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Self-Knowledge  • Know Yourself

Know Yourself — Socrates and How to Develop Self-Knowledge

In Ancient Greece, the philosopher Socrates famously declared that the unexamined life was not worth living. Asked to sum up what  all philosophical commandments could be reduced to, he replied: ‘ Know yourself .’

Knowing yourself has extraordinary prestige in our culture. It has been framed as quite literally the meaning of life.

This sounds, when one hears it, highly plausible, yet so plausible it’s worth pausing to ask a few more questions. Just why is self-knowledge such a prestigious good? What are the dangers that come with a lack of self-knowledge? And what do we in fact need to know about ourselves? How do we come to learn such things? And why is self-knowledge difficult to attain?

When we speak about self-knowledge , we’re alluding to a particular kind of knowledge – generally of an emotional or psychological kind. There are a million things you could potentially know about yourself. Here are some options:

• On what day of the week were you born?
• Were you able to pick up a raisin between your fore-finger and thumb when you were five months old?
• Are you more an introvert or an extrovert?
• How does your relationship with your father influence your career ambitions?
• What kind of picnic person are you: morning or evening? River-bank, park or hill?

Most of us would recognise that questions 3 and 4 are ones worth knowing; the others, not so much.

In other words, not everything that we can know about ourselves is all that important to find out. Here we want to focus on the areas of self-knowledge that matter most in life: the areas concerned with the inner psychological core of the self.

The key bits of self-knowledge we’ll be interested in are:

• — What kind of person are you characteristically attracted to in love
• — What difficult patterns of behaviour are you prey to in relationships
• — What are your talents at work
• — What problems do you have around success/failure
• — How are you about feedback
• — What do you do when you have been frustrated by life
• — What kind of taste do you have
• — Can you distinguish between your passing bodily-based emotions and your more rational thoughts

If you have solid answers to these issues, you’ll be able to speak of yourself as someone with an adequate degree of self-knowledge.

1. Why and Where Does Self-Knowledge Matter?

Self-knowledge is important for one central reason: because it offers us a route to greater happiness and fulfilment.

A lack of self-knowledge leaves you open to accident and mistaken ambitions.  

Armed with the right sort of self-knowledge, we have a greater chance of avoiding errors in our dealings with others and in the formulation of our life choices.

Let’s look at some examples of areas where self-knowledge matters

Without self-knowledge, all sorts of problems may occur:

1. We choose the wrong partners, trying to get together with people who don’t really suit us, because we don’t understand our own needs

When first looking out for a partner, the requirements we come up with are coloured often by a beautiful non-specific sentimental vagueness: we’ll say we really want to find someone who is ‘kind’ or ‘fun to be with’, ‘attractive’ or ‘up for adventure…’

It isn’t that such desires are wrong, they are just not remotely precise enough in their understanding of what we in particular are going to require in order to stand a chance of being happy – or, more accurately, not consistently miserable.

All of us are crazy in very particular ways. We’re distinctively neurotic, unbalanced and immature, but don’t know quite the details because no one ever encourages us too hard to find them out. An urgent, primary task of any lover is therefore to get a handle on the specific ways in which they are mad. They have to get up to speed on their individual neuroses. They have to grasp where these have come from, what they make them do – and most importantly, what sort of people either provoke or assuage them. A good partnership is not so much one between two healthy people (there aren’t many of these on the planet), it’s one between two demented people who have had the skill or luck to find a non-threatening conscious accommodation between their relative insanities.

The very idea that we might not be too difficult as people should set off alarm bells in any prospective partner. The question is just where the problems will lie: perhaps we have a latent tendency to get furious when someone disagrees with us, or we can only relax when we are working, or we’re a bit tricky around intimacy after sex, or we’ve never been so good at explaining what’s going on when we’re worried. It’s these sort of issues that – over decades – create catastrophes and that we therefore need to know about way ahead of time, in order to look out for people who are optimally designed to withstand them. A standard question on any early dinner date should be quite simply: ‘And how are you mad?’

The problem is that knowledge of our own neuroses is not at all easy to come by. It can take years and situations we have had no experience of. Prior to marriage, we’re rarely involved in dynamics that properly hold up a mirror to our disturbances. Whenever more casual relationships threaten to reveal the ‘difficult’ side of our natures, we tend to blame the partner – and call it a day. As for our friends, they predictably don’t care enough about us to have any motive to probe our real selves. They only want a nice evening out. Therefore, we end up blind to the awkward sides of our natures.

On our own, when we’re furious, we don’t shout, as there’s no one there to listen – and therefore we overlook the true, worrying strength of our capacity for fury. Or we work all the time without grasping, because there’s no one calling us to come for dinner, how we manically use work to gain a sense of control over life – and how we might cause hell if anyone tried to stop us. At night, all we’re aware of is how sweet it would be to cuddle with someone, but we have no opportunity to face up to the intimacy-avoiding side of us that would start to make us cold and strange if ever it felt we were too deeply committed to someone. One of the greatest privileges of being on one’s own is the flattering illusion that one is, in truth, really quite an easy person to live with. With such a poor level of understanding of our characters, no wonder we aren’t in any position to know who we should be looking out for.

2. We repeat unhealthy patterns from childhood, always latching on to people who will frustrate us in familiar but grievous ways

We believe we seek happiness in love, but it’s not quite that simple. What at times it seems we actually seek is familiarity – which may well complicate any plans we might have for happiness. We recreate in adult relationships some of the feelings we knew in childhood. It was as children that we first came to know and understand what love meant. But unfortunately, the lessons we picked up may not have been straightforward. The love we knew as children may have come entwined with other, less pleasant dynamics: being controlled, feeling humiliated, being abandoned, never communicating, in short: suffering. As adults, we may then reject certain healthy candidates whom we encounter, not because they are wrong, but precisely because they are too well-balanced (too mature, too understanding, too reliable), and this rightness feels unfamiliar and alien, almost oppressive. We head instead to candidates whom our unconscious is drawn to, not because they will please us, but because they will frustrate us in familiar ways. We get together with the wrong people because the right ones feel wrong – undeserved; because we have no experience of health, because we don’t ultimately associate being loved with feeling satisfied.  

• — We fail to explain our feelings to our partners – because we don’t understand ourselves well enough. We act out our feelings rather than spell them out, often to destructive effect. (we break the door rather than explain we are mad with anger).
• — We are unaware of the effects of our words on others. We don’t notice how often we say critical things to them.
• — We can’t anticipate and signpost our feelings: when we start to get over-excited and talk too fast, we should know it’s time to go for a walk round the block because otherwise there’s liable to be an explosion…
• — We project, that is, we respond to events in the here and now according to patterns laid down in childhood; in our heads, our partners become mixed up with other people from our emotional history (a humiliating mother, a distant father etc…).
• — We’re governed by the past: old unfortunate habits keep their grip. We don’t see what’s happening and so we can’t do anything about it.

There’s a lot we can do once people are able to tell us what’s problematic about themselves. We don’t need people to be problem free – we need people to be able to explain where the problems are.  

We only have a few short years in which to come up with a convincing answer about what we want to do with our lives. Then, wherever we are in the thought-process, we have to jump into a job in order to have enough money to survive or appease society’s demands for our productivity.

Without self-knowledge, we are too vague about our ambitions; we don’t know what to do with our lives and – because money tends to be such an urgent priority – we lock ourselves into a cage from which it may take decades to emerge.

• — We are too modest: we miss out on opportunities: we don’t know what we are capable of.
• — We are too ambitious: we don’t know what we shouldn’t attempt. We lack a clear sense of our limitations, wasting years trying to do something we’re not suited to.
• — We don’t grasp the ways in which we are difficult employees or bosses. We might – among other problems – be crazily defensive, or resistant to trusting anyone or too eager to please.
• — We don’t perceive our hidden attitudes to success and failure. It may be that we see ourselves (wrongly) as not cut out for the bigger roles or when things start to go well, we become manically prone to make a blunder. Perhaps we’re unconsciously trying to avoid rivalry with a parent, or a sibling by tripping ourselves up. Family dynamics have an enormous, subterranean influence on how effectively we operate at work.

LIVING WITH OTHERS

Without self-knowledge, we are, in general, a liability to be around:

• — We don’t realise the effect we tend to have on other people: without at all meaning to, we might come across as arrogant or cold, or as tending to hog attention or as needlessly shy and hesitant or as getting furious in dangerous ways.
• — We may fall prey to unnecessary loneliness: not understanding what we really need and what makes us hard to get to know.
• — Difficulties of empathy: not acknowledging the more vulnerable or disturbed parts of oneself; means not seeing oneself as being ‘like’ other people in crucial ways. It’s hard to understand the deeper bits of others without having explored oneself first.

SPENDING MONEY UNWISELY

Most of what we spend money on is a hunch about what will make us happy. But without self-knowledge, we’ll have a hard time figuring out the relationship between what we purchase and how we feel.

• — Holidays and travels will leave us disappointed.
• — Impulsive purchases will soon be regretted.
• — We’ll be prey to fashion: not knowing ourselves, we’ll be at the mercy of what consumer society tells us to want.
• — We might become inadvertent snobs: liking things because others like them rather than for deeper personal reasons.

Self-knowledge has always been important. But now it’s more so than ever. This is a result of political and social progress. When life was much more constrained by tradition, rigid social hierarchy and rigorous codes of manners, there was less need for self-knowledge to guide action. Now, if we are to exploit the independence and freedom we’ve been offered (in love, work and social lives), there is all the more reason to get to know ourselves in good time.

2. WHY IS SELF-KNOWLEDGE SO HARD TO COME BY?

We pay a high price for lack of self-knowledge. So why is it in short supply? Why is it hard for us to know ourselves in these ways? It’s not laziness or stupidity that explains it. There are several huge cognitive frailties that make it hard for us to have certain kinds of insight about ourselves. There are seven reasons why self-knowledge is tricky for creatures with the kinds of minds we have.

i. The Unconscious

Human beings have evolved into creatures whose minds are divided into conscious and unconscious processes. Digesting lunch is unconscious; reflecting on what you’d like to do this weekend is conscious.  

The reason for this division is bandwidth. We simply couldn’t cope if everything we did had to be filtered through the conscious mind.  

Also, we start off as children with fierce difficulties around self-awareness. Nature has structured us so that self-awareness comes very late on: you only have to study how children are to know that an awareness of self is a very late evolution of character.

In general, we can argue that we suffer because a little too much of how we behave happens unconsciously – when we would benefit from a closer grasp on what was going on. The default balance between conscious and unconscious tends to be wrong, we are incentivised to let too much of who we are happen in the unconscious.

As a general point, we need to make heroic efforts to correct the imbalance and bring more of our lives into the conscious realm.

ii. The Emotional and Rational Mind

A traditional way of conceiving of our minds is that there’s a small rational bit and a far larger, more dominant emotional bit.

Plato compared the rational bit to a group of wild horses dragging the conscious mind along.

Nowadays, neuroscientists tell us about three parts of the brain:

• – The reptilian
• – The limbic
• – The neocortex

The reptilian is, as the name sounds, the earliest and the most primitive. It’s interested in basic survival and responds immediately, in knee-jerk ways, unconsciously and rather aggressively and destructively. It’s what’s engaged if a lion surprises you in the jungle.

The limbic part of the brain, a later development is concerned with emotions and memories.

The neocortex, a very late development, is where our higher reasoning faculties lie.

We don’t have to buy into the precise terminology here to understand the drift: a lot of our lives is dominated by automatic, over-emotional, distorting responses by the ‘lower’ parts of the mind; and only occasionally can we hope to gain rational perspective through our higher faculties.

iii. Freudian Resistance

However, it isn’t just the case that things are unconscious by accident. It was Sigmund Freud’s great insight that they remain unconscious because of a squeamishness on our part: there is – in his term – extraordinary ‘resistance’ to making a lot of our unconscious material conscious.  

The unconscious contains desires and feelings that deeply challenge a more comfortable vision of ourselves. We might discover – if we got to know ourselves better – that we’re attracted to a different gender, or have career ambitions quite different from those our society expects of us. We therefore ‘resist’ finding out too much about ourselves in many areas. It shatters the short-term peace we’re addicted to.

But, of course, for Freud, we pay a high price for this. Short-term peace is unstable, it is, to use another word of his, ‘neurotic’, and cuts us off from the benefits of long-term honesty about aspects of our identity.

Too often we say of thoughts, it’s ‘safer not to go there’. One simply pushes feelings and ideas aside. Resistance means we are escaping the humiliation of admitting to particular appetites and desires – especially when these are at odds with what we’d like to be like or how others want us to be. We reduce our immediate suffering. But the cost is that we can’t properly aim for what would truly make us happy.

iv. Other People Won’t Tell Us

There are many aspects of our identities that it is simply hard for us to see without the help of another person. We need others to be our mirrors, feeding back their insights and perspectives on the elusive, hard-to-see parts of ourselves.

However, getting hold of data from others is a very unreliable process. Very few people can be bothered to undertake the arduous task of giving us feedback.

Either they dislike us too much and therefore can’t be bothered. Or they like us too much, and don’t want to upset us.

Our friends are too polite; good intentions lead them to keep their less pleasant observations to themselves. Our enemies have so much to tell us: it’s not always the people we like who see certain aspects of us most clearly. It might be someone we’re at loggerheads with who has the sharpest sense of what’s not quite going right in our character (a way, for instance, of letting people down after a long period of seeming to go along with their plans; a very annoying habit of sitting on the fence). But they are not likely to be good at sharing their wisdom with us. They either won’t take the trouble, or will brush us off with the sort of sharp insults that will make us defensive and closed to the wiser aspects embedded within their harsh assessments.

v. We Haven’t Lived Enough

Many bits of self-knowledge only come through experience. Think of ourselves as being like a biscuit mould: it’s only by pressing ourselves against the dough of life that we get to see what shape we actually are.  

Self-knowledge therefore isn’t something we can always do in isolation, retreating from the world to look into ourselves.

We acquire knowledge dynamically, by trying things out and colliding with others – which always carries a risk, and takes time.

In careers, for example, we can’t know what we might want to do with our lives simply by asking ourselves this question. We need to head out into the workplace and try things out. We need to spend a week at an architect’s office, or go and meet someone in the diplomatic service etc.

Self-knowledge can only evolve as a result of dialogue with the world.

vi. We Are Fatefully Vague About Stuff

Our thoughts about many things are marked first and foremost by vagueness. Our intellectual muscles are – by nature – rather weak. Our initial reactions to things are frequently of the order of ‘yum’ or ‘yuk’. We have pronounced pro or contra feelings towards something but struggle to say more. We say things like:

• — I want to be creative
• — I loathe big business
• — I’m feeling out of sorts
• — He annoys me

These reports might be true, but they are not very high-quality items in terms of self- knowledge. They’re not accurate enough to help guide action. It’s not that they are wrong, the problem is they are too vague. They don’t get to grips with what is really the issue. They circle in the big, general territory but don’t land anywhere specific.

This isn’t a personal problem. It’s universal. The first reports from our conscious minds are just by nature horribly vague – and in need of sustained analysis.

vii. Introspection is Low on Prestige and Unfamiliar

Introspection is the name we give to the close study of one’s feelings and ideas.

Unfortunately, it isn’t given high prestige in our society. We’re rarely encouraged to unpack our thoughts. The notion of what it means to have a conversation with a friend rarely includes trying to make progress in sorting out feelings. Psychotherapy – the prime arena for analysing oneself – interests barely 1% of the population.

Part of increasing the self-knowledge of a society is to help make the idea of introspection a little more glamorous; it should be thought of as a very plausible concept to spend a weekend on or host a dinner party around.

3. HOW TO GET MORE SELF-KNOWLEDGE — AND IN WHAT AREAS

Relationships, i. repetition compulsion.

We’re not terribly flexible when it comes to falling in love. We have types. There are patterns: each of us tends to have a characteristic sort of person we go for – a more or less sketchy template of the sort of person we find very attractive.

The template is highly individual, but if we could open up people’s heads we might find things like:

The B yronic type — dark hair (frequently tousled), reserved but intense; naughty

The serene type — calm, unruffled, angst-free

The cheeky type — bouncy, unpretentious, free  

We’re used to seeing our types in terms of the positives. But, in fact, every type also carries a lot of negatives as well. The people we tend to go for may be attractive to us not only for some very nice reasons but also because they bring with them some special kind of trouble or difficulty to which we are especially prone. Most of us are involved in the compulsion to repeat kinds of suffering in our personal lives, normally based on a suffering in early childhood.

Putting the same templates in darker terms, it might turn out that someone is drawn to:

A chaotic, selfish, volcanic person who seems always to be on the verge of losing their temper and is never on time ( Byronic ).

Someone who will be wrapped up in themselves and slightly depressed ( serene ).

An infantile person with poor self-management skills who needs a lot of looking after ( cheeky ).

We need self-knowledge in love because were so prone to repeat unhealthy patterns. We leave a relationship hoping to leave behind a particular set of problems – which we find again in the next relationship. These patterns normally derive from childhood experience whereby love was mixed in with various kinds of suffering. The father whose attention and affection we craved was also often annoyed (annoyance, ever since, has proved desperately interesting to a part of us); the mother who we loved was often preoccupied and always heading out to do more exciting things while leaving us behind (our partner is in a high stress job and doesn’t often call…)

Now when we’re searching for affection and closeness we look out for some quite negative, even damaging things, since we have learned to think that this is how love works. We don’t notice it, so the pattern keeps on guiding our behaviour in unfortunate ways. The psychoanalytic theory of repetition compulsion means that you’re also being drawn to something problematic. For example:

• — They are rather bossy
• — They are critical
• — They are in some way rather inadequate and in need of help
• — They are agitated and irritable<

Self-knowledge means first of all seeing the pattern. It means understanding the negative aspects of the type of person we tend to get involved with.

Culturally we are resistant to this kind of self-knowledge. We’re not used to the notion that we might be drawn to people for bad reasons. We want to say: I hate it when people don’t listen or I really don’t like irritable and agitated individuals. And of course that is true. We don’t like it when people behave these ways.

