THE THREE LEVELS OF SELF-AWARENESS

 THE THREE LEVELS OF SELF-AWARENESS

Below are three levels of self-awareness along with a caveat. Why three levels? Who the hell knows? Just go with it.

LEVEL 1 – WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?

There’s a lot of pain and suckage in life. Over the last 30 days, how many times have you:

• Struggled with a relationship with someone close to you?
• Felt lonely, isolated, or unheard?
• Felt unproductive or lost on what you should do?
• Been underslept, under-fed, low energy, or unhealthy?
• Stressed about work or finances?
• Uncertain about your future?
• Been physically hurt, ill, or debilitated?

Chances are if you add all of those up, you’re going to be pretty close to 30 out of the last 30 days. That’s a lot of suckage!

We avoid pain through distraction. We transport our minds to some other time or place or world where it can be safe and insulated from the pain of day-to-day life. We stare at our phones, we obsess about the past or our potential futures, make plans we’ll never keep, or simply try to forget. We eat, drink, and fuck ourselves into numbness to dull the reality of our problems. We use books, movies, games, and music to carry us to another world where no pain exists, and everything always feels easy and good and right.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with distraction. We all need some sort of diversion to keep us sane and happy.

The key is that we need to be aware of our distractions.

Put another way, we need to make sure that we’re choosing our distractions and our distractions aren’t choosing us. We’re the ones opting into the distraction, rather than simply being unable to opt-out of distraction. We need to know when we’re checking out. Our distraction needs to be planned and moderated in bite-sized chunks. We can’t binge on distraction.

Most people spend much of their day drowned in a sea of distraction without even realizing it. I do it, too. The other night at dinner, I pulled out my phone to look at my calendar, and the next thing I knew, I was browsing video game forums on Reddit. Meanwhile, my wife is staring at me as if I just had a lobotomy or something.

I’m getting better. This only happens about 23 times per day. Or sometimes I do that thing where I’ll have Facebook open, and then I’ll open another tab and instinctively type in the URL for… Facebook, the site I was already looking at. I don’t even realize I do it, but it’s my mind’s automatic move to disconnect (or in this case, disconnect from its disconnection).

We all think we know how we’re using our time. But we’re usually wrong. We think we work more than we do (studies show most people top out somewhere around three hours of actual work per day,the rest is just fucking around). We think we spend more time with our friends and loved ones than we do. We think we’re more present than we are, that we’re better listeners than we are, that we’re more thoughtful and intelligent than we are. But the truth is, we’re all pretty bad at this.

Now, some people take the hardline approach of trying to remove all distraction from their lives. This is a bit extreme. If time management and self-awareness was a religion, this approach would be like strapping a bomb to your chest and blowing up a mall thinking you’ve got a one-way ticket to 72 distraction-free virgins, when really, you’re just going to self-destruct (and probably harm a lot of people around you in the process).

The goal with distraction isn’t to defeat distraction, it’s merely to develop an awareness and control of our distractions. Instead of calling in sick to play video games all day, you’re able to devote some free time to video games in a way that’s satisfying and healthy. You let yourself drift away on your phone for a while if that’s what your brain seems to need, but you’re aware that you’re doing it and able to rein it back in when necessary.

The goal here is the elimination of compulsion. But to eliminate compulsion you must first become aware of compulsion. When are you engaging in an activity even though you don’t want to be engaging in it? When are you checking out mentally and why? Is it around family? Friends? Co-workers?

For years I used to carry around an iPod and put headphones on every time I went into public. Leaving the house without it felt like I was naked. For years, I just assumed I was really into music way more than other people, that there was some special need inside me for badass tunes that other people simply didn’t understand.

But eventually, it became clear this was a compulsion. I wasn’t in control of it. My headphones were a way of protecting and disconnecting myself from others. They were less about a bottomless passion and more about simple fear. Being around strangers without my headphones made me feel anxious and exposed.

Don’t judge these observations, simply have them. This is the first level of self-awareness, a simple understanding of where your mind goes and when. You must be aware of the paths your mind likes to take before you can begin to question why it takes those paths and whether those paths are helping or hurting you.