We are with ourselves all day every day, so it may seem like we must, therefore, know ourselves quite intimately. However, our attention and focus most days is on others around us or our daily responsibilities, and we often neglect to think about ourselves. Even if we do think about ourselves, it can be nearly impossible to be deeply tuned in.
It is imperative that each of us understands ourselves deeply because if we don’t, we risk simply going through the motions in life, as opposed to living deliberately. If we don’t know ourselves, we may be inclined to live in a sort of autopilot kind of way, just doing what we feel is the next logical step to move our lives forward without much regard for how those steps make us feel. This can be a problem because this type of life does not take our emotional health into consideration. We can do all the “right” things, but we’re still somehow unhappy. By all accounts, our lives check all the boxes, yet we find ourselves unsatisfied. A very possible reason for this unhappiness/dissatisfaction is that we’ve inadvertently ignored how we feel about those “right” things we’ve been doing.
It is easy to get caught up in living a life as who we feel we need to act as and not as our real selves. It’s not necessarily phony or fake, it just isn’t honoring our own wishes/desires because we have pushed those wishes/desires so far to the background slowly over time that we can hardly see them anymore.
–> It is important to know that the greater the discrepancy between who we really are and who we feel we must act as, the greater we will feel symptoms of depression and/or anxiety. However, the closer we live a life in accordance with who we truly are, the less likely we are to experience these symptoms. <–
Knowing this can provide us with motivation and also direction as to how we might alter our thoughts or our actions in order to best support our authentic self. If every thought you had or every action you took supported how you really feel, how different would life be? For some, it may be a dramatic change.
We cannot consistently live a life that is aligned with our true self unless we know who that true self is.