But we do much too often end up with them!  

Think of a celebrity or actor that you find attractive.

• – What are some good things you find attractive about them?
• – What might be the bad reasons you are drawn to them?
• – What are the difficult sides of people you’re oddly rather drawn to?
• – Sketch a ‘type’ you find attractive.
• – What are the bad reasons you find this type attractive?
• – What have the consequences been in your life?

Gaining self-knowledge about the darker aspects of one’s own pattern of attraction allows us to be more strategic.

When looking for a new relationship:

• — Realise that emotional appeal is not necessarily – for us – the best guide to who we could have good relationship with.
• — Pick up at a much earlier stage that one might be making this mistake and recognising that it is a mistake.

In a long-standing relationship:

• — Accept that we shouldn’t simply blame the other person for certain annoying characteristics – such as their distance or irritability. We can admit that this was part of what drew us to them in the first place.
• — It helps identify the kind of compensating maturity one needs; if you are drawn to quite critical people, you can’t always then blame them for being critical.

ii. Projection

Our minds have a strong natural tendency to projection , that is, to elaborate a response to a current situation from incomplete hints – drawing upon a dynamic set up in our past and indicative of our unconscious interests, drives and concerns.  

Take a look at this image, which appears as part of a famous projection test:

If you ask, what’s going on here, we all could read different things into the image. People might say something like:

• — It’s a father and son, mourning together for a shared loss, maybe they’ve heard that a friend of the family has died.
• — It’s a manager in the process of sacking (more in sorrow than in anger) a very unsatisfactory young employee.
• — I feel something obscene is going on out of the frame: it’s in a public urinal, the older man is looking at the younger guy’s penis and making him feel very embarrassed.

One thing we do know – really – is that the picture doesn’t really show any of these things. It is an ambiguous image.

The picture simply shows two men rather formally dressed, one slightly older. The elaboration is coming from the person who looks at it. And the way they elaborate, the kind of story they tell, may say more about them than it does about the image. Especially if they get insistent and very sure that this is what the picture really means. This is projection.  

We don’t just do this around images; the same thing happens with people. In relationships, projection kicks in when there are ‘ambiguous situations’.  

For instance, your partner is quietly chuckling at a text message. They don’t offer to share it with you. They quickly send a reply. You start to feel very agitated. It looks like your partner is having an affair. They have just received a message from their lover reminding them of some very intimate joke (which might even be about you and your failings); you partner eagerly responds. They don’t love you. You are abandoned, betrayed. You are now very angry with you partner; you feel victimised. But actually, nothing like this is really going on at all. The message was from an over-conscientious colleague at work, and your partner found it comic they should be bothering about such trivia and didn’t think it was even worth mentioning. In fact, the distress you felt derived from when you were at school: you discovered that the person you thought was your best friend was actually saying mean things about to others. You are still wounded by this, though you hate to admit it.

The structure is

• — We observe something but in honest truth it’s not entirely clear what it means.
• — We read into the situation a set of motive, intentions, attitudes – which are usually distressing to us and give rise to anxiety and anger.
• — The anxiety or fear actually relate to an earlier experience. But we don’t realise this.
• — We are frightened by, or angry about, what’s happening now. Even though really we shouldn’t be.

Projection is always about telling ourselves a story in answer to the question: what did that really mean? That might be, for instance, be a situation as well as a person.

When we are projecting it doesn’t FEEL as if we are doing anything complicated or special. On the contrary it feels just as if we are seeing things as they are. So, typically we dislike the suggestion that we are ‘projecting’. It feels as if it is an insult to our ability to perceive how things really are. Admitting the possibility that one might be projecting is humbling. But it could be worth it because projection brings a lot of trouble into our lives. We’re venting our anger on the wrong individual. And maybe in the process hurting someone very unfairly. We are afraid of the wrong person. Our fear of someone in the past gets in the way of making a friend or ally of someone today.

Self-knowledge means recognising one’s projections and attempting to repatriate. The active issue isn’t here and now: it’s some unfinished business from the past that’s still bugging us.

In the images below what do you think is going on?

– Say (without thinking too much) what you believe is happening. Write it down on a piece of paper, while others do the same.

– Then, as a class, go around and compare.

– Then ask yourselves what your possible explanation says not about the picture – it’s ambiguous – but about you. What parts of you have ‘projected’ into the ambiguous image?

ii. Confrontation and Criticism

Another area where a lack of self-knowledge bites is around how we characteristically behave with others, friends, family and colleagues. There are a number of themes here.

i: Confrontation Styles 

Daily life offers us constant frustrations where we have a choice as to how we might respond. All of us exhibit a variety of ‘confrontation styles’, but we’re often unaware which kind we generally go in for – and what the costs and consequences are.

Imagine that:

– Someone promised you a document by midday. It’s now 1pm.

– It’s your birthday next week, but your partner hasn’t said anything about it. You’d ideally love to go out.

– There’s a drilling sound coming from next door – again.

–  A work colleague has been muscling in on one of your clients.

How do you feel? And how would you typically react?

There are 4 key varieties of possible responses: passive, aggressive, passive-aggressive or assertive:

• — PASSIVE: You feel it’s just how life goes, some things you have to accept; if you make a fuss, it just makes everything worse. After all, it’s not that bad really. Sometimes you really resent these things, but you make yourself put up with them.
• — AGGRESSIVE: “I’m bloody annoyed. Where is that document? Why hasn’t my partner mentioned a party? Why should I suffer because the neighbours are incompetent, stupid, greedy or too lazy to do their DIY at some reasonable hour? If they don’t get their act together you’re really going to show them who’s boss.” They can shape up or ship out as far as you are concerned.
• — PASSIVE-AGGRESSIVE: A curious toxic mixture of passivity and more aggressive feelings. One tells oneself things like: ‘I don’t make a big fuss about my birthday – and of course my partner has a lot on their plate always.’ But secretly one is fuming. Or one thinks, ‘X is a perennially unreliable fool,’ but when their document eventually comes in at 5pm, one says, ‘Great to get this!!’ and leaves it at that… There’s a lot of hostility around but it is indirect. The passive aggressive person keeps their anger veiled just enough so as to be able to deny it to others and to themselves. They don’t feel they are being negative or aggressive. They see themselves as hard done by. What they hate most of all is to make a fuss – but that doesn’t prevent them being very upset. Often, the upset which hasn’t emerged with the person who caused it will later find a way out with a more innocent party. Passive aggressive people who didn’t make their feelings clear in the office will, when they get home, frequently take it out on the kids, the partner or the dog. Passive-aggression has its roots in low self-esteem. One simply doesn’t feel one is allowed to make a direct critique. Direct criticism takes confidence. At the same time, one can’t be happy either. Therefore, the compromise is a veiled compromise attack.
• — ASSERTIVE: you are clear about when someone has behaved badly towards you or is causing a problem. You aren’t happy about it. But your main aim is to fix the problem. You don’t need to take revenge or try to get the other person to feel guilty. You can go up to them and confidently make your point. You aren’t ashamed of yourself or guilty for making a fuss. You think it’s normal to treat people well – you do – and if someone else falls below your standards, you’re not embarrassed to tell them so in plain terms. It won’t be a catastrophe, just a few unpleasant moments, but that will allow the relationship to improve over the long-term. No festering wounds here.

Very few of us are assertive. One estimate is that no more than 20% of the population manage to be direct in a mature way about their ailments. That means there’s a lot of subterranean anger, a lot of people who are being shouted at even though they aren’t really responsible.  

The reason why passive-aggression is something we’re not aware of doing – and therefore need to increase our self-knowledge around – is that there are lots of inhibitions to being ‘straight’ around things one’s annoyed about:

– One might feel one doesn’t deserve to make a fuss.

– One might have a sense of shame/inner conviction of being bad which prevents one from taking the high ground ever, even when one deserves to.

– One might feel that other people will respond volcanically and catastrophically if one makes any complaint against them.

These assumptions are all worth questioning.

This is from something called the Ascendance-Submission study by the American psychologist Gordon Allport:

1. Someone tries to push ahead of you in line. You have been waiting for some time, and can’t wait much longer. Suppose the intruder is the same sex as yourself, do you usually:

– Remonstrate with the intruder

– ‘Look daggers’ at the intruder or make clearly audible comments to your neighbour

– Decide not to wait and go away

– Do nothing

2. Do you feel self-conscious in the presence of superiors in the academic or business world?

– Not at all

3. Some possession of yours is being worked upon at a repair shop. You call for it at the time appointed, but the repair man informs you that he has “only just begun to work on it.” Is your customary reaction:

– To upbraid him

– To express dissatisfaction mildly

– To smother your feelings entirely

Another American psychologist, Dr Saul Rosenzweig, came up with the Picture Frustration test, which shows a number of frustrating situations and invites us to fill in the blanks:

How might you respond to this scenario? 

Try this out + discuss what other moments in life you respond in similar ways…

ii: Criticism  

Criticism is always challenging,  but people respond to it in a variety ways.

It can be hugely beneficial to get a better grip on your characteristic response/behaviour around criticism – in order to be able to modulate it, and advance towards the more mature varieties.

Possible Responses to Criticism

1. They must be entirely wrong:

This is the response colloquially known as ‘defensive’ – whereby a criticism unleashes a disproportionately strong defence against it. The original criticism isn’t heard, for its destinee is so taken up with shoring up their position.

One thinks: “I am OK, I don’t generally make mistakes. If they are annoyed with me, it’s likely that they are being too demanding, or they’re jealous, or they’re trying to kick me down. The problem is theirs.”  

2. They must be entirely right and I don’t deserve to exist:

Here one thinks that a local criticism (of a book, a document, something one said over dinner) is in fact pointing to a global problem. Very quickly, the local criticism brings about a crisis:

“I don’t deserve to exist. I am a wretch. They have seen through the facade. It is true, I am meaningless, petty, stupid and dull…’

3. They might be right AND I can be OK

Here one is able to contain the criticism to the issue at hand. One is able to distinguish between a criticism of some aspect of oneself and a wholehearted assault on one’s identity. 

One of the most popular forms of self-knowledge exercises among psychologists involve an invitation to finish sentence stubs.

The idea is to answer fast, without thinking too much, thereby allowing the unconscious mind to have its say before it is censored.  

Here are some sentence stubs to complete around the issue of criticism:

– When someone points out a piece of work of mine is less than perfect, I…

– When my boss says something to me, I think…

– Bosses who criticise typically…

Try to work out your Criticism style:

– are you defensive

– or do you feel globally attacked

– or locally attacked?

One’s response to criticism is formed in childhood.  

It is the task of all parents to criticise their children and break bad news to them about their wishes and plans – but there are evidently different ways of going about this.

The best sort of criticism leaves a child feeling that the criticism is local – but that they remain loved and adored.

Moreover, the suggestion is that everyone makes mistakes, especially the parents, and that criticism is a well-meaning and in no way threatening aspect of daily life.  

But there are also scenarios where the child is criticised and no one notices that the criticism cuts too deep. There is no suggestion that this is ONLY a limited criticism. The child falls prey to the belief that they are entirely worthless. Throughout adulthood, the slightest critique can re-evoke this perspective.

What did you learn about criticism in your childhood?

How did your mother/father make you feel when they criticised you?

iii. Career

i: Vagueness around one’s ambitions

When thinking about aspirations, hopes and what it would be good to do, there’s a very strong tendency to end up saying things like:

• — I want to help other people
• — I want to do something that matters

The statements might be very true and the sentiments admirable. The problem with them is that they are vague. They don’t point in any particular direction: they don’t guide action or do much to help make a decision. Vagueness is a sign of the difficulty we have around self-knowledge. It shows that in some important aspect of life we don’t yet know ourselves very well.

How do we improve self-knowledge around ambitions?

1. Dare to name some people you envy and or admire – however grand and implausible. One of the causes of vagueness is that (after the age of about eleven) we feel embarrassed to mention very high status individuals as inspiration; we sense that we’ll be seen as pretentious or naive. But it’s important to list them because they are the grandest version of the person you want to be. It could be Michelangelo or Lady Gaga or Goethe or Bill Gates. The point isn’t that you necessarily want to be them or just like them. It’s that there is something about them that you want to learn from.

2. Moving from person to trait. Analyse what it is about them that you admire…

It needn’t be the thing they are most famous for. The cause of vagueness here is that we get hung up on people. We focus on the person – and there are so many different things about them that are impressive. So simply naming them leaves it vague what it is we’re trying to learn from this person’s example.

3. How could that quality be more present in your life…

Another cause of vagueness is inflexibility. We can see how that quality played itself out in that person’s life. But what we really want to know is what else can be done with it. The person we’re thinking about is only giving a hint.  

ii: Attitudes to ambition

There are many obstacles to doing well at work , getting the kind of partner we feel we deserve; or getting on top of our financial and creative lives: competition from able rivals, not enough room at the top, prejudice, limited talents. But some of the most serious barriers to success come from within our own heads. We suffer from problematic attitudes to success.

We are held back by anxiety around success. These anxieties mean that we are not purely seeking to succeed. Without realising it, we are also quite invested in aspects of failure.  

— Success makes you envied. They’ll think I’m showing off, big-noting myself. I really don’t want to be the target of other people’s envy. Better to remain on the sidelines.

— Inner feudalism: there are sorts of people who are allowed to succeed and do big things in the world; unfortunately, I’m not one of them; things like that just don’t happen to people like me.

There is also the danger of over-investment in the idea of ‘success’. It’s natural to want to do well-enough around work. But career can be a magnet for other hopes that don’t really belong in this area. One comes to believe that if only things go well in terms of career or money, many other problems will be solved too. It’s a line of thought that is strongly encouraged by contemporary society. Meritocratic attitudes invite the misleading thought that how you do at work is a measure of your global worth; advertising relentlessly projects the thought that psychological qualities like friendship, good relationships, serenity and a sense of fun are tied to financial prosperity (and hence to career success). These kinds of thoughts are not explicitly running through our heads but reflection on our behaviour may indicate that we act as if we believe such things as:

“If I succeed at work, I will deserve to be loved.”

“I will stop feeling lonely when I’ve made it.”

“The holiday will be great – if only we stay in luxury.”

“High status means happiness.”

Once such beliefs have been made explicit they can be put to the test. For instance: other people can succeed, but not me. Is it true? Examine it like a statement in court. What evidence supports this? What are all the things that could be said in its favour and assess their plausibility.

— S ome people are born lucky – this can’t be right.

— Talent is unequally distributed – true, but many of the people who you think are successful are not more talented than you.

— There are prejudices which favour some and disadvantage others – yes, but (usually) only to some extent, they are not decisive .

— If I succeed, what will happen is… (both negative and positive)  

— By succeeding, I’d love to please…

— The person who might (secretly) be most dismayed by my success would be…

— People who are successful are typically…

— I wouldn’t want to be a success because..

iii: The meaning of your life

In the middle of daily life, impressed by the expectations of other people and bombarded with ideas from the media and advertising (which are unlikely to have one’s own best interest at heart), it’s completely unsurprising that we get confused about how much something really matters to us.

If you were on your deathbed, what would you regret not doing…

The exercise is designed to tease out underlying ambitions that you are reluctant to explore. They might seem too challenging or embarrassing to admit to anyone else. The point isn’t necessarily to explain them to others but to give them more attention in the privacy of your own head.

• Why, in fact, do you hold back from doing these things?
• How might those obstacles be addressed?
• What specific practical steps you could take?

The death-bed exercise also helps reveal the true hierarchy of our needs.

• Things that have only a very limited contribution to make to our flourishing come to seem much more important than the really are.
• We underrate the importance of things that are familiar or maybe not especially exciting.

iv. What Others Can Know of Us

When it comes to other people, we are all a bit like mind-readers. Mind-readers astonish their customers by telling them things about their lives – you have had a quarrel with your parents recently; you were close to a sibling when you were a child, but in recent years you have drifted apart and that makes you sad. And the visitor is left wondering: how did they know this about me. It must be magic. They can sometimes tell us after a minute things that it’s taken us years to find out about ourselves. They might note that we react defensively when mentioning our parents – as if we feel we are about to be accused of something; though this characteristic is one we are reluctant to recognise in ourselves. Mind-reading just shows up that knowledge about us is surprisingly obvious and easy for an outsider to get hold of – much easier than for us inside. Strangers are surprisingly good at guessing things about us.

One consequence is that we find it difficult to grasp how other people see us. The gap between self-perception and the point of view of others is richly comic: pomposity for example occurs when someone can’t see that other people don’t share their high opinion of their own merits; and there’s a satisfaction in seeing this person being forced by events to a much lower and more accurate picture of themselves. But mostly, of course, it doesn’t seem especially funny:

You don’t realise

— That you are taxing other people’s patience

— Other people often feel you hog the limelight

— You come across as arrogant

— You seem excessively diffident

— You are often trying to hint that you have done everything anyone else has done; as if it would be painful to you to be impressed by anyone

The point isn’t that other people are always right. The point isn’t that one should feel cross with other people for not rightly appreciating one’s better intent. (‘Of course, I didn’t mean to be arrogant? Can’t they tell the difference between honest assertion and showing off?’)  It’s just that it is really helpful to know how we impact on other people since this allows for strategic adjustment. Once we know we can try to change for the sake of getting on better with others – being a little less assertive at certain points or making an effort to ask other people questions about themselves.

Pair up with someone.

Get them to say 5 nice things about this person, based on very little knowledge.

Then, one negative thing.

How did they know this negative thing?

Swap roles.

– Write down the kind of animal you might see yourself as being. And list three attributes that you feel you share to some extent with this kind of creature.

— Then ask another person to draw the animal they see you as being, and to pick out three characteristics that help explain why.

— What do you learn from their choice and their reasons?

v. Family Dynamics

i: Overall Picture: How you feel about your family

What do you really feel about your family? Especially the things that you don’t say for all sorts of reasons: you might hurt particular people; you feel guilty because, after all they have been very good to you in some ways; you feel disloyal; you fear that people will feel sorry for you in ways that make you awkward; you fear that people will regard you with contempt. Such thoughts are likely to remain shadowy. We have unconscious – or barely unconscious attitudes in relation to family that are liable to play serious havoc with our lives. Possibilities include:

>Attitudes to a younger brother are governing one’s feelings about never having enough.

