It’s a kind of hunger that, once you catch it, leaves you lingering on every thought, triggered by every experience potentially harming your balance. It’s a desire that goes far beyond simply seeking meaning in our existence. Once you start becoming aware of your mind, you begin to wonder where your thoughts come from. Then, you find yourself tracing and linking thoughts and feelings, you wonder how one thing leads to another and why. You no longer content yourself with the plain acknowledgment of a thought. Feel your feelings; they all shout in unison, and you do. Day in, day out, until you become so immersed in your mind, in the labyrinth, that you lose your way out.

We have to be self-aware. It’s important on so many different levels, from emotional regulation, to impulse control, to aligning with what we want and ultimately, living a successful life. To prove this point, it is worth looking at what happens to someone who isn’t self-aware. Those risk deindividuation, which is a psychological state, in which individuals lose their sense of personal responsibility and, as you might have guessed, self-awareness. Take right-wing extremism as an example, often enough, these are individuals who have lost their personal identity and therefore become part of a collective ideology. Deindividuation disconnects the person from their values, making it easier to justify harmful behaviour. A study proving this point was conducted by Robert D. Johnson and Leslie Downing. Participants were instructed to deliver electric shocks to one of their confederates as part of a learning task. The study consisted of four groups: two groups were wearing name tags (identifiable), while the other two weren’t (deindividuated). On top of that, each group was assigned to either wear Ku Klux Klan (KKK) robes or nurse uniforms (a symbol of care and compassion). Indeed, the ethics of this experiment are very much questionable. The results showed that participants who were deindividuated, no matter what costume they were wearing, administered higher levels of shocks. Apart from the group who wore the KKK robes, regardless of whether they were identifiable or not, they always administered higher shocks. It is likely that these people identified with the symbol of aggression and hate that underlies the KKK costume. Now connect that with right-wing extremism. When people are deindividuated and feel that they belong to a certain group associated with violence – even when only through outward appearance – it makes them more prone to violence.
It is without a doubt dangerous not to be attentive to who we are, though that is not what I want to focus on. Quite the opposite, I want to touch on what too much self-awarness can do to an individual.

Let’s take a step back and start with a short, simple definition of what self-awareness actually means. Self-awareness is the ability to perceive and understand the things that make us who we are as individuals, essentially a state of self-examination; fatal beyond a certain point. If we are so involved with ourselves that we have actually already made all the realisations there are to make, we are going round in circles. Eventually, we’ll reach a point where we’ve felt everything there is to feel. Every thought has been considered, every experience picked apart, even the conclusions have their own conclusions. However, if this still leaves you unsatisfied, you keep going, deeper into the labyrinth of your mind. Like any good labyrinth, you will end up walking the same paths over and over, you retrace incidents, revisit familiar emotions, desperately convinced the answer lies just a little further in. I’ve said it before, and I will say it again: the only way out is through. Like any good labyrith, passing the exit is the only way to leave it behind and move further. A professor of mine once said something about this that I’ll never forget, and neither should you. He said that someone who is intensely absorbed in themselves, is someone focused on problems rather than solutions. Truly wise words. Reaching a meta-perspective, so thinking about thinking, is enough – you don’t need meta-meta-perspective.

Something else that happens when we hyperfocus on our inner activities, is that we attribute both positive and negative events to ourselves. It is important to keep in mind that this is a correlation, not a causality; meaning, although self-aware people credit or blame themselves more often, it can’t be said with certainty that self-awareness directly causes this behaviour. A very important distinction in the glorious world of science. Here is an example to make this idea of attributing even more vivid.

When someone with high self-awareness get promoted, their reflection would look something like this: “I got promoted because I worked hard”, or, “I deserve the promotion; I’ve been in the company for a long time”. What a wonderful thing, we should be able to reflect on our success and not assume that good things only happen out of pure luck or coincidence. That would be called imposter syndrome. On the other side, someone with a highly reflective mind might respond with thoughts like these when they get fired: “It is true, I haven’t been working hard enough lately”, or: “It is my fault”. Essentially, you could say that someone who is very attentive to themselves has the ability to make themselves really happy, and really sad, at the same time. Unfortunately enough, the negativity bias leads us humans to remember negative events more strongly and for longer than positive ones, which sometimes results in sensitivity to them and potentially to a loss of focus. Onto the good news, finally: someone who has a lot of practice in meta-thinking, is also someone who can shift the focus of their thoughts. They can not only recognise the rabbit hole but also pull themselves out of it, putting an end to overthinking. I know it’s easier said than done, everything always is.

My intention isn’t to tell you to become less self-aware. It’s to be self-aware enough to know when to stop indulging in yourself, when to end the maze, stop ruminating, and just exist. Go on a walk, eat some good food, read a book, sleep a little longer when you can. You don’t need to have it all figured out already. Give yourself some grace.