Are You Too Self-Aware? [The Self-Awareness Paradox]

- For decades, a billion-dollar self-help industry has been built around helping people find their true selves, discover their purpose, and unearth buried emotions, but I'm here to tell you that they're wrong. - Well, I can tell you, I've never been wrong once. - People view self-awareness like money.

If you have none, then you desperately need to get some, but if you even have some, you can always benefit from having more. But there's recent evidence suggesting that self-awareness is actually not like money, it's actually a lot more like medicine. If you're sick, you definitely need some, but if you're already healthy, too much could actually make you, well, sick.

In this video, I'm gonna explain how self-awareness can both help and hurt us and what we can do about it. But to understand how self-awareness can cut both ways, we need to start by taking a deeper look at a practice we're all probably familiar with, therapy. Despite data from millions of people over a century, psychologists still don't totally understand why therapy works.

And how does that make you feel? Over the past hundred years, clinical psychology has produced as many forms of therapy as Adam Sandler has cheesy romcom movies. The field is an alphabet soup of modalities.

You've got CBT, AEDP, DBT, IPT, ACT, CPP, SFBI, and REBT. You've got gestalt, existential, interpersonal, Rogerian, Jungian, humanistic, regression, psychoanalysis, and of course everybody's favorite, family therapy. - That was a lot.

- With so many approaches to therapy, researchers were rightly curious about which ones were actually the most effective. They wanted to know which ones worked and which ones didn't. So they ran a bunch of studies to see which therapies produce the best results, and the answer will probably surprise you.

It's all of them, they all work. Well, kind of. Pretty much every modality produces, on average, relatively similar results.

They work decently, but not perfectly. Some have slightly better results than others, but on the whole, just the fact that you're doing therapy has way more impact than the type of therapy you choose to do. In fact, dozens of studies have struggled to find much measurable benefit to the therapist's training and credentials.

Many studies show that people benefit from speaking to thoughtful amateurs just as much as they do professionals. Now, this is kind of stunning because it suggests that for all the theorizing and frameworking over the last 150 years from Sigmund Freud to Dr Phil, the content of the therapy itself actually isn't that important. What seems to be important is to simply get a person in a room regularly to talk about their problems to another human being who is thoughtful and listens well.

That's the 1% that drives 99% of the results. The value of the therapy isn't the therapy, it's the context, the environment. Really?

You're paying to have a place to go where you can sort out your shit in front of someone trustworthy and not be judged. Everything else, the fancy acronyms, the degrees and frameworks, the couch, it seems to really just be an excuse to get you into that room and into that context. Whoa, okay.

So if most of the value of therapy is merely getting into a room and critically discussing your own thoughts, ideas, and emotions, couldn't you just call a trusted friend and do it with them instead? Do we even need therapy at all? It turns out, you don't.

In fact, this is probably why journaling is so effective. You are essentially accomplishing the same things as most therapy. You are creating a context in which you can express your feelings in a way that feels non-judgmental so that you can then consider those feelings more objectively.

And it turns out, in some ways, this might even be superior to therapy, which brings me to the sponsor of this video, Day One. Day One is the most popular journaling software in the world. It is available on any device, so you can jot down your thoughts and keep them secure forever.

I first used Day One back in 2014 when I was dating my now wife. It's been fun to go back and look through some of those early entries and see how absolutely clueless I was. But this is the advantage that journaling has over something like therapy or counseling.

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com/markmanson. It's in the description, check it out. So, why does writing out our thoughts and feelings on a piece of paper help us?

Hell, why does sitting in a quiet room and meditating, observing our thoughts and feelings help us? Well, it's because doing these things help us dis-identify with whatever we're experiencing. Let me explain.

The philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer argued that consciousness can be divided into two parts, the subject and the object. Think of the subject as the observer and the object as whatever is observed. Both aspects are required in consciousness.

There's always something being watched and something doing the watching. Generally, we are the subject of our consciousness and some external thing is the object. The microphone I'm speaking into is currently the object of my consciousness, it's what I'm focusing on and paying attention to, but thoughts and feelings can be the object of our consciousness as well.

I can sit here and imagine the amazing dinner I'm gonna eat tonight and now that is the object of my consciousness. As long as I am the subject and some external thought or thing is the object, then all of my feelings, impulses, and desires are bundled up into some intangible subjectivity known as I. This I is then not analyzed or considered.

After all, it's not separate. This unexamined subject is often referred to as the ego. It's only when we turn our focus on ourselves and make our thoughts and feelings the object of our consciousness that we are able to differentiate them and put them into perspective.

"Oh, I'm feeling angry today, and I didn't realize it. " What was once the subject of my consciousness, my feeling of anger is now the object of my consciousness and is now separate from me, and once separate from me, I can consider my anger as though it were not me. I can ask myself, "Why does it exist?

"What's the purpose? "Is it useful? "Should I even care?