>Feelings about an older sister have led to problems around envy.

>A general tendency to be deferential around authority might be traced to an excessive need to please one’s parents.

A key psychological exercise is to draw your nuclear family; putting in parents + siblings + house + a sun + a tree.

Then examine the drawing. 

Draw your family.

Ask: Who is big?

Who is small?

Where is everyone standing?  

Some typical themes in analysis:

– who you draw yourself next to is who you are closest to.

– who are you are most distant from is put faraway.

– the size you have drawn yourself is the size of your self-esteem.

– the house is an extension of yourself: it is the ego. Is it in good shape? Optimistic? Ordered?

Windows imply a degree of communication/passage. Does it have a door?

This is only a start, and it’s not science – but the exercise is useful nevertheless, trying – like the sentence stubb exercise – to catch our unconscious slightly unawares in order to reveal its structure.

ii: Blame and self-knowledge:

We may not be aware of the extent to which we assign problems in our lives to our parents.

1. What do you blame your parents for?

Here we are looking for an ego response: how they hurt me, the mistakes they made etc.

2.   Why do you think they were the way they were?

This is a very different sort of question. It asks you to step outside of yourself and ask not, how did they hurt me or disappoint me – but rather, what were the pressures and difficulties they were under. It interrupts the circuit of hurt-blame, replacing it with hurt-understanding.

Blaming one’s parents isn’t – of course – always a mistake. It’s just that doing so can get in the way of a better understanding of the nature of a problem. And hence of what it is possible to do about it.

vi. Taste and your idea of happiness

We aren’t used to the idea that interior decoration can tell us anything very intimate about ourselves. But aesthetic preferences can yield revealing insights. That’s because personal taste reflects other things about us.

We may be disturbed by unfortunate associations to certain kinds of objects or environments. At a particular age you might have seen a film in which a character who deeply appealed to you, lived in rather grand classical mansion; ever since then you’ve had quiet – but quite strong – positive feelings about such places. Understanding the attraction leads back to the prior question: what it was about that character that you found so appealing? Or it may be that a rather fearsome relative was very critical of mess, which touched off a rebellious opposite in you; you find a bit of clutter and a confusion of colours homely and endearing (which that person definitely was not). Analysing the response helps uncover the further concerns – the loves, antipathies, hopes and fears – that helped to shape your taste.

We are drawn to things we don’t have enough of. Aesthetic preference is often connected to the pursuit of balance. If we are typically stressed and anxious, we might be very attracted to serene environments. A person who has been assailed too often by boorish people, might be very attracted to things that suggest refinement, order and harmony: the lack of which has been painfully brought home to them.  

We find neglected parts of ourselves in objects: in daily life we may give little attention or respect to aspects of our own nature that – however – hint at their existence in our tastes. The thrilled response to a grand interior in another wise demure individual suggest a bolder, more ambitious side to them.

Consider these different interiors:

cosy clutter

Which one do you hate?

Which one are you drawn to?

The underlying theory is that we are drawn to visual styles which capture what is MISSING in our psyches.

In other words, the person attracted to calm-minimalism doesn’t feel calm inside. They feel on the verge of being overwhelmed – and look to a taste that can CORRECT their inclinations.

Similarly with the bohemian style – this is favoured not by bohemians, but by people deeply frightened of their native impulses towards conformity and rigidity.

We use visual decoration styles to correct/rebalance ourselves.

vii. Wisdom and the Search for Moments of Higher Consciousness

Often, self-knowledge is concerned with describing more accurately how one feels. It follows the path of introspection. You try work out what you actually feel when you look at the sky or watch a film or feel bored in a meeting.  

But there’s another side to self-knowledge: becoming more aware of how the self-machine works: of how your mind operates and distorts things. For instance, you learn that eating a lot of chocolate makes you feel a bit queasy afterwards. Eating chocolate doesn’t feel as if it will do that. It’s so delicious you can’t resist another square. But gradually you just learn that this is how your particular machine work: if you put in a lot of chocolate it starts to create problems. Just as we can learn how the body works, we can also learn how the mind works.

One of the major implication of evolutionary theory is that the human brain itself has evolved over a very long period of time. The body, we readily accept, carries many indications of its long, long developmental story. The kind of eyes we have, the way our knees work or how our lungs extract oxygen from the air are not unique to humans. These kinds of organs and joints evolved long before humans were around.  

So too with our brains. Hence the usefulness of talking about a ‘ reptilian’ part of the brain, even though it isn’t absolutely correct scientifically (we don’t literally have the brain of lizard encased within our skulls). We have instincts and response patterns that evolved to suit being chased by predators or needing mate no matter what, that are more suited to existence in the pleistocene era than to life in a modern metropolis (or rural farming community).  

The reptilian brain is interested only in survival and responds instinctively and fast. It is out for itself, it has no capacity for empathy or morality. It is deeply and constitutionally selfish.  

But we also have a more evolved mature brain (scientists call it the neocortex ) which is able to gain a distance from immediate reptilian demands. It can observe rather than submit to the sexual impulse: it can study, rather than obey, selfish desires etc.  

The picture of ourselves – as having a sophisticated mind sitting on top of a primitive one – is very helpful because it makes sense of some of our troubles and of our potential for addressing them. The primitive brain is very concerned with safety and reproduction. It is impatient. It’s violent in asserting itself. It has no interest in reasons and explanations. It cannot comprehend what an apology is. In some of our worst moments, the primitive brain is doing the work. From its point of view, smashing a glass on the table might be an ideal way of getting someone to agree with you; being insulting, aggressive and boorish might look like a great way of getting to have sex with someone.

That we can behave very badly is, therefore, entirely unsurprising. But it means also that such bad behaviour cannot possible be the whole story about us. Having a divided brain – a reptilian and non-reptilian mind – means that the task is always to get the higher part of the mind to be more in charge and to take over whenever things get complicated. If we understand this about ourselves than we don’t have to go around thinking that we are totally worthless and awful because we did a genuinely very stupid and pretty nasty thing. The evolutionary story gives a more helpful explanation. You are not thoroughly bad at all. You just have a current problem: your modern brain is not as strong as it needs to be – and your reptilian brain is far too strong.  

It defines the nature of the task: I need to get my non-reptile brain to be more prominent. And I need to learn to distinguish which of my hopes, fears and desires belong to the reptilian mind – and which are soundly founded in the higher rationality of the more evolved mind.  

What we can call higher-consciousness occurs as we flex the muscles of our modern brain; and manage to free ourselves from the hold of the reptilian brain, gaining perspective over our immediate impulses and moods.

In another kind of language, we’d say we had been able to ‘free ourselves’ from the ego and to survey our lives and the world free of the immediate imperatives of being ourselves.

There are FIVE key ways this happens.

One: Fostering a capacity to observe one’s cruder impulses

Very occasionally, perhaps late at night, when the pressures of the day have receded, we have access to what feel like moments of wisdom – they usually don’t last very long but for a short period of time we have access to crucial ideas or insights about the way we operate, which is free of the normal subjectivity, defensiveness or self-justification.

In the morning – and for pretty much the whole day – you are in a rush. At dinner, your partner makes a comment about how you eat too fast or how you tune out when they are talking about their work – and immediately you get defensive; you insist you don’t do these things, you say they are hypercritical, that they don’t care and are always coldly judging you. You are furious and might slam the door.

Then lying awake in the middle of the night you have a powerful sense that quite often you move too fast defend yourself whenever your partner says anything a bit critical. You can picture yourself doing it. They start to speak, it’s so familiar, and immediately you are crouching, ready to deflect the blow. And so you don’t really hear what they have to say. You admit – very, very privately – that you do quite often stop paying attention when they talk about work; it’s not merely that you have stopped listening to all the ins and outs of life in their office; it’s that you have stopped paying attention to the way they are speaking, to what it means to them and why.

So, they’ve got a point. But you feel compelled to say they don’t. And truth be told you know you do eat too fast. Yes, it’s annoying to have it pointed out. But you realise that being a bit critical is a way your partner tries to show affection and care; it’s a possessive gesture on their part. You want to say you’re sorry, hug them, do it differently. In the dark it all makes sense.

The midnight insight was right. It was a moment of self knowledge. It was a moment of ‘higher consciousness’ when it was possible to stand back from experience and see it more clearly. You felt sufficiently safe and calm to observe your own behaviour without rushing to either condemn or defend it. You became wiser about yourself.

Such states of mind are, however, intermittent. Most of the time we have to be very intent on defending our patch, on fighting our cause. We lack the calm to observe our primitive mind in action.

Two: Developing a capacity to interpret the behaviour of others, rather than merely react to it automatically  

Most of the time, we respond immediately (and rather powerfully) to the behaviour of others.

They honk the horn at us, we get furious and honk back.

They say something mean-sounding, we insult them right back.

The natural instinct is to meet the primitive with the primitive. Our own reptile nature wants to attack their reptile selves and beat them back into their hole.

But there is, of course, another option – one of the great marvels of evolution and civilisation (morality and religion too).

The civilised, higher move is to understand that they are behaving badly for a reason which they are in no position to tell you about, so under pressure are they from their more primitive minds.

Maybe they have had a hard day. Maybe they are worried about something. Perhaps they have felt squashed and sidelined in their career and now having someone squeeze in in front of them on the road is too much to bear. Instead of simply seeing them as the dangerous enemy, we can recognise that they are distressed and that their bad behaviour (the impatient horn the swearing behind the windscreen) is a symptom of hurt rather than of ‘evil’.

It’s an astonishing gradual evolution to develop the ability to do this – to explain other people’s behaviour as caused by their distress, rather than simply to see it in terms of how it affects us. There must have been a first time in human history this happened. And in each life there is perhaps a similar awakening. But often it is so hard for this higher consciousness to break through; we are so deeply caught up in our own troubles that we find it almost impossible to be generous in our assessment of why others are causing us trouble:

Try out these ideas (they sound foreign); they are examples of higher consciousness:

• the sales assistant is being curt with your request, perhaps because his relationship is breaking up. It isn’t about you.
• the snobbish person at the party is, ultimately, insecure (although they look self-confident and have just ignored you).
• the lout who scratches your car is terrified of being exposed as sexually inadequate.
• the boaster at the bar is convinced that he can never be loved.

Three: Developing a capacity for universal love

Once we are able to interpret someone’s pain-inducing behaviour as having roots in their own pain, we’re on the threshold of a remarkable steps. It then appears that in truth, no one in this world is ever simply ‘nasty’. They are always hurt – and this means that the appropriate response to humanity is not fear, cynicism or aggression, but love.

Once we relinquish our egos, and loosen ourselves from the grip of our primitive defensive and aggressive thought-processes, we are free to consider humanity in a much more benign light. We might even, at an extreme (this might happen only very late at night once in a while), feel that we could love everyone, that no human could be outside the circle of our sympathy.  

We attain a state reported by certain yogis, christian ascetics and buddhist monks – wherein we feel that we have loosened ourselves from the self: we are looking at the world as if we were not ourselves, without the usual filter of our interests, passions and needs.

And the world, at that moment, reveals itself as quite different: a place of suffering and misguided effort, a place full of people striving to be heard and lashing out against others.

The fitting response is universal sympathy and kindness.  

We have taken self-knowledge in a new and interesting direction. Being so aware of ourselves that we can remove the ‘lower self’ from the windscreen through which we look at things – and therefore look at things in a truer and unegoistic way.

For years you have had to fight your corner: you have had to grab at every opportunity, defend yourself, look out for your interests. You have to feed and clothe yourself, pay the bills, manage your education, deal as best you can with your own moods and demons. You have to assert your rights, justify your actions and your choices. Being alive is all there is. You are understandably obsessed with your own life – what option do you have?

But there are moments when one’s own life feels less precious, or less crucial – and not in a despairing way. And without the support of any imagined afterlife.  It might be that the fear of not-existing is – if only for a little while – less intense. Perhaps looking out over the ocean at dusk or walking in woodland in winter, or listening to a particular piece of music Bach’s double violin concerto, that it would be alright not to exist; one can contemplate a world in which one is no longer present with some tranquility and still feel appreciative of life. In such rare moments of higher consciousness, one’s mortality is less of a burden; one’s interests can be put aside;  you can fuse with transient things: trees, wind, waves breaking on the shore. From that higher point of view, status doesn’t seem important, possession don’t seem to matter, grievances lose their urgency; one is serene. If certain people could encounter you at this point they be amazed at the transformation.  

These higher states of consciousness are short lived. We have to accept that. We shouldn’t aspire to make them permanent – because they don’t sit so well with many of the very important practical tasks that we need to attend to. We don’t need to be always in them. But we do need to make the most of them. We have to harvest them and preserve them so that we can have access to them when we need them most. The problem is that when we are in these higher states of mind we have highly important insights; but we lose access to them when we return to the ordinary conditions of life. And so we don’t get the benefit of the insight that was there in those special moments.

In the past, religions have been very interested in this move. The Christian churches, for instance, cottoned onto the fact that at times we can recognise that we have been unfair and disloyal to others. It’s a huge triumph over the primitive mind which has little time for such possibilities. They established rituals designed to intensify, prolong and deepen these fragile insights. There was, for example, highly charged words of a special prayer, the Confiteor:

I confess to Almighty God and to you my brothers and sister

that I have sinned through my own fault, in thoughts and in my words, in what

I have done and in what I have failed to do…

So that, ideally, on a very regular basis people would have a powerful experience of recognising that they might have been cruel, harsh, thoughtless, greedy or mean. It didn’t necessarily always work, of course, but the idea is highly significant. It’s an attempt to make this kind of experience less random. To give it more power in our lives and to make the best use of it.

The ideal, which is obviously separable from Christianity and involves not occult belief, is that the higher parts of the mind should be more reliable and more powerful.

Four: Developing a suspicion about your own feelings

Normally we are used to the idea of gaining self-knowledge by asking ourselves ever more closely: how do I feel about this?

The idea is that you know ‘who you really are’, by studying your feelings.

But this suggestion here is something different, indeed the opposite.

What we advise is a capacity to stand aside from feelings in order to recognise their potentially deceptive nature. It means acknowledging a fundamental distinction between what we might feel about a situation – and what it might actually be.  

The classic example of this historically is when humans learnt for the first time to accept that even though the earth feels flat, it is in fact round. In other words, when humans learnt to be suspicious about their feelings, trusting instead to the data of their rational minds – overruling feeling for the sake of reason. This has come very very late on in human evolution, and in day-to-day life, most of us operate in a pre-Copernican way, especially as regards our emotional lives.

One exception though, from which we can learn a lot, is children. When we deal with small children, we rather easily override our reptilian responses and aim for a higher interpretation. We look beyond what seems, and try to picture what is.  

Imagine a child who is whiny and then goes up to its parent and hits it and says, I hate you.

The primitive response is to hit back. The more sophisticated one is to ask: what is going on beneath what I can see of the child’s behaviour?

And, because it’s 6pm and they haven’t had a nap and had a bit of a cold, one will quite naturally ascribe the bad mood to these factors. The higher mind will have interpreted the situation.

However wise this might be, we find it hard to perform the exercise on ourselves.

We too might be feeling tired and hungry. But we don’t ask ourselves what role this might be playing in our sudden sense that everyone hates us and that our careers are a disaster.  

These seem like entirely reasonable conclusions to draw from real facts. But, in reality, they are the outcome of a very tired and hungry mind trying to deal with existence. After a snack and a lie down, our views will be very different.

In other words, our minds are filled with ideas that seem to be rationally founded but actually are not, that owe much to lower physical processes that are denied or unrecognised.  

Self-knowledge means becoming much better at realising how many of our mental processes (extending to things like our views on politics and our assessments of our careers and our lovers) can be explained by:

– not having drunk enough water

– not having had enough sleep

– lacking something to eat

If you haven’t slept well for a few nights and you’ve been working too hard, a few not too tactful comments from your partner can leave you considering divorce. It feels as if your relationship is in tatters, that you need to take a life-changing, dramatic and risky step; that the compromises, accommodations and love of the last few years have all been wasted. The problem looks enormous. But actually it isn’t. All that’s wrong is that you are tired. It’s shockingly hard for us to distinguish between a need of the body and a harrowing emotional conflict.

Or it might be that, having skipped breakfast, a tricky work meeting leaves you determined to resign. Things will be tough, certainly, but anything is better than continuing to sell your soul to these mindless fools. The problem looks as if it is huge – one’s career has taken a calamitous turn. Yet the real cause may be no more than depleted blood-sugar levels.

Being told that one’s view of existence is – at this moment – not the product of reason but of indigestion or exhaustion, is utterly maddening. Especially when it is true. We want to believe our woes are essentially all high flown – intellectual, moral and existential – when they are often no more, but also no less, than a disturbance of the body.

We should be careful of over-intellectualising. To be happy, we require big things (money, freedom, love), but we need a lot of semi-insultingly little things too (enough sleep, a good diet, a sunny sky). Babies know this well. They’re usefully unintellectual. They’re on hand to remind us of some profound truths.

The operative question, then, isn’t always ‘how do I feel?’ Self-knowledge might equally derive from asking: how do I function? What role are emotions playing in my life? And it can lead us, crucially, at times to discount them despite their strength. This is the higher capacity to stand aside from one’s feelings.

When you are tired, dehydrated or hungry, stressed or frightened these states of mind alter your perception of reality. The sense become misleading. Other people’s behaviour is liable to look more menacing than it is; we find it harder to grasp their more complex motives. Threats look bigger than they are; sources of security or pleasure look smaller, more fragile and more distant than in truth they are.

The higher position is to recognise that this is a way the self functions. This is what tiredness, dehydration and such states do to us. So we know to be suspicious of certain states of mind, we have to learn not to act on them. Wisdom means getting better at asking: is this reality or might I be seeing things in a distorted way, due to a lack of lunch or 2 hours less sleep.

