my brain, but also to feel like I am busy. It feels good to feel busy, but it feels bad to feel as though I’m not busy at all.
This causes my head to become very busy and my brain becomes very impressionable because I feel like I am always chasing that data. So, I am less likely to recognize when I’m losing track of time.
There is also a kind of dopamine addiction to checking. Every time I get notifications from social media, every time I get a message from someone that I do not like on a particular site, every time I feel like there is some good in the world, I stimulate my dopamine levels. It’s about telling myself that the moment is worth something.