" (objects clunking) Ultimately, all the stuff you and I learn, they're just tools, tools for building self-awareness and chipping away at our ego. Therapy does this by some thoughtful person inviting us to express ourselves and then helping us analyze our thoughts and feelings. Journaling does this by getting us to write down our thoughts and feelings, and then meditation does this by helping us observe our thoughts and feelings as though they're separate from ourselves.

This is how self-awareness can make us better because when our feelings and impulses are undifferentiated from ourselves, they hold control over us. And as long as I'm unaware of my anger, I can't recognize the transient nature of my anger. As long as I can't see my biases and insecurities, then I'll never question whether they're legitimate or not.

This is why self-awareness is a prerequisite for handling any emotional baggage that may be holding us back. The question is, "Is it possible to be too aware of my anger? " Turns out, it is.

(Mark screaming) (intense rock music) (drill whizzing) (lighthearted music) Let's return to the example of therapy. Let's say you've been seeing a therapist for a couple years, and in that time you've learned a lot about yourself and made a lotta progress on problems. Tell me about that.

You really like your therapist and you feel some sense of loyalty to them. Yes, yes, yes, okay. But then, something weird starts happening.

You start showing up to your therapy sessions with nothing to talk about. And how does that make you feel? But you wanna keep improving and working on yourself, right?

So you start thinking really hard about "What could I talk to my therapist about? " And that's where the problem starts. Before, you simply came in and unloaded the big and heavy stresses and emotions that were burdening you, but now you're actively scanning through your life, looking for anything that's even somewhat uncomfortable, even the light little things because you wanna keep the process going.

Let's say you've been at your new job for a year now, but you still don't feel like you connect your coworkers. In fact, now that you're thinking about it, you've never really connected with your coworkers. It's always taken you a really long time to make friends and this has caused a lot of frustration and loneliness throughout your life.

Why is that? Your therapist predictably asks about your childhood. You mentioned that your mother was very protective.

It would be very much like her to discourage new friendships with people you didn't know well. Next thing you know, a faint memory materializes in your mind of your mother warning you against playing with kids across the street. You don't totally remember where or how this happened, but you have this vivid image in your head of her standing above you saying scary things about people you don't know.

Wow, another breakthrough, or is it? (record scratching) Because what's actually happening in this example is likely not self-awareness, but self delusion, and it's dangerous because the two can feel exactly the same. Now, let's back up for a second.

(record rewinding) First, you come into therapy without a clear problem in mind. This should be a signal. Your life is going pretty well, don't fix what's not broken.

Second. In order to fulfill your desire to have another problem to analyze in therapy, your mind naturally inflates a small problem to make it feel more important than it actually is. This makes sense.

It will get you validation from your therapist who you really like and it justifies spending 100 some odd dollars to be there. In order to justify this newly inflated problem in your mind, you start scouring vague and empty memories, trying to materialize something that can justify this new feeling of loneliness. It turns out, the human brain is actually really good at inventing memories when the conscious mind feels it needs one.

So, boom, there you go, vague recollections of a stern mother warning you against playing with friends. Now, the above steps have been well documented and studied. It's called false memory syndrome, and there was a period in the seventies and eighties where particularly aggressive therapists were inciting fake memories in their patients regularly and causing disastrous results.

It caused this shitstorm and took over a decade for the profession to recover. It's not really hard to see how this newfound self-awareness has actually made you worse. Perhaps the best way to think about this is that healthy self-awareness will normalize what is pathological, whereas unhealthy self-awareness pathologizes what's actually normal.

Awareness of mental health issues is at an all-time high, yet, mental health itself is at an all-time low. So clearly, the extra awareness is not helping. Somewhere, something is going wrong.

We are no longer normalizing the pathological, but instead, we may be pathologizing the normal. And worse, we're teaching young people that this is a normal, healthy, acceptable way to live. (lighthearted music) I wanna offer a few pieces of advice in case you feel like you are someone who is too aware of their emotions and is constantly self-conscious.

Number one. The first thing to do is to stop seeing discomfort or challenges as something to be solved or fixed. Anxiety is a natural and healthy part of life.

Anger can be useful. Fear helps you alive. These are not problems to be unpacked and solved, but rather simple feedback, and you don't always have to take the feedback.

Second. Don't fix what's not broken. If your life is going well, then let it go well.

Don't look for problems or inflate small problems into bigger ones. And if someone in your life pressures you to pathologize the normal, be explicit and tell them that's exactly what they're doing, and to go fuck themselves. Third.

Get some physical activity. The best way to quell an overactive mind is to keep the body busy, not only will you physically feel better, but some sort of physical activity will keep your mind off things. And finally, stop giving a fuck.

If you're upset about that thing your mom did, can you change it, can you control it? No? Then just let fucking let it go.

And if you're still struggling to do that, well, I know a guy who wrote a book about it.