PHILOSOPHICAL MEDITATION

Ordering our minds rather than emptying them.

Even though our minds ostensibly belong to us, we don’t always control or know what is in them. There are always some ideas, bang in the middle of consciousness, that are thoroughly and immediately clear to us: for example, that we love our children. Or that we have to be out of the house by 7.40am. Or, that we are keen to have something salty to eat right now. These thoughts feel obvious without burdening us with uncertainty or any requirement that we reflect harder on them.

But a host of other ideas tend to hover in a far more unfocused state. For example, we may know that our career needs to change, but it’s hard to say much more. Or we feel some resentment against our partner over an upsetting incident the night before, but we can’t pin down with any accuracy what we’re in fact bitter or sad about. Our confusions sometimes have a positive character about them but are perplexing all the same: perhaps there was something deeply ‘exciting’ about a canal-side cafe we discovered in Amsterdam or the sight of a person reading on a train or the way the sun lit up the sky in the evening after the storm, but it may be equally hard to put a finger on the meaning of these feelings.

Unfocused thoughts are constantly orbiting our minds, but from where we are, from the observatory of our conscious selves (as it were), we can’t grasp them distinctly. We speak of needing to ‘sort our heads out’ or to ‘get on top of things’, but quite how one does something like this isn’t obvious – or very much discussed. There is one response to dealing with our minds that has become immensely popular in the West in recent years. Drawn from the traditions of Buddhism, the practice of meditation has gripped the Western imagination, presenting itself as a solution to the problems of our chaotic minds. It is estimated that 1 in 10 adults in the US has taken part in some form of structured meditation.

Adherents of meditation suggest that we sit very quietly, in a particular bodily position, and strive, through a variety of exercises, to empty our minds of content, quite literally to push or draw away the disturbing and unfocused objects of consciousness to the periphery of our minds, leaving a central space empty and serene. In the Buddhist world-view, anxieties and excitements are not trying to tell us anything especially interesting or valuable. We continuously fret without good purpose, about this or that random and vain thing – and therefore the best solution is simply to push the objects of the mind to one side.

Buddhist meditation has been so successful, we are liable to forget another effective and in some ways superior path to finding peace of mind, this one rooted in the Western tradition: Philosophical Meditation. Like its Eastern counterpart, Philosophical Meditation wants our thoughts, feelings and anxieties to trouble us less, but it seeks to sort out our minds in a very different manner. At heart, it doesn’t believe that the contents of our minds are nonsensical or meaningless. Our worries may seem like a nuisance but they are in fact neurotically garbled but important signals about how we should direct our lives. They contain complex clues as to our development. Therefore, rather than wanting simply to empty our minds of content, practitioners of Philosophical Meditation encourage us to clean these minds up: they want to bring the content that troubles us more securely into focus, and thereby usher in calm through understanding rather than through evacuation.

How does one bring the confused objects of the mind into focus? There are instructions for Philosophical Meditation, just as there are for Buddhist Meditation (a little artificiality in these matters may just be what we need to lend the process discipline). The first priority is to set aside a bit of time, ideally 20 minutes, once a day. One should sit with a pad of paper and start by asking oneself a very simple set of questions: what is it that I am regretful, anxious or excited about at present? One is invited to download the immediate contents of one’s mind. One will by nature be a little unsure of what our feelings mean, so it is best simply to write down – without thinking or censoring ourselves – one or two words around each feeling. It’s a case of tipping out the contents of the mind onto the paper as unselfconsciously as possible. One might, for example, write down: Darren, Cologne trip, weekend, shoes, Mum, face at train station… The task is then to try to convert each of these words from an ambiguous and silent worry, regret or thrill into something one can understand, grasp, order and eventually better control. Success in this meditation relies on a skilful process of questioning. Imagine these thoughts as ineloquent and muddled strangers, who are full of valuable ideas, but whom one has to get to know in a roundabout way, by directing just the right questions at them. [See the link at the end of this piece for a more complete Guide to Philosophical Meditation]

Philosophical Meditation brings us calm not by removing issues, but by helping us to understand them, thereby evaporating some of the paranoia and static that might otherwise cling to them. When confused objects of consciousness become clearer, they stop bothering us quite so much. Problems don’t disappear, but they assume proportion and can be managed. For example, we may make ourselves at home with an array of administrative worries that had been clumsily concealed under the vague title of ‘the Cologne trip’. The word ‘Darren’ might disclose someone we envy, but who holds out a fascinating run of clues as to how we might make a new move in our career. The word ‘weekend’ yields feelings towards one’s partner which are both resentful and yet capable of being discussed and perhaps worked through in the evening. Sorting out our minds doesn’t just feel comforting (like tidying our homes), it also spares us grave errors.

Confused excitement can be highly dangerous when it involves career ambitions. Imagine someone with a tendency to experience excitement when reading Vogue or Gourmet Traveller – and who then declares, without much attempt to analyse the feeling, that they want ‘to work in magazines’. It may seem reasonable enough for them to send off a CV to the magazine company HQ. After many efforts, they may be offered a lowly internship. It might take a few years and a lot of heartache before they realise that it wasn’t really the magazines themselves that were the true object of their attraction to begin with. Actually what was really speaking to this person was the idea of working in a close-knit team in an area that wasn’t finance (where Mum, a caustic and forbidding figure, puritanical in matters of sex and money, spent her career). Philosophical Meditation can, among other things, save us a lot of time.

Similar dangers play out when one is upset or anxious. Imagine that yesterday you had dinner at the house of a conspicuously successful friend. They’d just got back from a holiday in the Maldives and were telling you about their latest business venture in pharmaceuticals. You left feeling restless and annoyed, but you didn’t know why. Your own life felt flat and dispiriting. Vague plans about what to do swirled around in your head. Maybe you could have a brilliant idea and start a business. Somehow you wanted your life to be more like your friend’s. But what is a brilliant idea in business? How does one get going?

Then your partner said something about having set up a dinner with her mother. At that moment, from somewhere mysterious in you, you felt a wave of anger – and shouted something about the house always being left in such a mess. After all, there was a set of dirty plates in your field of vision. But your partner said you were crazy, the house wasn’t that messy anyway, and how long would it take to tidy away a few plates in the first place…? She walked out of the room crossly and so tonight, you’ll be sleeping on the sofa again for a whole set of reasons that it’s now becoming very hard to disentangle, let alone discuss with any degree of maturity.

Countless agonies and mistakes stem from not properly analysing our confused inner experiences. We pick the wrong job; get together with the wrong person, run away from the right person; spend our money on the wrong things and don’t do justice to our talents and deeper aspirations. Acting without Philosophical Meditation is like being allowed to embark on a trip without checking the equipment or the map. We trust the feelings without duly acknowledging that they may prompt us in some catastrophic directions.

The longing to empty the mind, to calm turbulent thoughts isn’t completely opposed to the exercise of cleaning up the mind, decoding, analysing and ordering its contents. It’s just that at the moment, as societies, we have allowed ourselves to get overly seduced by the promise of tranquility, so that we always strive to empty the mind, instead of attempting to understand its contents. We see our agitation as the result of thinking too much, rather than of not having – as yet – thought enough. It’s time for our societies to take on board the promises and advantages of Philosophical Meditation.

For a step-by-step guide to Philosophical Meditation, see here .

THE ART OF CONVERSATION

How can one improve and speed up self-knowledge.

One of the key ways in which we can get to know ourselves and others is through conversation. Unfortunately, we tend to have a ‘Romantic’ conception of conversation. We believe that in the right setting – distressed old wooden tables, food from Liguria, bruschetta – conversation will flow naturally, without special effort.

The reality is that conversation is an achievement, something we might need to learn. Key to it is having the right questions to hand.

Approach self-knowledge as a game. It can be fun.

Let’s look at some very good questions to ask via the 100x question packs done by the School of Life.

For example:

What would you most like to be complimented on in a relationship? Where do you think you’re especially good as a person?

Which of your flaws do you want to be treated more generously?

What would you tell your younger self about love?

What is one incident you would like to apologise to a lover or friend for?

Finish the following sentences:

When I am anxious in a relationship, I tend to….

The other then tends to respond by….

which makes me…

When I argue, on the surface I show ……, but inside I feel….

Without thinking too hard, let’s finish these sentence stems about our feelings towards one another:

I am puzzled by…

I am hurt by…

I am afraid that…

I am frustrated by…

I am happier when…

I appreciate…

WHAT DOES THE WISE PERSON END UP KNOWING ABOUT THEMSELVES?

Of course, what individuals know is specific to them. But we can still identify the kind of things they know. If someone gains a lot of self-knowledge how would this show up in their behaviour? How would self-knowledge impact on their lives? Self-knowledge isn’t so much a set of statements that one gives assent to. Rather it’s a set of capacities for dealing better with one’s needs and weaknesses and generally being better at handling oneself. The wise, self-knowing person …

— Would be less prone to blame others for their troubles. They get upset, they get bothered, they feel anxious; things still go wrong. But self-knowledge admits the full extent of responsibility. So annoyance doesn’t get channelled into being angry with the wrong person – who isn’t really to blame.

— They’d likely be less frustrated at work: it’s not that they have the perfect job. They know themselves well enough to seek out the kind of work they can do comfortably; they don’t push needlessly to get ahead; they can cope fairly well with criticism, so they don’t get unduly anxious in a competitive environment.

— They’d panic a bit less: panic is caused by fear; and mostly the fear is psychological, rather than physical – fear of humiliation of rejection or being bored. Great self-knowledge diminishes these fears.

— They’d be less prone to envy – because envy often comes from not quite knowing what you really need.

—They don’t stress quite so much about money; that’s because they are more alert to what really matters to them; they are less given to impulse spending; they are better at saving.

— They might have fewer crushes. They don’t project wildly onto others and so are less likely to suppose that a stranger glimpsed on a train or at the next table is their ideal soul-mate.

— They are good at apologising, partly because they can fully appreciate that they are at times very annoying – even if unintentionally so – to others. They can mull over the fact that they might be in the wrong, without getting too defensive.  

— They tend to be good conversationalists. Because they are alert to why they do things as they do – and don’t merely assert what they do think. They’re also slow to assume that others automatically think as they do. They can identify widely with different kinds of people because they can pick up on many different aspects of their own experience at different stages of life.

