Harnessing This One Trait Will Make You Seem Super Human.
The good news: we are already hardwired to have it
Photo by Alexandru Zdrobău on Unsplash
“Most people don’t live aware lives. They live mechanical lives, mechanical thoughts — generally somebody else’s — mechanical emotions, mechanical actions, mechanical reactions” — Anthony De Mello
Do you know which trait is fundamental to each stage of human evolution?
Self-awareness.
As we have evolved from a single-celled organism to modern Homo Sapiens, we have only become more self-aware, not less.
A Brief Lesson on Self-Awareness and The Evolution of Human Kind
Self-awareness is the tool that our predecessors used to distinguish ourselves from our environment, other animals and eventually, other human species.
We used self-awareness to adapt, teach and understand our surroundings.
In a paper published in Molecular Psychiatry, C. Robert Cloninger, a psychiatrist and geneticist at Washington University in St. Louis reported that:
Modern humans also have a set of 267 genes from the larger set than the other two human species. Most of these sequences are devoted to regulating genes in the self-awareness network.
“When the researchers sized up how much of the gene set belonged to each species, they found the biggest differences in those for self-awareness.”
Scientists now believe that self-awareness explains why Homo Sapiens could out-compete our Neanderthal counterparts. It is our unique ability to understand our harsh environment and think creatively that sets us apart.
Evolving Your Life Means Becoming More Self-Aware
In the modern world, we seem to have plateaued in our ability to become more self-aware.
There is no longer an evolutionary drive for self-awareness. You could live a blissful and ignorant life and still die happy. Self-awareness is seen more as a liability than a tool to make your life better.
Social media, the 24/7 news cycle and the ability to have distractions and entertainment on demand have pacified society from cultivating greater self-awareness.
In a study conducted by the University of Virginia, when given the choice of being with one’s thoughts or receiving mild electric shocks, an alarming amount of research participants chose the electric shocks.
67% of men and 25% of women chose to inflict electric shocks on themselves rather than just sit there quietly and think.
The lead researcher, Timothy Wilson, notes “we, like everyone else, noticed how wedded people seem to be to modern technology, and seem to shy away from just using their own thoughts to occupy themselves.”
Most people seem to prefer to be doing something rather than nothing, even if that something is negative. Yikes.
French philosopher Blaise Pascal once observed:
“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
Think about that for a moment. Rather than use the time for self-reflection, we rather engage in a mild form of self-harm. We seem to be devolving rather than evolving.
The constant desire to be distracted and entertained crowds out our ability to self-reflect, daydream, and be bored.
Boredom is the fertile ground for creativity. Thinking is the precursor to action. And daydreaming is how we create electric cars and launch rockets to Mars.
Technological Oppression
I have friends who can’t go more than a couple of minutes without checking their phones. Some even start scrolling through their newsfeed while we are talking.
There is nothing that drives me more mad. It makes me want to throw their phone away with the person attached to it.
I have to be that person that confiscates phones when we are at dinner so we can have undistracted conversations and connections.
In 2012, researchers at the University of Essex in England discovered that just having a phone on the table could negatively impact conversations and feelings of connection between individuals, making it less likely that they would have “meaningful” conversations.
“The presence of a mobile phone may orient individuals to thinking of other people and events outside their immediate social context,” lead researcher Andrew Przybylski told The Telegraph.
We’ve become a slave to the technology that was meant to liberate us. We’ve become more lonely through technology that is meant to connect us to everyone in the world.
Neil Postman, in his 1982 book Amusing Ourselves to Death, wrote:
“Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think”.
We are losing the ability to be more enlightened as a society. And that’s to our own detriment.
Self-awareness is becoming more scarce at exactly the same time that it is becoming more valuable.
The demands of the 21st century will require more self-awareness not less. Our ability to self-reflect on our morality, emotions and empathy are the only things that will separate us from robots and artificial intelligence.
Self-awareness is not a nice-to-have or a new-age fad.
If you can develop your self-awareness, you’ll become unstoppable.
While everyone else lives their life on autopilot, you can be intentional and make decisions to make your life better.
The competition is low for those who have taken the time to understand themselves. Purposely cultivating your self-awareness will allow you to evolve into the next version of yourself.
Building Self-Awareness:
Most people go through life half-asleep or fully in a coma.
Many are dead by 30 but are buried at 70.
“Self-awareness means waking up. Most people, even though they don’t know it, are asleep. They’re born asleep, they live asleep, they marry in their sleep, they breed children in their sleep, they die in their sleep without ever waking up.”
— Anthony De Mello
Unlike the Matrix, you won’t need to take any pills to become more self-aware. You can start becoming self-aware right this second.
Self-awareness is a muscle you can build. It is your evolutionary birthright and it costs you nothing.
But here is the warning on the label:
Building self-awareness is not easy. It requires lots of suffering.
