The Importance of Self-Awareness, and How to Become More Self Aware

LifeHacker.com

They say the first step is admitting you have a problem, and that’s true in every aspect of life. Self-awareness and introspection have the ring of of a self-help guru’s empty promises, but they are the starting point that leads to every improvement.

Self-Improvement Is Impossible Without Self-Awareness

Self-awareness (sometimes also referred to as self-knowledge or introspection) is about understanding your own needs, desires, failings, habits, and everything else that makes you tick. The more you know about yourself, the better you are at adapting life changes that suit your needs.

Of course, self-awareness is a big part of both therapy and philosophy. It’s also the basis of thequantified self movement, which assumes that if you collect data about yourself you can make improvements based on that data. The New York Times breaks down the roots like so:

Socrates’s ukase was “know thyself.” Though it may come as a surprise to some philosophers, self-knowledge requires more than intellectual self-examination. It demands knowing something about your feelings. In my experience philosophers are, in general, not the most emotionally attuned individuals. Many are prone to treat the ebb and flow of feelings as though our passions were nothing but impediments to reason. Freud, more than the sage of Athens, grasped the moral importance of emotional self-transparency. Like the Greek tragedians but in language that did not require an ear for poetry, he reminded us of how difficult it is to own kinship with a whole range of emotions.

Essentially, the more you pay attention to your emotions and how you work, the better you’ll understand why you do the things you do. The more you know about your own habits, the easier it is to improve on those habits. In most cases, this takes a little experimentation. Here’sThe New York Times again, talking about a self-awareness method called double-loop learning:

LESS common but vastly more effective is the cognitive approach that Professor Argyris called double-loop learning. In this mode we… question every aspect of our approach, including our methodology, biases and deeply held assumptions. This more psychologically nuanced self-examination requires that we honestly challenge our beliefs and summon the courage to act on that information, which may lead to fresh ways of thinking about our lives and our goals.

You can read every productivity tip out there, you can adapt the routines of geniuses, and you can eat up every piece of self-help that comes across the computer screen, but it’s completely pointless if you don’t know yourself well enough to put the correct advice into practice. For example: in college, I spent my time staying up late and working on papers until late in the night. My room was a mess, I didn’t have a proper desk, and I spent more sleepless night than I can count. I felt terrible everyday and the papers I wrote were horrible. I thought I was a night person because it had that sense of “cool creative type” about it, but it obviously wasn’t working for me.

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