Full Article Index

• 01. Ostracism Anxiety
• 02. The Need For A Modern Monastery
• 03. Why the World Can Seem So Frightening – and How to Make It Feel Less So
• 04. Four Ways of Coping With Anxiety
• 05. Might You Be Hypervigilant? A Sombre Questionnaire
• 06. A Question to Ask Ourselves When We're Feeling Low and Paranoid
• 07. The Importance of Not Knowing
• 08. Why We May Be Addicted to Crises
• 09. The Causes of Obsessive Thinking
• 10. What Our Bodies are Trying to Tell Us
• 11. Anxiety-as-Denial
• 12. Our Anxious Ancestry
• 13. Auditing Our Worries
• 14. Why We May Need a Convalescence
• 15. Don't Hope for the Best; Expect the Worst
• 16. The Age of Agitation
• 17. How to Sleep Better
• 18. How and Why We Catastrophise
• 19. On Being 'Triggered'
• 20. OCD — and How to Overcome It
• 21. How Mental Illness Impacts Our Bodies
• 22. Signs You Might Be Suffering from Complex PTSD
• 23. On Skin Picking
• 24. Stoicism and Tigers Who Come to Tea
• 25. The Seven Most Calming Works of Art in the World
• 26. After the Storm
• 27. Thoughts for the Storm
• 28. Emotional Maturity in a Crisis
• 29. Preparing for Disaster
• 30. How to Stop Being Scared All the Time
• 31. The Ultimate Dark Source of Security
• 32. What Everybody Really Wants
• 33. Simplicity & Anxiety
• 34. A Way Through Panic Attacks
• 35. Self-Hatred & Anxiety
• 36. The Question We Should Ask Ourselves When Anxious
• 37. On Anxiety
• 38. The True Cause of Dread and Anxiety
• 39. On Being Scared All the Time
• 40. The Importance of Having A Breakdown
• 41. On Asking for Help
• 42. The Normality of Anxiety Attacks
• 43. On Panic Attacks
• 01. Might I Be Feeling Lonely Rather Than Worried?
• 02. A Place for Despair
• 03. On Being Gaslit In Our Childhoods
• 04. How to Make It Through
• 05. When Our Battery is Running Low
• 06. The Many Moods We Pass Through
• 07. When I Am Called to Die
• 08. If You Stopped Running, What Would You Need to Feel?
• 09. Can We Live With the Truth?
• 10. Five Questions to Ask Yourself Every Evening
• 11. Why Things May Need to Get Worse Before They Can Get Better
• 12. The Limits of the Conscious Mind
• 13. Why Life is Always Difficult
• 14. What is a Transcendental Experience?
• 15. Building the Cathedral
• 16. Rewriting Our Inner Scripts
• 17. What Sleeping Babies Can Teach Us
• 18. How to Endure
• 19. Everything Is So Weird
• 20. Escaping Into History
• 21. The Inevitability of Choice
• 22. What Would Jesus Do?
• 23. Stop Worrying About Your Reputation
• 24. You Still Have Time
• 25. I Will Survive!
• 26. On Trying to Control the Future
• 27. A Few Things Still to Be Grateful For
• 28. No One Knows
• 29. There is No Happily Ever After
• 30. The Catastrophe You Fear Will Happen has Already Happened
• 31. There is Always a Plan B
• 32. The Consolations of History
• 33. The Lessons of Nature
• 34. What Others Think of You - and The Fall of Icarus
• 35. On the Sublime
• 36. Gratitude for the Small Things
• 37. Why ‘Earthrise’ Matters
• 38. On Flowers
• 39. The Valuable Idea Behind the Concept of the Day of Judgement
• 40. The Wisdom of Animals
• 41. The Lottery of Life
• 42. Untranslatable Words
• 43. The Wisdom of Rocks: Gongshi
• 44. Wu Wei – Doing Nothing 無爲
• 45. The Faulty Walnut
• 46. Perspectives on Insomnia
• 47. On the Wisdom of Space
• 48. Memento Mori
• 49. On the Wisdom of Cows
• 50. On Calming Places
• 51. Why Small Pleasures Are a Big Deal
• 52. The Consolations of a Bath
• 53. The Importance of Staring out the Window
• 54. Clouds, Trees, Streams
• 55. On Sunshine
• 01. The Ecstatic Joy We Deny Ourselves
• 02. Why Illusions Are Necessary to Achieve Anything
• 03. Preparing for a Decent Night of Sleep
• 04. Returning Anger to Where It Belongs
• 05. Controlling Insomnia – and Life – Through Pessimism
• 06. How to Be Cool the Yoruba Way
• 07. Why We Should Refuse to Get into Arguments
• 08. The Perils of Making Predictions
• 09. Making Peace with Life's Mystery
• 10. The Promise of an Unblemished Life
• 11. Daring to Be Simple
• 12. Haikus and Appreciation
• 13. The Call of Calm
• 14. What Would Paradise Look Like?
• 15. How to Process Your Emotions
• 16. The Wisdom of Dusk
• 17. The Appeal of Austere Places
• 18. How to Go to Bed Earlier
• 19. Why We All Need Quiet Days
• 20. The Benefits of Provincial Life
• 21. How to Live in a Hut
• 22. For Those Who (Privately) Aspire to Become More Reclusive
• 23. The Hard Work of Being 'Lazy'
• 24. Expectations - and the 80/20 Rule
• 25. Taking It One Day at a Time
• 26. Spirituality for People who Hate Spirituality
• 27. How to Spill A Drink Down One’s Front - and Survive
• 28. How To Stop Worrying Whether or Not They Like You
• 29. On Soothing
• 30. What Is Wrong with Modern Times - and How to Regain Wisdom
• 31. The Disaster of Anthropocentrism - and the Promise of the Transcendent
• 32. On Needing to Find Something to Worry About — Why We Always Worry for No Reason
• 33. How We Are Easily, Too Easily, 'Triggered'
• 34. Hypervigilance
• 35. If The Worst Came to the Worst...
• 36. The Wonders of an Ordinary Life
• 37. In Praise of the Quiet Life
• 38. The Pursuit of Calm
• 39. Insomnia and Philosophy
• 01. African Proverbs to Live By
• 02. Why We Are Haunted by Ghosts of the Past
• 03. How to Be Cool the Yoruba Way
• 01. What Goes With What
• 02. Eight Rules to Create Nicer Cities
• 03. The Secret Toll of Our Ugly World
• 04. Henri Rousseau
• 05. Albrecht Dürer and his Pillows
• 06. On the Consolations of Home | Georg Friedrich Kersting
• 07. Francisco Goya's Masterpiece
• 08. How Industry Restores Our Faith in Humanity
• 09. Rembrandt as a Guide to Kindness
• 10. Buildings That Give Hope - and Buildings That Condemn Us
• 11. Katsushika Hokusai
• 12. Agnes Martin
• 13. The Importance of Architecture
• 14. The Secret of Beauty: Order and Complexity
• 15. Le Corbusier
• 16. Two World Views: Romantic and Classical
• 17. Oscar Niemeyer
• 18. Against Obscurity
• 19. Why Do Scandinavians Have Such Impeccable Taste in Interior Design?
• 20. Art for Art's Sake
• 21. Why We Need to Create a Home
• 22. Why You Should Never Say: ‘Beauty Lies in the Eye of the Beholder’
• 23. Andrea Palladio
• 24. Why Design Matters
• 25. On Good and Bad Taste
• 26. On How to Make an Attractive City
• 27. Art as Therapy
• 28. On Ugliness and the Housing Crisis
• 29. Johannes Vermeer
• 30. Caspar David Friedrich
• 31. Henri Matisse
• 32. Edward Hopper
• 33. Louis Kahn
• 34. Coco Chanel
• 35. Jane Jacobs
• 36. Cy Twombly
• 37. Andy Warhol
• 38. Dieter Rams
• 39. A Therapeutic Approach to Art
• 40. Christo and Jeanne-Claude 
• 41. On the Importance of Drawing
• 42. On Art as a Reminder
• 43. On the Price of Art Works
• 44. Secular Chapels
• 45. Relativism and Urban Planning
• 46. What Art Museums Should Be For
• 47. On Fakes and Originals
• 48. The Museum Gift Shop
• 01. What We Might Learn From The Dandies of The Congo
• 02. The Beauty of Komorebi
• 03. The Past Was Not in Black and White
• 04. The Drawer of Odd Things
• 05. Why Middle-Aged Men Think So Often About the Roman Empire
• 06. The Consolations of Catastrophe
• 07. What is the Point of History?
• 08. What Rothko's Art Teaches Us About Suffering
• 09. The Value of Reading Things We Disagree with
• 10. Easter for Atheists
• 11. The Life House
• 12. Why Philosophy Should Become More Like Pop Music
• 13. Why Stoicism Continues to Matter
• 14. The School of Life: What We Believe
• 15. Cultural Mining
• 16. Lego – the Movies
• 17. Philosophy – the Movies
• 18. History of Ideas – the Movies
• 19. Sociology – the Movies
• 20. Political Theory – the Movies
• 21. Psychotherapy – the Movies
• 22. Greek Philosophy – the Movies
• 23. Eastern Philosophy – the Movies
• 24. Art – the Movies
• 25. On Aphorisms
• 26. What Comes After Religion?
• 27. The Serious Business of Clothes
• 28. What Is the Point of the Humanities?
• 29. Why Music Works
• 30. The Importance of Music
• 31. The Importance of Books
• 32. What Is Comedy For?
• 33. What Is Philosophy For?
• 34. What Is Art For?
• 35. What Is History For?
• 36. What Is Psychotherapy For?
• 37. What Is Literature For?
• 38. The Joys of Sport
• 01. Following in the Buddha's Footsteps
• 02. Six Persimmons
• 03. The Four Hindu Stages of Life
• 04. Rice or Wheat? The Difference Between Eastern and Western Cultures
• 05. Eastern vs Western Views of Happiness
• 06. Four Great Ideas from Hinduism
• 07. Zen Buddhism and Fireflies
• 08. Six Ideas from Eastern Philosophy
• 09. Wu Wei – Doing Nothing 無爲
• 10. Kintsugi 金継ぎ
• 12. Lao Tzu
• 13. Confucius
• 14. Sen no Rikyū
• 15. Matsuo Basho
• 16. Mono No Aware
• 17. Guan Yin
• 18. Gongshi
• 20. Kintsugi
• 22. Why so Many Love the Philosophy of the East - and so Few That of the West
• 01. It Isn't About the Length of a Life...
• 02. On Luxury and Sadness
• 03. On Not Being Able To Cook Very Well
• 04. Food as Therapy
• 05. What We Really Like to Eat When No One is Looking
• 06. What Meal Might Suit My Mood? Questionnaire
• 01. Charles Dickens's Secret
• 02. Giuseppe di Lampedusa — The Leopard
• 03. Sei Shōnagon — The Pillow Book
• 04. Kakuzo Okakura — The Book of Tea
• 05. Victor Hugo and the Art of Contempt
• 06. Edward Gibbon — The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
• 07. How to Read Fewer Books
• 08. The Downfall of Oscar Wilde
• 09. What Voltaire Meant by 'One Must Cultivate One's Own Garden'
• 10. James Baldwin
• 11. Camus and The Plague
• 12. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• 13. Charles Dickens  
• 14. Gustave Flaubert
• 15. Fyodor Dostoevsky
• 16. Marcel Proust
• 17. Books as Therapy
• 18. Jane Austen
• 19. Leo Tolstoy
• 20. Virginia Woolf
• 21. James Joyce
• 01. Machiavelli's Advice for Nice Guys
• 02. Niccolò Machiavelli
• 03. Thomas Hobbes
• 04. Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• 05. Adam Smith
• 06. Karl Marx
• 07. John Ruskin
• 08. Henry David Thoreau
• 09. Thoreau and Civil Disobedience
• 10. Matthew Arnold
• 11. William Morris
• 12. Friedrich Hayek
• 13. John Rawls
• 01. What Should A Good Therapist Do For Us?
• 02. The Usefulness Of Speaking Your Feelings To An Empty Chair
• 03. What's the Bit of Therapy That Heals You?
• 04. Why We Need Therapy When We Give Up on Religion
• 05. How Psychotherapy Might Truly Help Us
• 06. Why You Should Take a Sentence Completion Test
• 07. Carl Jung's Word Association Test
• 08. Freud's Porcupine
• 09. How Mental Illness Impacts Our Bodies
• 10. How the Modern World Makes Us Mentally Ill
• 11. Twenty Key Concepts from Psychotherapy
• 12. Why Psychotherapy Works
• 13. The True and the False Self
• 14. What Happens in Psychotherapy? Four Case Studies
• 15. The Problem of Psychological Asymmetry
• 16. Freud on Sublimation
• 17. Sigmund Freud
• 18. Anna Freud
• 19. Melanie Klein
• 20. Donald Winnicott
• 21. John Bowlby 
• 22. A Short Dictionary of Psychoanalysis
• 23. Jacques Lacan
• 01. You Are Living in the Greatest Museum in the World
• 02. When Something is Beautiful...
• 03. Albrecht Dürer and his Pillows
• 04. How Giraffes Can Teach Us to Wonder
• 05. Sun Worship
• 06. The Importance of Dancing Like an Idiot
• 07. Walking in the Woods
• 08. Getting More Serious about Pleasure
• 09. On Going to the Zoo
• 10. The Fish Shop
• 11. On Small Islands
• 12. On Stars
• 13. On Grandmothers
• 14. Up at Dawn
• 15. On Crimes in the Newspapers
• 16. Driving on the Motorway at Night
• 17. On Sunday Mornings
• 18. A Favourite Old Jumper
• 19. Holding Hands with a Small Child
• 20. Feeling at Home in the Sea
• 21. The Book That Understands You
• 22. Old Photos of One’s Parents
• 23. Whispering in Bed in the Dark
• 24. On Feeling That Someone Else is So Wrong
• 25. The First Day of Feeling Well Again
• 01. St. Benedict 
• 02. Alexis de Tocqueville 
• 03. Auguste Comte
• 04. Max Weber
• 05. Emile Durkheim
• 06. Margaret Mead
• 07. Theodor Adorno
• 08. Rachel Carson
• 01. Three Essays on Flight
• 02. The Wisdom of Islamic Gardens
• 03. A World Without Air Travel
• 04. Walking in the Woods
• 05. Why We Argue in Paradise
• 06. The Advantages of Staying at Home
• 07. The Wisdom of Nature
• 08. The Holidays When You're Feeling Mentally Unwell
• 09. The Shortest Journey: On Going for a Walk around the Block
• 10. How to Spend a Few Days in Paris
• 11. Why Germans Can Say Things No One Else Can
• 12. Travel as Therapy - an Introduction
• 13. Lunch, 30,000 Feet – for Comfort
• 14. The Western Desert, Australia – for Humility
• 15. Glenpark Road, Birmingham - for Boredom
• 16. Comuna 13, San Javier, Medellin, Colombia - for Dissatisfaction
• 17. Pumping Station, Isla Mayor, Seville - for Snobbery
• 18. Eastown Theatre, Detroit - for Perspective
• 19. Capri Hotel, Changi Airport, Singapore - for Thinking
• 20. Cafe de Zaak, Utrecht - for Sex Education
• 21. Corner shop, Kanagawaken, Yokohama - for Shyness
• 22. Monument Valley, USA - for Calm
• 23. Heathrow Airport, London – for Awe
• 24. Pefkos Beach, Rhodes - for Anxiety
• 01. On Flying Too Close to the Sun - And Not Flying Close Enough
• 02. Kierkegaard on Love
• 03. Aristotle
• 04. Baruch Spinoza
• 05. Arthur Schopenhauer
• 06. Blaise Pascal
• 07. Six Ideas from Western Philosophy
• 08. Introduction to The Curriculum
• 10. The Stoics
• 11. Epicurus
• 12. Augustine
• 13. Boethius and The Consolation of Philosophy
• 14. Thomas Aquinas
• 15. Michel de Montaigne
• 16. La Rochefoucauld
• 17. Voltaire
• 18. David Hume
• 19. Immanuel Kant
• 21. Hegel Knew There Would Be Days Like These
• 22. Ralph Waldo Emerson
• 23. Nietzsche
• 24. Nietzsche, Regret and Amor Fati
• 25. Nietzsche and Envy
• 26. Martin Heidegger
• 27. Ludwig Wittgenstein
• 28. Jean-Paul Sartre
• 29. Albert Camus
• 30. Michel Foucault
• 31. Jacques Derrida
• 32. E. M. Cioran
• 01. What to Say in Response to an Affair
• 02. How To Handle the Desire for Affairs?
• 03. What Does It Take To Be Good at Affairs?
• 04. What Ideally Happens When An Affair is Discovered?
• 05. When Does An Affair Begin?  
• 06. A Brief History of Affairs
• 07. How to Reduce the Risk of Affairs
• 08. The Role of Sex in Affairs
• 09. How To Spot A Couple That Might Be Headed For An Affair
• 10. How Can An Affair Help A Marriage?
• 11. The Pleasures of Affairs
• 12. The Pains of Affairs
• 13. The Meaning of Infidelity
• 14. Loyalty and Adultery
• 15. Why People Have Affairs: Distance and Closeness
• 01. The Pains of Heartbreak
• 02. Those Who Cannot Feel Love Until It Is Over
• 03. The Heroism of Leaving a Relationship
• 04. Exquisite Agony in Love
• 05. Why It Should Not Have to Last Forever...
• 06. When Does a Divorce Begin?
• 07. Rethinking Divorce
• 08. Three Questions to Help You Decide Whether to Stay in or Leave a Relationship
• 09. Stop Repeating the Same Mistakes
• 10. There's Nothing Wrong with Being on Your Own
• 11. The Wrong Idea of a Baddie
• 12. Finding Closure After a Breakup
• 13. Should Sex Ever Be a Reason to Break Up?
• 14. When a Relationship Fails, Who Rejected Whom?
• 15. The Fear of Not Being Able to Cope Practically Without a Partner
• 16. The Fear of Ending a Relationship
• 17. What About the Children When Divorce is on the Cards?
• 18. What If I Just Repeat the Same Mistakes Next Time?
• 19. Are My Expectations Too High?
• 20. Overcoming Nostalgia for a Past Relationship
• 21. The Feeling of Being Back in Love with the Person You're About to Leave
• 22. The Capacity to Give up on People
• 23. For Those Stuck in a Relationship
• 24. 10 Ideas for People Afraid to Exit a Relationship
• 25. People Who Want to Own Us - but Not Nourish Us
• 26. The Hardest Person in the World to Break up With
• 27. A Non-Tragic View of Breaking Up
• 28. A Guide to Breaking Up
• 29. How to Reject Someone Kindly
• 30. When Someone We Love Has Died
• 31. Why Did They Leave Us?
• 32. How to Break Up
• 33. How We Can Have Our Hearts Broken Even Though No One Has Left Us
• 34. The Psychology of Our Exes
• 35. 'Unfair Dismissal' in Love
• 36. How Not to Be Tortured By a Love Rival
• 37. Coping with Betrayal
• 38. Can Exes be Friends?
• 39. How to Get Over Someone
• 40. Why True Love Doesn’t Have to Last Forever
• 41. How to Get Over a Rejection
• 42. How to End a Relationship
• 43. Stay or Leave?
• 44. How to Get Divorced
• 45. On Forgetting Lovers
• 46. How Not to Break Up with Someone
• 01. People Pleasers in Relationships
• 02. People Not to Fall in Love With
• 03. Picking Partners Who Won't Understand Us
• 04. How Do Emotionally Healthy People Behave In Relationships? 
• 05. The Avoidant Partner With The Power To Drive You Mad
• 06. On Picking a Socially Unsuitable Partner
• 07. How to Sustain Love: A Tool
• 08. Questions To Ask About Someone We Are Thinking Of Committing To
• 09. Our Two Great Fears in Love
• 10. The Pains of Preoccupied Attachment
• 11. Are You Afraid of Intimacy?
• 12. Why You Will Never Quite Get it Right in Love
• 13. Understanding Attachment Theory
• 14. Why We 'Split' Our Partners
• 15. Why We Love People Who Don't Love Us Back
• 16. Should I Be With Them?
• 17. The Seven Rules of Successful Relationships
• 18. Why We Must Explain Our Own Needs
• 19. How Good Are You at Communication in Love? Questionnaire
• 20. Why Some Couples Last — and Some Don't
• 21. The Difference Between Fragile and Strong Couples
• 22. What Relationships Should Really Be About
• 23. The Real Reason Why Couples Break Up
• 24. 6 Reasons We Choose Badly in Love
• 25. Can People Change?
• 26. Konrad Lorenz & Why You Choose the Partners You Choose
• 27. The Stranger You Live With
• 28. The Attachment Style Questionnaire
• 29. Why Anxious and Avoidant Partners Find It Hard to Leave One Another
• 30. The Challenges of Anxious-Avoidant Relationships — Can Couples With Different Attachment Styles Work?
• 31. On Rescue Fantasies
• 32. How to Cope with an Avoidant Partner
• 33. What Is Your Attachment Style?
• 34. 'I Will Never Find the Right Partner'
• 35. Too Close or Too Distant: How We Stand in Relationships
• 36. How Are You Difficult to Live with?
• 37. Why We're Compelled to Love Difficult People
• 38. Why Your Lover is Very Damaged - and Annoying
• 39. Why Tiny Things about Our Partners Drive Us Mad
• 40. How to Love Ugly People
• 41. Why Polyamory Probably Won’t Work for You
• 42. Why We Go Cold on Our Partners
• 43. An Instruction Manual to Oneself
• 44. The Terrors of Being Loved
• 45. The Partner as Child Theory
• 46. On the Fear of Intimacy
• 47. Meet the Parents
• 48. On Finding the 'Right' Person
• 49. If You Loved Me, You Wouldn't Want to Change Me
• 50. The Problems of Closeness
• 01. How to Break Logjams in a Relationship
• 02. The Miseries of Push-Pull Relationships 
• 03. A Way To Break Logjams In A Couple
• 04. When Your Partner Loves You – but Does Their Best to Drive You Away...
• 05. A Rule to Help Your Relationship
• 06. Secret Grudges We May Have Against the Other Gender
• 07. The Demand for Perfection in Love
• 08. On Being Upset Without Knowing It
• 09. Who is Afraid of Intimacy?
• 10. Why Good Manners Matter in Relationships
• 11. A Role for Lies
• 12. The Secret Lives of Other Couples