It is painful to know that the stories you tell yourself are bullshit. That where you are in life is a direct result of the choices you’ve made. That you might have lived a huge portion of your life playing out a script you inherited.
“In fact, when you’re beginning to awaken, you experience a great deal of pain. It’s painful to see your illusions being shattered. Everything that you thought you had built up crumbles and that’s painful,” writes Anthony De Mello
The decision to live consciously is not an easy commitment. If self-awareness was easy and painless, everyone would do it. But a trait is valuable in proportion to how difficult it is to attain.
Here are some steps to get started:
1. Self-observation
Watch what your mind does.
What do you do when someone cuts you off in traffic? What happens when someone makes you feel insecure? How do you react to adversity or bad news?
There is no need for judgment. Suspend what you think is right and wrong for now. Simply observe.
Look at your thoughts as if you were sitting on a riverbank observing the water flowing by. The water is your thoughts. Notice what comes through. What color is the water? How fast or slow is it moving?
Understand how the water shapes your mind and actions.
Once you understand your patterns, you can start to shape the river. You are the master of your own thoughts. It is the only thing you have complete control over.
Once you can see your emotions for what they are, start to detach from them.
This does not mean you become an emotionless robot but rather you can view your emotions from a further perspective. Much like if you were watching a movie of your life.
Every time you feel an emotion and you distance yourself from it, you’ve completed a mental bicep curl. The more bicep curls you do, the stronger you will get.
2. Meditation
I am a huge fan of meditation. Meditation has single handly been the greatest investment I’ve made in my self-development journey.
Meditation is for the mind and exercise is for the body. Believe it or not, there was a period in time when people didn’t believe you could make your body stronger.
We are now living in a time when people don’t believe that meditation can make your mind stronger. Those who wield this knowledge will have an advantage over those who don’t.
A lack of mindfulness is the illiteracy of the 21st century.
In the study, published in the journal NeuroImage, UCLA neuroscientist Eileen Luders and her colleagues compared the brains of 22 people who had practiced various forms of meditation with the brains of people who don’t meditate.
“Two brain regions were bigger in the meditators than in the non-meditators, while non-meditators showed no advantage in any brain region. The regions that had greater volume in the meditators have both been linked to our ability to manage our emotions and attention.”
Learn to meditate through great apps such as Waking Up, Headspace or Calm. The knowledge to learn how to meditate is abundant, it is the desire to be mindful that is scarce.
3. Get comfortable being in solitude
You’ll never know what your thoughts are until you are alone with them.
As someone who scores over 90% for extroversion on the Big Five Personality Test, being around people and the center of attention gives me a lot of energy.
For me to purposely be alone felt like a fate worse than death.
I struggled to do this for a long time. I was terrified of being by myself or alone for long periods of time. But after a breakup of a 5-year relationship, I started to realize how much I relied on other people for my happiness.
My first time staying alone in a beachside Airbnb on the coast of Melbourne, I cried incessantly. Not just a few tears. I was whaling. The type of ugly crying you can only do when you know you’re alone. I had thoughts in my head I never had before.
But after this experience, I felt incredibly light. I had felt deep emotions of hurt and sadness from the breakup and took steps to process them.
Unprocessed emotions don’t go away, they only get stored in your body.
Investing time alone will do wonders for your self-awareness.
“We need solitude, because when we’re alone, we’re free from obligations, we don’t need to put on a show, and we can hear our own thoughts.” — Tamim Ansary
Since my first experience, I regularly go away 2–3 times a year by myself to just think and be with my thoughts. People think I am weird. But I don’t care. We live in a society adverse to being alone.
My energy and productivity increase exponentially each time I take a break for myself.
4. Take responsibility
“When you’re ready to exchange your illusions for reality when you’re ready to exchange your dreams for facts, that’s the way you find it all. That’s where life becomes meaningful. Life becomes beautiful” — Anthony de Mello
Self-awareness begins when you take the responsibility that no one else is in charge of your happiness or well-being besides you. Opportunities for your growth are hidden behind the responsibilities you refuse to take.
I had an ex-girlfriend who would blame everything on her parents.
No matter what they did she found a way to feel like the victim. Despite living rent-free in a nice and safe house or the fact they bought her car and offered to buy her a house, she would claim to feel unsupported.
It’s fine to have issues with your parents. We all do. My parents are getting divorced. I can’t imagine the impact that is having on me on some level. But I don’t depend on them for my happiness or emotional well-being.
Instead of moving out or accepting them as they are, she decided to remain the victim. It took up so much space in our relationship and was a contributing factor to it not working out.
How much your self-awareness grows depends on the weight of responsibility you’re willing to take on. Her refusal to take any responsibility for her life kept her trapped in whatever story she told herself.
Feeling better doesn’t come from avoiding life, it comes from investing in life.
Don’t get stuck in a bad situation you refuse to change.
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