• 13. On Saying 'I Hate You' to Someone You Love
• 14. When Love Isn't Easy
• 15. Two Questions to Repair a Relationship
• 16. Three Steps to Resolving Conflicts in Relationships
• 17. Stop Avoiding Conflict
• 18. An Alternative to Passive Aggression
• 19. Why We Must Soften What We Say to Our Partners
• 20. How to Be Less Defensive in Love
• 21. On Gaslighting
• 22. Why We Play Games in Love
• 23. On 'Rupture' and 'Repair'
• 24. Why it's OK to Want a Partner to Change
• 25. On Arguing More Nakedly
• 26. Do You Still Love Me?
• 27. Why We Need to Feel Heard
• 28. Five Questions to Ask of Bad Behaviour
• 29. The Art of Complaining
• 30. The Challenges of Communication
• 31. How To Have Fewer Bitter Arguments in Love
• 32. The Arguments We Have From Guilt
• 33. Attention-Seeking Arguments
• 34. When Our Partners Are Being Excessively Logical
• 35. When We Tell Our Partners That We Are Normal and They Are Strange
• 36. When Your Partner Tries to Stop You Growing
• 37. When Your Partner Starts Crying Hysterically During an Argument
• 38. Why We Sometimes Set Out to Shatter Our Lover's Good Mood
• 39. Why People Get Defensive in Relationships
• 40. A History of Arguments
• 41. The Fights When There Is No Sex
• 42. What We Might Learn in Couples Therapy
• 43. On the Tendency to Love and Hate Excessively
• 44. An Alternative to Being Controlling
• 45. Why We Should Not Silently Suffer From A Lack of Touch in Love
• 46. Why Anger Has a Place in Love
• 47. The Importance of Relationship Counselling
• 48. How to Argue in Relationships
• 49. Why We (Sometimes) Hope the People We Love Might Die
• 50. Be the Change You Want To See
• 51. I Wish I Was Still Single
• 52. Love and Sulking
• 53. On Being Unintentionally Hurt
• 54. The Secret Problems of Other Couples
• 55. On the Dangers of Being Too Defensive
• 56. On How to Defuse an Argument
• 57. How to Save Love with Pessimism
• 58. How 'Transference' Makes You Hard to Live With
• 59. Why You Resent Your Partner
• 60. Why It Is Always Your Partner's Fault
• 61. If It Wasn't for You...
• 62. Why You Are So Annoyed By What You Once Admired
• 63. Why You’re (Probably) Not a Great Communicator
• 01. The Need for Honesty on Early Dates
• 02. Why Dating Apps Won't Help You Find Love
• 03. Being Honest on a Date
• 04. Why Haven't They Called - and the Rorschach Test
• 05. Dating When You've Had a Bad Childhood
• 06. Varieties of Madness Commonly Met with On Dates
• 07. How to Seduce with Confidence
• 08. A Brief History of Dating
• 09. How to Prove Attractive to Someone on a Date
• 10. Existentialism and Dating
• 11. What to Talk About on a Date
• 12. What to Eat and Drink on a Date
• 13. How to Seduce Someone on a Date
• 14. How Not to Think on a Date
• 01. Getting Better at Picking Lovers
• 02. How We May Be Creating The Lovers We Fear
• 03. What If the People We Could Love Are Here Already; We Just Can't See Them?
• 04. The Lengths We Go to Avoid Love
• 05. Our Secret Wish Never to Find Love
• 06. Why We All End up Marrying Our Parents
• 07. True Love Begins With Self-Love
• 08. The Importance of Being Single
• 09. Why We Keep Choosing Bad Partners
• 10. Celebrity Crushes
• 11. Romantic Masochism
• 12. What Do You Love Me For?
• 13. If Love Never Came
• 14. On the Madness and Charm of Crushes
• 15. Why Only the Happy Single Find True Love
• 16. Should We Play It Cool When We Like Someone?
• 17. In Praise of Unrequited Love
• 18. Two Reasons Why You Might Still Be Single
• 19. How We Choose a Partner
• 20. Why Flirting Matters
• 21. Why, Once You Understand Love, You Could Love Anyone
• 22. Mate Selection
• 23. Reasons to Remain Single
• 24. How to Enjoy a New Relationship
• 01. Alternatives to Romantic Monogamy
• 02. Twenty Ideas on Marriage
• 03. For Moments of Marital Crisis
• 04. What to Do on Your Wedding Night
• 05. Who Should You Invite to Your Wedding?
• 06. Pragmatic Reasons for Getting Married
• 07. The Standard Marriage and Its Seven Alternatives
• 08. Utopian Marriage
• 09. When Is One Ready to Get Married?
• 10. On the Continuing Relevance of Marriage
• 11. On Marrying the Wrong Person — 9 Reasons We Will Regret Getting Married
• 01. What Are We Lying To Our Lovers About? 
• 02. Those Who Have to Wait for a War to Say ‘I Love You’
• 03. What Celebrity Stalkers Can Teach Us About Love
• 04. The Achievement of Missing Someone
• 05. How Love Can Teach Us Who We Are
• 06. Beyond the Need for Melodrama in Love
• 07. True Love is Boring
• 08. How to Make Love Last Forever
• 09. How to Be Vulnerable
• 10. Why You Can't Read Your Partner's Mind
• 11. What Teddy Bears Teach Us About Love
• 12. What Role Do You Play in Your Relationship?
• 13. Why We Should Be 'Babyish' in Love
• 14. The Maturity of Regression
• 15. The Benefits of Insecurity in Love
• 16. Taking the Pressure off Love
• 17. A Pledge for Lovers
• 18. A Projection Exercise for Couples
• 19. A New Ritual: The Morning and Evening Kiss
• 20. Can Our Phones Solve Our Love Lives?
• 21. If We're All Bad at Love, Shouldn't We Change Our Definition of Normality?
• 22. Other People's Relationships
• 23. How to Cope with an Avoidant Partner
• 24. The Pleasure of Reading Together in Bed
• 25. 22 Questions to Reignite Love
• 26. The Wisdom of Romantic Compromise
• 27. How to Complain
• 28. How We Need to Keep Growing Up
• 29. Teaching and Love
• 30. Love and Self-Love
• 31. Humour in Love
• 32. The Advantages of Long-Distance Love
• 33. In Praise of Hugs
• 34. Why Affectionate Teasing is Kind and Necessary
• 35. The Couple Courtroom Game
• 36. Getting over a Row
• 37. Keeping Secrets in Relationships
• 38. A Lover's Guide to Sulking
• 39. Artificial Conversations
• 40. On the Role of Stories in Love
• 41. On the Hardest Job in the World
• 42. On the Beloved's Wrist
• 01. How Even Very ‘Nice’ Parents Can Mess Up Their Children
• 02. The Parents We Would Love To Have Had: An Exercise
• 03. Fatherless Boys
• 04. How to Raise a Successful Person
• 05. The Problems of Miniature Adults
• 06. Mothers and Daughters
• 07. The Importance of Swords and Guns for Children
• 08. When Parents Won't Let Their Children Grow Up
• 09. The Fragile Parent
• 10. Parenting and People-Pleasing
• 11. Three Kinds of Parental Love
• 12. A Portrait of Tenderness
• 13. What Makes a Good Parent? A Checklist
• 14. On the Curiosity of Children
• 15. How to Lend a Child Confidence
• 16. The Importance of Play
• 17. Why Children Need an Emotional Education
• 18. Coping with One's Parents
• 19. Are Children for Me?
• 20. How Parents Might Let Their Children Know of Their Issues
• 21. How We Crave to Be Soothed
• 22. Escaping the Shadow of a Parent
• 23. On Being Angry with a Parent
• 24. What You Might Want to Tell Your Child About Homework
• 25. On Apologising to Your Child
• 26. Teaching Children about Relationships
• 27. How Should a Parent Love their Child?
• 28. When people pleasers become parents - and need to say 'no'
• 29. On the Sweetness of Children
• 30. Listening to Children
• 31. Whether or not to have Children
• 32. The Children of Snobs
• 33. Why Good Parents Have Naughty Children
• 34. The Joys and Sorrows of Parenting
• 35. The Significance of Parenthood
• 36. Why Family Matters
• 37. Parenting and Working
• 38. On Children's Art
• 39. What Babies Can Teach Us
• 40. Why – When It Comes to Children – Love May Not Be Enough
• 01. What We Really, Really Want in Love
• 02. Falling in Love with a Stranger
• 03. Why We Need 'Ubuntu'
• 04. The Buddhist View of Love
• 05. What True Love Looks Like
• 06. How the Wrong Images of Love Can Ruin Our Lives
• 07. Kierkegaard on Love
• 08. Why Do I Feel So Lonely?
• 09. Pygmalion and your Love life
• 10. How to Love
• 11. What is Love?
• 12. On Romanticism
• 13. A Short History of Love
• 14. The Definition of Love
• 15. Why We Need the Ancient Greek Vocabulary of Love
• 16. The Cure for Love
• 17. Why We Need to Speak of Love in Public
• 18. How Romanticism Ruined Love
• 19. Our Most Romantic Moments
• 20. Loving and Being Loved
• 21. Romantic Realism
• 22. On Being Romantic or Classical
• 01. The Difficulties of Impotence
• 02. What is Sexual Perversion?
• 03. Our Unconscious Fear of Successful Sex
• 04. The Logic of Our Fantasies
• 05. Rethinking Gender
• 06. The Ongoing Complexities of Our Intimate Lives
• 07. On Post-Coital Melancholy
• 08. Desire and Intimacy
• 09. What Makes a Person Attractive?
• 10. How to Talk About Your Sexual Fantasy
• 11. The Problem of Sexual Shame
• 12. Who Initiates Sex: and Why It Matters So Much
• 13. On Still Being a Virgin
• 14. Love and Sex
• 15. Impotence and Respect
• 16. Sexual Non-Liberation
• 17. The Excitement of Kissing
• 18. The Appeal of Outdoor Sex
• 19. The Sexual Fantasies of Others
• 20. On Art and Masturbation
• 21. The Psychology of Cross-Dressing
• 22. The Fear of Being Bad in Bed
• 23. The Sex-Starved Relationship
• 24. How to Start Having Sex Again
• 25. Sexual Liberation
• 26. The Poignancy of Old Pornography
• 27. On Porn Addiction
• 28. A Brief Philosophy of Oral Sex
• 29. Why We Go Off Sex
• 30. On Being a Sleazebag
• 31. A Brief Theory of Sexual Excitement
• 01. Work Outs For Our Minds
• 02. Interviewing Our Bodies
• 03. The Top Dog - Under Dog Exercise
• 04. A Guide For The Recovering Avoidant
• 05. Where Are Humanity’s Problems Really Located?
• 06. On Feeling Obliged 
• 07. Why We Struggle With Self-Discipline
• 08. Why We Should Practice Automatic Writing
• 09. Why We Behave As We Do
• 10. Mechanisms of Defence
• 11. On Always Finding Fault with Others
• 12. The Hidden Logic of Illogical Behaviour
• 13. How to Weaken the Hold of Addiction
• 14. Charles Darwin and The Descent of Man
• 15. Why We Are All Addicts
• 16. Straightforward vs. Complicated People
• 17. Reasons to Give Up on Perfection
• 18. The Need for a Cry
• 19. On Confinement
• 20. The Importance of Singing Badly
• 21. You Don't Need Permission
• 22. On Feeling Stuck
• 23. Am I Paranoid?
• 24. Learning to Be More Selfish
• 25. Learning How to Be Angry
• 26. Why We're All Liars
• 27. Are You a Masochist?
• 28. How Badly Adapted We Are to Life on Earth
• 29. How We Prefer to Act Rather Than Think
• 30. How to Live More Wisely Around Our Phones
• 31. On Dreaming
• 32. The Need to be Alone
• 33. On the Remarkable Need to Speak
• 34. Thinking Too Much; and Thinking Too Little
• 35. On Nagging
• 36. The Prevention of Suicide
• 37. On Getting an Early Night
• 38. Why We Eat Too Much
• 39. On Taking Drugs
• 40. On Perfectionism
• 41. On Procrastination
• 01. Why We Overreact
• 02. Giving Up on People Pleasing
• 03. The Benefits of Forgetfulness
• 04. How to Take Criticism
• 05. A More Spontaneous Life
• 06. On Self-Assertion
• 07. The Benefit of Analogies
• 08. Why We Need Moments of Mad Thinking
• 09. The Task of Turning Vague Thoughts into More Precise Ones
• 10. How to Catch Your Own Thoughts
• 11. Why Our Best Thoughts Come To Us in the Shower
• 13. Confidence
• 14. Why We Should Try to Become Better Narcissists
• 15. Why We Require Poor Memories To Survive
• 16. The Importance of Confession
• 17. How Emotionally Healthy Are You?
• 18. What Is An Emotionally Healthy Childhood?
• 19. Unprocessed Emotion
• 20. How to Be a Genius
• 21. On Resilience
• 22. How to Decide
• 23. Why It Should Be Glamorous to Change Your Mind
• 24. How to Make More of Our Memories
• 25. What’s Wrong with Needy People
• 26. Emotional Education: An Introduction
• 27. Philosophical Meditation
• 28. Honesty
• 29. Self-Love
• 30. Emotional Scepticism
• 31. Politeness
• 32. Charity
• 34. Love-as-Generosity
• 35. Comforting
• 36. Emotional Translation
• 38. On Pessimism
• 39. The Problem with Cynicism
• 40. On Keeping Going
• 41. Closeness
• 42. On Higher Consciousness
• 43. On Exercising the Mind
• 44. Authentic Work
• 45. The Sorrows of Work
• 46. Cultural Consolation
• 47. Appreciation
• 48. Cheerful Despair
• 01. What Is It Like to Be Mentally Unwell?
• 02. How 'Mad' People Make a Lot of Sense
• 03. Why We Keep Repeating Patterns of Unhappiness
• 04. Your Self-Esteem is a Record of Your History
• 05. Why Some People Love Extreme Sports
• 06. The Overlooked Pains of Very, Very Tidy People
• 07. On Feeling Guilty for No Reason
• 08. The Fear of Being Touched
• 09. Why Most of Us Feel Like Losers
• 10. One of the More Beautiful Paintings in the World...
• 11. The Origins of a Sense of Persecution
• 12. How to Overcome Psychological Barriers
• 13. The Sinner Inside All of Us
• 14. How to Be Less Defensive
• 15. Are You a Sadist or a Masochist?
• 16. You Might Be Mad
• 17. Fears Are Not Facts
• 18. Why It's Good to Be a Narcissist
• 19. Am I a Bad Person?
• 20. Why Some of Us Are So Thin-Skinned
• 21. The Five Features of Paranoia
• 22. Why So Many of Us Are Masochists
• 23. In Praise of Self-Doubt
• 24. Why We Get Locked Inside Stories — and How to Break Free
• 25. Why Grandiosity is a Symptom of Self-Hatred
• 26. The Origins of Imposter Syndrome
• 27. The Upsides of Being Ill
• 28. The Roots of Paranoia
• 29. Loneliness as a Sign of Depth
• 30. How Social Media Affects Our Self-Worth
• 31. How to Be Beautiful
• 32. Trying to Be Kinder to Ourselves
• 33. The Role of Love in Mental Health
• 34. Trauma and Fearfulness
• 35. On Despair and the Imagination
• 36. On Being Able to Defend Oneself
• 37. The Fear of Death
• 38. I Am Not My Body
• 39. The Problems of Being Very Beautiful
• 40. 6 Reasons Not to Worry What the Neighbours Think
• 41. Am I Fat? An Answer from History
• 42. The Problem of Shame
• 43. On Feeling Ugly
• 44. The Particular Beauty of Unhappy-Looking People
• 45. How Not to Become a Conspiracy Theorist
• 46. The Terror of a ‘No’
• 47. On Being Hated
• 48. The Origins of Everyday Nastiness
• 49. The Weakness of Strength Theory
• 50. On Self-Sabotage
• 51. FOMO: Fear Of Missing Out
• 52. On a Sense of Sinfulness
• 01. We All Need Our North Pole
• 02. We Need to Change the Movie We Are In
• 03. Maybe You Are, in Your Own Way, a Little Bit Marvellous
• 04. Why We Deny Ourselves the Chance of Happiness
• 05. How to Live More Consciously
• 06. Our Secret Longing to Be Good
• 07. Why Everyone Needs to Feel 'Lost' for a While
• 08. On the Consolations of Home | Georg Friedrich Kersting
• 09. On Feeling Rather Than Thinking
• 10. How to Be Interesting
• 11. Am I Too Clever?
• 12. A More Self-Accepting Life
• 13. 'Let Him Who Is Without Sin Cast the First Stone'
• 14. The Roots of Loneliness
• 15. Small Acts of Liberation
• 16. Overcoming the Need to Be Exceptional
• 17. The Fear of Happiness
• 18. The Truth May Already Be Inside Us
• 19. What Is the Meaning of Life?
• 20. The Desire to Write
• 21. Are Intelligent People More Lonely?
• 22. A Better Word than Happiness: Eudaimonia
• 23. The Meaning of Life
• 24. Our Secret Fantasies
• 25. Why We’re Fated to Be Lonely (But That’s OK)
• 26. Good Enough is Good Enough
• 27. An Updated Ten Commandments
• 28. A Self-Compassion Exercise
• 29. How to Become a Better Person
• 30. On Resolutions
• 31. On Final Things
• 01. How to 'Grow'
• 02. The Life-Saving Nature of Poor Memories
• 03. The Stages of Development - And What If We Miss Out on One…
• 04. Who Might I Have Been If…
• 05. Yes, Maybe They Are Just Envious…
• 06. We Are All Lonely - Now Can We Be Friends?
• 07. How to Make It Through
• 08. 12 Signs That You Are Mature in the Eyes of Psychotherapy
• 09. The Breast and the Mouth
• 10. A Test to Measure How Nice You Are
• 11. What Hypochondriacs Aren't Able to Tell You
• 12. The Origins of Sanity
• 13. The Always Unfinished Business of Self-Knowledge
• 14. Learning to Laugh at Ourselves
• 15. A Simple Question to Set You Free
• 16. Locating the Trouble
• 17. Who Knows More, the Young or the Old?
• 18. Beyond Sanctimony
• 19. The Ingredients of Emotional Maturity
• 20. When Illness is Preferable to Health
• 21. What Should My Life Have Been Like?
• 22. Why We Need to Go Back to Emotional School
• 23. The Point of Writing Letters We Never Send
• 24. Self-Forgiveness
• 25. Why We Must Have Done Bad to Be Good
• 26. Finding the Courage to Be Ourselves
• 27. What Regret Can Teach Us
• 28. The Importance of Adolescence
• 29. How to Love Difficult People
• 30. On Falling Mentally Ill
• 31. Splitting Humanity into Saints and Sinners
• 32. Becoming Free
• 33. Learning to Listen to the Adult Inside Us
• 34. The Ultimate Test of Emotional Maturity
• 35. Can People Change?
• 36. When Home is Not Home...
• 37. Learning to Lay Down Boundaries
• 38. You Could Finally Leave School!
• 39. When Do You Know You Are Emotionally Mature? 26 Signs of Emotional Maturity
• 40. How to Lengthen Your Life
• 41. We Only Learn If We Repeat
• 42. The Drive to Keep Growing Emotionally
• 43. On Bittersweet Memories
• 44. Small Triumphs of the Mentally Unwell
• 45. The Importance of Atonement
• 46. How To Be a Mummy's Boy
• 47. On Consolation
• 48. The Inner Idiot
• 49. The Dangers of the Good Child
• 50. Why None of Us are Really 'Sinners'
• 51. How We Need to Keep Growing Up
• 52. Are Humans Still Evolving?
• 53. On Losers – and Tragic Heroes
• 54. On the Serious Role of Stuffed Animals
• 55. Why Self-Help Books Matter
• 01. Living Long Term With Mental Illness
• 02. Suffering From A Snobbery That Isn’t Ours
• 03. How to Recover the Plot
• 04. Why We Have Trouble Getting Back To Sleep
• 05. When, and Why, Do We Pick up Our Phones?
• 06. What is the Unconscious - and What Might Be Inside Yours?
• 07. Complete the Story – and Discover What's Really On Your mind
• 08. Complete the Sentence – and Find Out What's Really on Your Mind
• 09. The One Question You Need to Understand Who You Are
• 10. Six Fundamental Truths of Self-Awareness
• 11. Why Knowing Ourselves is Impossible – and Necessary
• 12. Making Friends with Your Unconscious
• 13. Do You Believe in Mind-Reading?
• 14. Questioning Our Conscience
• 15. A Bedtime Meditation
• 16. How to Figure Out What You Really, Really Think
• 17. Why You Should Keep a Journal
• 18. In Praise of Introspection
• 19. What Brain Scans Reveal About Our Minds
• 20. What is Mental Health?
• 21. The One Question You Need to Ask to Know Whether You're a Good Person
• 22. Eight Rules of The School of Life
• 23. No One Cares
• 24. The High Price We Pay for Our Fear of Being Alone
• 25. 5 Signs of Emotional Immaturity
• 26. On Knowing Who One Is
• 27. Why Self-Analysis Works
• 28. Knowing Things Intellectually vs. Knowing Them Emotionally
• 29. The Novel We Really Need To Read Next
• 30. Is Free Will or Determinism Correct?
• 31. Emotional Identity
• 32. Know Yourself — Socrates and How to Develop Self-Knowledge
• 33. Self-Knowledge Quiz
• 34. On Being Very Normal
• 01. How History Can Explain Our Unhappiness
• 02. How Lonely Are You? A Test
• 03. The Wisdom of Tears
• 04. You Don't Always Need to Be Funny
• 05. On Suicide
• 06. You Have Permission to Be Miserable
• 07. The Pessimist's Guide to Mental Illness
• 08. Why Do Bad Things Always Happen to Me?
• 09. Why We Enjoy the Suffering of Others
• 10. The Tragedy of Birth
• 11. What Rothko's Art Teaches Us About Suffering
• 12. Our Tragic Condition
• 13. The Melancholy Charm of Lonely Travelling Places
• 14. Nostalgia for Religion
• 15. Parties and Melancholy
• 16. Why Very Beautiful Scenes Can Make Us So Melancholy
• 17. On Old Photos of Oneself
• 18. Are Intelligent People More Melancholic?
• 19. Strangers and Melancholy
• 20. On Post-Coital Melancholy
• 21. Sex and Melancholy
• 22. Astronomy and Melancholy
• 23. Nostalgia for the Womb
• 24. Melancholy and the Feeling of Being Superfluous
• 25. Pills & Melancholy
• 26. Melancholy: the best kind of Despair
• 27. On Melancholy
• 01. The Impulse to Sink Our Own Mood – and Return to Sadness and Worry
• 02. We Are Made of Moods
• 03. Why Sweet Things Make Us Cry
• 04. Overcoming Manic Moods
• 05. Learning to Feel What We Really Feel
• 06. Exercise When We're Feeling Mentally Unwell
• 07. Why You May Be Experiencing a Mental Midwinter
• 08. Living Long-Term with Mental Illness
• 09. The Role of Sleep in Mental Health
• 10. The Role of Pills in Mental Health
• 11. Mental Illness and Acceptance
• 12. Mental Illness and 'Reasons to Live'
• 13. Taming a Pitiless Inner Critic
• 14. Reasons to Give Up on Human Beings
• 15. The Window of Tolerance
• 16. On Realising One Might Be an Introvert
• 17. Our Right to be Miserable
• 18. How to Manage One's Moods
• 19. On Living in a More Light-Hearted Way
• 20. On Disliking Oneself
• 21. Of Course We Mess Up!
• 22. Learning to Listen to One's Own Boredom
• 23. On Depression
• 24. In Praise of the Melancholy Child
• 25. Why We May Be Angry Rather Than Sad
• 26. On Not Being in the Moment
• 27. 'Pure' OCD - and Intrusive Thoughts
• 28. Twenty Moods
• 29. How the Right Words Help Us to Feel the Right Things
• 30. The Secret Optimism of Angry People
• 31. On Feeling Depressed
• 32. The Difficulty of Being in the Present
• 33. On Being Out of Touch with One's Feelings
• 34. Our Secret Thoughts
• 35. The Psychology of Colour
• 36. On Self-Pity
• 37. On Irritability
• 38. On the Things that Make Adults Cry
• 39. On Anger
• 40. Detachment
• 01. On Those Ruined by Success
• 02. The Demand for Perfection in Love
• 03. The Secret Lives of Other Couples
• 04. How the Wrong Images of Love Can Ruin Our Lives
• 05. Self-Forgiveness
• 06. How Perfectionism Makes Us Ill
• 07. Reasons to Give Up on Perfection
• 08. Are My Expectations Too High?
• 09. Of Course We Mess Up!
• 10. Expectations - and the 80/20 Rule
• 11. Good Enough is Good Enough
• 12. The Perfectionist Trap
• 13. A Self-Compassion Exercise
• 14. On Perfectionism
• 01. How Good Are You at Communication in Love? Questionnaire
• 02. How Prone Might You Be To Insomnia? Questionnaire
• 03. How Ready Might You Be for Therapy? Questionnaire
• 04. The Attachment Style Questionnaire
• 01. Why It Can Take Us So Long to Understand How Unwell We Are
• 02. Intergenerational Trauma
• 03. How the Unfinished Business of Childhood is Played Out in Relationships
• 05. Can Childhoods Really Matter So Much?
• 06. What Some Childhoods Don’t Allow You to Think
• 07. The Legacy of an Unloving Childhood
• 08. Why You Don’t Need a Very Bad Childhood to Have a Complicated Adulthood
• 09. When People Let Us Know What the World Has Done to Them
• 10. The Healing Power of Time
• 11. You Are Freer Than You Think
• 12. On Parenting Our Parents
• 13. Letting Go of Self-Protective Strategies
• 14. How to Tell If Someone Had a Difficult Childhood...
• 15. Childhood Matters, Unfortunately!
• 16. How Should We Define 'Mental Illness'?
• 17. Taking Childhood Seriously
• 18. Sympathy for Our Younger Selves
• 19. How Music Can Heal Us
• 20. What Your Body Reveals About Your Past
• 21. Why Adults Often Behave Like Children
• 22. How to Live Long-Term With Trauma
• 23. Should We Forgive Our Parents or Not?
• 24. Reparenting Your Inner Child
• 25. The Agonies of Shame
• 26. How Trauma Works
• 27. Why Abused Children End Up Hating Themselves
• 28. Why We Sometimes Feel Like Curling Up Into a Ball
• 29. How to Get Your Parents Out of Your Head
• 30. Why Parents Bully Their Children
• 31. On Projection
• 32. Self-Archaeology
• 33. It's Not Your Fault
• 34. If Our Parents Never Listened
• 35. Why Everything Relates to Your Childhood
• 36. Why Those Who Should Love Us Can Hurt Us
• 37. The Upsides of Having a Mental Breakdown
• 38. How Perfectionism Makes Us Ill
• 39. How We Should Have Been Loved
• 40. Self-Hatred and High-Achievement
• 41. A Self-Hatred Audit
• 42. How Mental Illness Impacts Our Bodies
• 43. Two Reasons Why People End up Parenting Badly
• 44. What is Emotional Neglect?
• 45. How Unloving Parents can Generate Self-Hating Children
• 46. How Mental Illness Closes Down Our Minds
• 47. Trauma and EMDR Therapy
• 48. How to Fight off Your Inner Critic
• 49. The One Subject You Really Need to Study: Your Own Childhood
• 50. Sharing Our Early Wounds
• 51. Trauma and How to Overcome It
• 52. Why We're All Messed Up By Our Childhoods
• 53. The Golden Child Syndrome
• 54. The Importance of Being an Unhappy Teenager
• 55. How We Get Damaged by Emotional Neglect
• 56. The Secrets of a Privileged Childhood
• 57. What We Owe to the People Who Loved Us in Childhood
• 58. Criticism When You've Had a Bad Childhood
• 59. On Suffering in Silence
• 60. How a Messed up Childhood Affects You in Adulthood
• 61. Daddy Issues
• 62. The Non-Rewritable Disc: the Fateful Impact of Childhood
• 63. On the Longing for Maternal Tenderness
• 01. The Need for Processing 
• 02. The Subtle Art of Not Listening to People Too Closely
• 03. The Art of Good Listening
• 04. Becoming More Interesting
• 05. In Praise of Small Chats With Strangers
• 06. Why We Should Listen Rather Than Reassure
• 07. How We Can Hurt Without Thinking
• 08. Leaning in to Vulnerability
• 09. How to Become Someone People Will Confide in
• 10. How To Write An Effective Thank You Letter
• 11. How to Be a Good Listener
• 12. How to Comment Online
• 13. Listening as Editing
• 14. The Importance of Flattery
• 15. How to Narrate Your Life Story
• 16. The Art of Listening
• 17. How to Narrate Your Dreams
• 18. How to Talk About Yourself
• 19. Communication
• 20. How to Be a Good Teacher
• 21. On How to Disagree
• 22. On the Art of Conversation
• 01. On Feeling Painfully Different
• 02. Abandoning Hope
• 03. How to Leave a Party
• 04. On Becoming a Hermit
• 05. How to Have a Renaissance
• 06. Think Like an Aristocrat
• 07. Van Gogh's Neglected Genius
• 08. How to Be Quietly Confident
• 09. How to Live Like an Exile
• 10. How to Cope With Bullying
• 11. Stop Being So Nice
• 12. The Origins of Shyness
• 13. On Friendliness to Strangers
• 14. What to Do at Parties If You Hate Small Talk
• 15. How to Approach Strangers at A Party
• 16. How to Be Comfortable on Your Own in Public
• 17. Akrasia - or Why We Don't Do What We Believe
• 18. Why We Think So Much about Our Hair
• 19. Aphorisms on Confidence
• 20. How Knowledge of Difficulties Lends Confidence
• 21. How Thinking You’re an Idiot Lends Confidence
• 22. How to Overcome Shyness
• 23. The Mind-Body Problem
• 24. The Impostor Syndrome
• 25. On the Origins of Confidence
• 26. Self-Esteem
• 27. On Confidence
• 28. On Not Liking the Way One Looks
• 02. Why Losers Make the Best Friends
• 03. Our Very Best Friends
• 04. The Difficulties of Oversharing
• 05. Is It OK to Outgrow Our Friends?
• 06. Why Everyone We Meet is a Little Bit Lonely
• 07. On 'Complicated' Friendships
• 08. The Friend Who Can Tease Us
• 09. Don't Be Too Normal If You Want to Make Friends
• 10. The Forgotten Art of Making Friends
• 11. The Friend Who Balances Us
• 12. The Purpose of Friendship
• 13. Why the Best Kind of Friends Are Lonely
• 14. How to Lose Friends
• 15. Why Misfits Make Great Friends
• 16. How to Handle an Envious Friend
• 17. Loneliness as a Sign of Depth
• 18. Companionship and Mental Health
• 19. How Often Do We Need to Go to Parties?
• 20. Virtual Dinners: Conversation Menus
• 21. The Cleaning Party
• 22. On Talking Horizontally
• 23. Dinner Table Orchestra
• 24. On Sofa Jumping
• 25. On Studying Someone Else's Hands
• 26. What Women and Men May Learn from One Another When They are Just Friends
• 27. How to Say 'I Love You' to a Friend
• 28. How to End a Friendship
• 29. What Can Stop the Loneliness?
• 30. Why Men Are So Bad at Friendship
• 31. What Would An Ideal Friend Be Like?
• 32. 'Couldn't We Just Be Friends?'
• 33. On Acquiring an Enemy
• 34. Why Old Friends Matter
• 35. Why Not to Panic about Enemies
• 36. What Is the Purpose of Friendship?
• 37. Friendship and Vulnerability
• 38. On Socks and Friendship
• 39. The Teasing of Old Friends
• 01. The Boring Person
• 02. The Loveliest People in the World
• 03. The Life Saving Role of Small Chats
• 04. The Origins of Shifty People
• 05. The Many Faults of Other People
• 06. Why Nice People Give Us the 'Ick'
• 07. How to Become a More Interesting Person
• 08. The Challenges of Hugging
• 09. Dale Carnegie — How to Win Friends and Influence People
• 10. The Origins of People Pleasing
• 11. The Eyes of Love
• 12. Kindness Isn't Weakness
• 13. Why We're All Capable of Damaging Others
• 14. Rembrandt as a Guide to Kindness
• 15. What Love Really Is – and Why It Matters
• 16. The Need for Kindness
• 17. 6 Reasons Not to Worry What the Neighbours Think
• 18. What to Do When a Stranger Annoys You
• 19. How to Choose A Good Present
• 20. How to Be a Good Guest
• 21. How To Make People Feel Good about Themselves
• 22. How To Tell When You Are Being A Bore
• 23. What Is Empathy?
• 24. How Not to Rant
• 25. How Not to Be Boring
• 26. On Eggs and Compassion
• 27. How to Become an Adult
• 28. People-Pleasing: and How to Overcome It
• 29. Why Truly Sociable People Hate Parties
• 30. How to Be Diplomatic
• 31. Sane Insanity
• 32. Charity of Interpretation
• 33. How to Be a Good Teacher
• 34. The Solution to Clumsiness
• 35. How to Be a Man
• 36. Political Correctness vs. Politeness
• 37. Aphorisms on Kindness
• 38. Why We Don’t Really Want to Be Nice
• 39. The Charm of Vulnerability
• 40. The Ultimate Test of Your Social Skills
• 41. How to Be Open-Minded
• 42. Why Kind People Always Lie
• 43. How to Be Warm
• 44. The Problem of Over-Friendliness
• 45. How to Forgive
• 46. Why We’re Fated to Be Lonely (But That’s OK)
• 47. How to Cope with Snobbery
• 48. On Charm
• 49. On Being Kind
• 50. On Gratitude
• 51. On Forgiveness
• 52. On Charity
• 53. On Wisdom
• 01. How to Fire Someone
• 02. Diplomacy at the Office
• 03. How to Tell a Colleague Their Breath Smells
• 04. How to Screw Up at Work
• 05. In Praise of Teamwork
• 06. How to Become an Entrepreneur
• 07. The Need for Eloquence
• 08. The Nature and Causes of Procrastination
• 09. In Praise of Networking
• 10. Why Creativity is Too Important to Be Left to Artists
• 11. How to Survive Bureaucracy
• 12. Machismo and Management
• 13. What Art Can Teach Business About Being Fussy
• 14. On Novelists and Manuals
• 15. How Not to Let Work Explode Your Life
• 16. How to Sell
• 17. Innovation, Empathy and Introspection
• 18. Innovation and Creativity
• 19. Innovation and Science Fiction
• 20. The Acceptance of Change
• 21. The Collaborative Virtues
• 22. Towards Better Collaboration
• 23. How To Make Efficiency a Habit
• 24. On Raising the Prestige of 'Details'
• 25. Monasticism & How to Avoid Distraction
• 26. How to Dare to Begin
• 27. On Meaning – and Motivation
• 28. The Psychological Obstacles Holding Employees Back
• 29. On Feedback
• 30. How to Better Understand Customers
• 31. On Bounded and Unbounded Tasks
• 01. What Should Truly Motivate Us at Work
• 02. Nature as a Cure for the Sickness of Modern Times
• 03. The Difficulties of Work-Life Balance
• 04. The Challenges of Modernity
• 05. Businesses for Love; Businesses for Money
• 06. Countries for Losers; Countries for Winners
• 07. Towards a Solution to Inequality
• 08. Free Trade - or Protectionism?
• 09. Should We Work on Ourselves - or on the World?
• 10. Why Is There Unemployment?
• 11. Artists and Supermarket Tycoons
• 12. Business and the Arts
• 13. Sentimentality in Art - and Business
• 14. How to Make a Country Rich
• 15. First World Problems
• 16. On Devotion to Corporations
• 17. Good vs Classical Economics
• 18. What Is a Good Brand?
• 19. Good Economic Measures: Beyond GDP
• 20. What Good Business Should Be
• 21. On the Faultiness of Our Economic Indicators
• 22. On the Dawn of Capitalism
• 23. Utopian Capitalism
• 24. On Philanthropy
• 01. Why Do We Work So Hard?
• 02. On Eating a Friend
• 03. Is the Modern World Too 'Materialistic'?
• 04. On Consumer Capitalism
• 05. How to Choose the Perfect Gift
• 06. The Importance of Maslow's Pyramid of Needs
• 07. How to Live More Wisely Around Our Phones
• 08. Money and 'Higher Things'
• 09. Why We Are All Addicts
• 10. Why We Are So Bad at Shopping
• 11. Business and the Ladder of Needs
• 12. Consumer Self-Knowledge
• 13. "Giving Customers What They Want"
• 14. The Entrepreneur and the Artist
• 15. What Advertising Can Learn from Art
• 16. What the Luxury Sector Does for Us
• 17. On Using Sex to Sell
• 18. Understanding Brand Promises
• 19. Consumer Education: On Learning How to Spend
• 20. Good Materialism
• 21. Why We Hate Cheap Things
• 22. Why We Continue to Love Expensive Things
• 23. Why Advertising Is so Annoying - but Doesn't Have to Be
• 24. On Good Demand
• 25. On Consumption and Status Anxiety
• 26. On the Responsibility of the Consumer
• 27. Adverts Know What We Want - They Just Can't Sell It to us
• 28. On the True Desires of the Rich
• 01. How to Be Original
• 02. When Are We Truly Productive?
• 03. The Importance of the Siesta
• 04. Career Therapy
• 05. On Meritocracy
• 06. The Vocation Myth
• 07. The Good Sides of Work
• 08. The Good Office
• 09. The EQ Office
• 10. Good Salaries: What We Earn - and What We’re Worth
• 11. What Good Business Should Be
• 12. On the Pleasures of Work
• 01. How Does An Emotionally Healthy Person Relate To Their Career?
• 02. The Concept of Voluntary Poverty
• 03. The Dangers of Having Too Little To Do
• 04. How Could a Working Life Be Meaningful?
• 05. On Learning to Live Deeply Rather than Broadly
• 06. What They Forget to Teach You at School
• 07. Authentic Work
• 08. Why We Need to Work
• 09. How We Came to Desire a Job We Could Love
• 10. Why Work Is So Much Easier than Love
• 11. Work and Maturity
• 12. How Your Job Shapes Your Identity
• 13. Authentic Work
• 01. Do We Need to Read the News?
• 02. On Gossip
• 03. How the Media Damages Our Faith in Humanity
• 04. Why We Secretly Love Bad News
• 05. Celebrity Crushes
• 06. On Switching Off the News
• 07. We've Been Here Before
• 08. In Praise of Bias
• 09. The News from Without - and the News from Within
• 10. History as a Corrective to News
• 11. Emotional Technology
• 12. What's Wrong with the Media
• 13. On the Dangers of the Internet
• 14. On Taking Digital Sabbaths
• 15. On the Role of Censorship
• 16. On the Role of Disasters
• 17. On the Role of Art in News
• 18. Tragedies and Ordinary Lives in the Media
• 19. On the Failures of Economic News
• 20. On Health News
• 21. What State Broadcasters Should Do
• 22. On the Role of Cheerful News
• 23. On News and Kindness
• 24. On Maniacs and Murderers
• 01. The United States and Happiness
• 02. Political Emotional Maturity
• 03. On Feeling Offended
• 04. A Guide to Good Nationalism
• 05. Why We Do - After All - Care about Politics
• 06. Why Socrates Hated Democracy
• 07. The Fragility of Good Government
• 08. Romantic vs. Classical Voters
• 09. Africa after Independence
• 01. Should I Follow My Dreams?
• 02. How to Retire Early
• 03. The Agonies of Choice
• 04. The Creative Itch
• 05. Broadening the Job Search
• 06. Our Families and Our Careers
• 07. The Challenges of Choosing a Career
• 08. On Career Crises
• 09. The Output/Input Confusion
• 10. Finding a Mission
• 11. How to Serve
• 12. Why Work-Life Balance is an Illusion
• 13. On Gratitude – and Motivation
• 14. How to Find Fulfilling Work
• 15. On the Origins of Motivation at Work
• 16. On Becoming an Entrepreneur
• 17. On Being an Unemployed Arts Graduate
• 01. On Small Talk at the Office
• 02. On Falling Apart at the Office
• 03. The Sorrows of Competition
• 04. What Is That Sunday Evening Feeling?
• 05. How Parents Get in the Way of Our Career Plans
• 06. Why Modern Work Is So Boring
• 07. Why Pessimism is the Key to Good Government
• 08. The Sorrows of Colleagues
• 09. The Sorrows of Commercialisation
• 10. The Sorrows of Standardisation
• 11. Confidence in the System
• 12. Job Monogamy
• 13. The Duty Trap
• 14. The Perfectionist Trap
• 15. On Professional Failure
• 16. Nasty Businesses
• 17. The Job Investment Trap
• 18. How Your Job Shapes Your Identity
• 19. The Pains of Leadership
• 20. Would It Be Better for Your Job If You Were Celibate?
• 21. On Stress and Inner Voices
• 22. On Being Wary of Simple-Looking Issues
• 23. On Commuting
• 24. On the Sorrows of Work
• 25. On Misemployment
• 26. On Guilt-trips and Charm
• 01. The Dangers of People Who Have Been to Boarding School
• 02. Giving Up on Being Special
• 03. The Problem with Individualism
• 04. Winners and Losers in the Race of Life
• 05. Being on the Receiving End of Pity
• 06. Shakespeare: 'When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state...'
• 07. Overcoming the Need to Be Exceptional
• 08. On the Loss of Reputation
• 09. The Secret Sorrows of Over-Achievers
• 10. You Are Not What You Earn
• 11. Artistic Philanthropy
• 12. The Need to Keep Believing in Luck
• 13. On Glamour
• 14. The Incumbent Problem
• 15. How to Cope with Snobbery
• 16. On the Dangers of Success
• 17. On Doing Better Than Our Parents
• 18. Success at School vs. Success in Life
• 19. Why We Look Down on People Who Don’t Earn Very Much
• 20. What Is 'Success'?
• 21. On Children and Power
• 22. On Pleasure in the Downfall of the Mighty
• 23. On Status and Democracy
• 24. On Failure and Success in the Game of Fame
• 25. On Envy
• 26. A Philosophical Exercise for Envy
• 27. On the Envy of Politicians
• 28. On Consumption and Status Anxiety
• 29. On the Desire for Fame
• 30. On Fame and Sibling Rivalry
• 01. Why Humanity Destroyed Itself
• 02. How Science Could - at Last - Properly Replace Religion
• 03. Our Forgotten Craving for Community
• 04. Why isn't the Future here yet?
• 05. On Changing the World
• 06. What Community Centres Should Be Like
• 07. On Seduction
• 08. The Importance of Utopian Thinking
• 09. Art is Advertising for What We Really Need
• 10. Why the World Stands Ready to Be Changed
• 11. On the Desire to Change the World
• 12. Utopian Collective Pride
• 13. Envy of a Utopian Future
• 14. Utopian Artificial Intelligence
• 15. Utopian Education
• 16. Utopian Marriage
• 17. Utopian Film
• 18. Utopian Culture
• 19. Utopian Festivals
• 20. Utopian Business Consultancy
• 21. Utopian Capitalism
• 22. Utopian Government
• 23. Utopian Media
• 24. Utopian Tax
• 25. Utopian Celebrity Culture
• 26. The Future of the Banking Industry
• 27. The Future of the Communications Industry
• 28. The Future of the Hotel Industry

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Home Essay Samples Life Self Awareness

Reflecting on How Well You Know Yourself

Table of contents, the significance of self-awareness, the challenges of self-discovery, exploring the layers within, the power of reflection, the transformative journey, references:.

• Tasha Eurich. (2017). "Insight: The Surprising Truth About How Others See Us, How We See Ourselves, and Why the Answers Matter More Than We Think."
• Daniel Goleman. (1995). "Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ."
• John D. Mayer, Peter Salovey, & David R. Caruso. (2008). "Emotional Intelligence: New Ability or Eclectic Traits?" American Psychologist, 63(6), 503-517.
• Carl Rogers. (1980). "A Way of Being." Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
• Donna Hicks. (2011). "Dignity: The Essential Role It Plays in Resolving Conflict." Yale University Press.

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UConn Today

August 7, 2018 | Kenneth Best - UConn Communications

Know Thyself: The Philosophy of Self-Knowledge

Dating back to an ancient Greek inscription, the injunction to 'know thyself' has encouraged people to engage in a search for self-understanding. Philosophy professor Mitchell Green discusses its history and relevance to the present.

From Socrates to today's undergraduates, philosophy professor Mitchell Green discusses the history and current relevance of the human quest for self-knowledge. (Getty Images)

UConn philosopher Mitchell S. Green leads a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) titled Know Thyself: The Value and Limits of Self-Knowledge  on the online learning platform Coursera. The course is based on his 2018 book (published by Routledge) of the same name. He recently spoke with Ken Best of UConn Today about the philosophy and understanding of self-knowledge. This is an edited transcript of their discussion.

Q. ‘Know Thyself’ was carved into stone at the entrance to Apollo’s temple at Delphi in Greece, according to legend. Scholars, philosophers, and civilizations have debated this question for a long time. Why have we not been able to find the answer?

A. I’m not sure that every civilization or even most civilizations have taken the goal to achieve self-knowledge as being among the most important ones. It comes and goes. It did have cachet in the Greece of 300-400 BC. Whether it had similar cachet 200 years later or had something like cultural importance in the heyday of Roman civilization is another question. Of course some philosophers would have enjoined people to engage in a search for self-understanding; some not so much. Likewise, think about the Middle Ages. There’s a case in which we don’t get a whole lot of emphasis on knowing the self, instead the focus was on knowing God. It’s only when Descartes comes on the scene centuries later that we begin to get more of a focus on introspection and understanding ourselves by looking within. Also, the injunction to “know thyself” is not a question, and would have to be modified in some way to pose a question. However, suppose the question is, “Is it possible to know oneself, either in part or fully.” In that case, I’d suggest that we’ve made considerable progress in answering this question over the last two millennia, and in the Know Thyself book, and in the MOOC of the same name, I try to guide readers and students through some of what we have learned.

Q. You point out that the shift Descartes brought about is a turning point in Western philosophy.

A. Right. It’s for various reasons cultural, political, economic, and ideological that the norm of self-knowledge has come and gone with the tides through Western history. Even if we had been constantly enjoined to achieve self-knowledge for the 2,300 years since the time Socrates spoke, just as Sigmund Freud said about civilization – that civilization is constantly being created anew and everyone being born has to work their way up to being civilized being – so, too, the project of achieving self-knowledge is a project for every single new member of our species. No one can be given it at birth. It’s not an achievement you get for free like a high IQ or a prominent chin. Continuing to beat that drum, to remind people of the importance of that, is something we’ll always be doing. I’m doubtful we’ll ever reach a point we can all say: Yup, we’re good on that. We’ve got that covered, we’ve got self-knowledge down. That’s a challenge for each of us, every time somebody is born. I would also say, given the ambient, environmental factors as well as the predilections that we’re born with as part of our cognitive and genetic nature, there are probably pressures that push against self-knowledge as well. For instance, in the book I talk about the cognitive immune system that tends to make us spin information in our own favor. When something goes bad, there’s a certain part of us, hopefully within bounds, that tends to see the glass as half full rather than half empty. That’s probably a good way of getting yourself up off the floor after you’ve been knocked down.

Q. Retirement planners tell us you’re supposed to know yourself well enough to know what your needs are going to be – create art or music, or travel – when you have all of your time to use. At what point should that point of getting to know yourself better begin?

A. I wouldn’t encourage a 9-year-old to engage in a whole lot of self-scrutiny, but I would say even when you’re young some of those indirect, especially self-distancing, types of activities, can be of value. Imagine a 9-year-old gets in a fight on the playground and a teacher asks him: Given what you said to the other kid that provoked the fight, if he had said that to you, how would you feel? That might be intended to provoke an inkling of self-knowledge – if not in the form of introspection, in the form of developing empathetic skills, which I think is part of self-knowledge because it allows me to see myself through another’s eyes. Toward the other end of the lifespan, I’d also say in my experience lots of people who are in, or near, retirement have the idea they’re going to stop working and be really happy. But I find in some cases that this expectation is not realistic because so many people find so much fulfillment, and rightly so, in their work. I would urge people to think about what it is that gives them satisfaction? Granted we sometimes find ourselves spitting nails as we think about the challenges our jobs present to us. But in some ways that frequent grumbling, the kind of hair-pulling stress and so forth, these might be part of what makes life fulfilling. More importantly, long-term projects, whether as part of one’s career or post-career, tend I think to provide more intellectual and emotional sustenance than do the more ephemeral activities such as cruises, safaris, and the like.

Q. We’re on a college campus with undergraduates trying to learn more about themselves through what they’re studying. They’re making decisions on what they might want to do with the rest of their life, taking classes like philosophy that encourage them to think about this. Is this an optimal time for this to take place?

A. For many students it’s an optimal time. I consider one component of a liberal arts education to be that of cultivation of the self. Learning a lot of stuff is important, but in some ways that’s just filling, which might be inert unless we give it form, or structure. These things can be achieved through cultivation of the self, and if you want to do that you have to have some idea of how you want it to grow and develop, which requires some inkling of what kind of person you think you are and what you think you can be. Those are achievements that students can only attain by trying things and seeing what happens. I am not suggesting that a freshman should come to college and plan in some rigorous and lockstep way to learn about themselves, cultivate themselves, and bring themselves into fruition as some fully formed adult upon graduation. Rather, there is much more messiness; much more unpredictable try things, it doesn’t work, throw it aside, try something else. In spite of all that messiness and ambient chaos, I would also say in the midst of that there is potential for learning about yourself; taking note of what didn’t go well, what can I learn from that? Or that was really cool, I’d like to build on that experience and do more of it. Those are all good ways of both learning about yourself and constructing yourself. Those two things can go hand-in-hand. Self-knowledge, self-realization, and self-scrutiny can happen, albeit in an often messy and unpredictable way for undergraduates. It’s also illusory for us to think at age 22 we can put on our business clothes and go to work and stop with all that frivolous self-examination. I would urge that acquiring knowledge about yourself, understanding yourself is a lifelong task.

Q. There is the idea that you should learn something new every day. A lot of people who go through college come to understand this, while some think after graduation, I’m done with that. Early in the book, you talk about Socrates’ defense of himself when accused of corrupting students by teaching them in saying: I know what I don’t know, which is why I ask questions.

It seems to me the beginning of wisdom of any kind, including knowledge of ourselves, is acknowledgment of the infirmity of our beliefs and the paucity of our knowledge. — Mitchell S. Green

A. That’s very important insight on his part. That’s something I would be inclined to yell from the rooftops, in the sense that one big barrier to achieving anything in the direction of self-knowledge is hubris, thinking that we do know, often confusing our confidence in our opinions with thinking that confidence is an indication of my degree of correctness. We feel sure, and take that surety itself to be evidence of the truth of what we think. Socrates is right to say that’s a cognitive error, that’s fallacious reasoning. We should ask ourselves: Do I know what I take myself to know? It seems to me the beginning of wisdom of any kind, including knowledge of ourselves, is acknowledgment of the infirmity of our beliefs and the paucity of our knowledge; the fact that opinions we have might just be opinions. It’s always astonishing to me the disparity between the confidence with which people express their opinions, on one hand, and the negligible ability they have to back them up, especially those opinions that go beyond just whether they’re hungry or prefer chocolate over vanilla. Those are things over which you can probably have pretty confident opinions. But when it comes to politics or science, history or human psychology, it’s surprising to me just how gullible people are, not because they believe what other people say, so to speak, but rather they believe what they themselves say. They tend to just say: Here is what I think. It seems obvious to me and I’m not willing to even consider skeptical objections to my position.

Q. You also bring into the fold the theory of adaptive unconscious – that we observe and pick up information but we don’t realize it at the time. How much does that feed into people thinking that they know themselves better than they do and know more than they think they do?

A. It’s huge. There’s a chapter in the book on classical psychoanalysis and Freud. I argue that the Freudian legacy is a broken one, in the sense that while his work is incredibly interesting – he made a lot of provocative and ingenious claims interesting – surprisingly few of them have been borne out with empirical evidence. This is a less controversial view than it was in the past. Experimental psychologists in the 1970s and 80s began to ask how many of those Freudian claims about the unconscious can be established in a rigorous, experimental way? The theory of the adaptive unconscious is an attempt to do that; to find out how much of the unconscious mind that Freud posited is real, and what is it like. One of the main findings is that the unconscious mind is not quite as bound up, obsessed with, sexuality and violence as posited by Freud. It’s still a very powerful system, but not necessarily a thing to be kept at bay in the way psychoanalysis would have said. According to Freud, a great deal with the unconscious poses a constant threat to the well-functioning of civilized society, whereas for people like Tim Wilson, Tanya Chartrand, Daniel Gilbert, Joseph LeDoux, Paul Ekman, and many others, we’ve got a view that says that in many ways having an adaptive unconsciousness is a useful thing, an outsourcing of lots of cognition. It allows us to process information, interpret it, without having to consciously, painstakingly, and deliberately calculate things. It’s really good in many ways that we have adaptive unconscious. On the other hand, it tends to predispose us, for example, to things like prejudice. Today there is a discussion about so-called implicit bias, which has taught us that because we grew up watching Hollywood movies where protagonist heroes were white or male, or both; saw stereotypes in advertising that have been promulgated – that experience, even if I have never had a consciously bigoted, racist, or sexist thought in my life, can still cause me to make choices that are biased. That’s a part of the message on the theory of adaptive unconscious we would want to take very seriously and be worried about, because it can affect our choices in ways that we’re not aware of.

Q. With all of this we’ve discussed, what kind of person would know themselves well?

A. Knowing oneself well would, I suspect, be a multi-faceted affair, only one part of which would have to do with introspection as that notion is commonly understood. One of these facets involves acknowledging your limitations, “owning them” as my Department of Philosophy colleague Heather Battaly would put it. Those limitations can be cognitive – my lousy memory that distorts information, my tendency to sugarcoat any bad news I may happen to receive? Take the example of a professor reading student evaluations. It’s easy to forget the negative ones and remember the positive ones – a case of “confirmation bias,” as that term is used in psychology. Knowing that I tend to do that, if that’s what I tend to do, allows me to take a second look, as painful as it might be. Again, am I overly critical of others? Do I tend to look at the glass as overly half full or overly half empty? Those are all limitations of the emotional kind, or at least have an important affective dimension. I suspect a person who knows herself well knows how to spot the characteristic ways in which she “spins” or otherwise distorts positive or negative information, and can then step back from such reactions, rather than taking them as the last word.

I’d also go back to empathy, knowing how to see things from another person’s point of view. It is not guaranteed to, but is often apt to allow me to see myself more effectively, too. If I can to some extent put myself into your shoes, then I also have the chance to be able to see myself through your eyes and that might get me to realize things difficult to see from the first-person perspective. Empathizing with others who know me might, for instance, help to understand why they sometimes find me overbearing, cloying, or quick to judge.

Q. What would someone gain in self-knowledge by listening to someone appraising them and speaking to them about how well they knew them? How does that dynamic help?

A. It can help, but it also can be shocking. Experiments have suggested other people’s assessments of an individual can often be very out of line with that person’s self-assessment. It’s not clear those other person’s assessments are less accurate – in some cases they’re more accurate – as determined by relatively well-established objective psychological assessments. Third-person assessments can be both difficult to swallow – bitter medicine – and also extremely valuable. Because they’re difficult to swallow, I would suggest taking them in small doses. But they can help us to learn about ourselves such things as that we can be unaccountably solicitous, or petty, or prone to one-up others, or thick-skinned. I’ve sometimes found myself thinking while speaking to someone, “If you could hear yourself talking right now, you might come to realize …” Humblebragging is a case in point, in which someone is ostensibly complaining about a problem, but the subtext of what they’re saying might be self-promoting as well.

All this has implications for those of us who teach. At the end of the semester I encourage my graduate assistants to read course evaluations; not to read them all at once, but instead try to take one suggestion from those evaluations that they can work on going into the next semester. I try to do the same. I would not, however, expect there ever to be a point at which one could say, “Ah! Now I fully know myself.” Instead, this is more likely a process that we can pursue, and continue to benefit from, our entire lives.

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Know Thyself: A Short Essay on The Importance of Knowing

Dr. Jeremy Divinity

Stop for a moment.

Take a deep breath in, now breathe out slowly.

Be mindful of your surroundings and begin to look around the room that you are in. Do you notice anything that you haven’t noticed before? Focus your mind on the noises that are ambient in your environment. Are there any sounds that draw your attention?

Now repeat.

Take a deep breath in, now breathe out.

Begin to look inward, feel your heartbeat throughout your body. Feel your breath as it rises from the bottom of your stomach, makes its way up through your chest, and the warm air leaves your lips. Be mindful. Be present. Be you.

Take a moment to find yourself. Take a moment to get to know yourself and who you truly are. By being present within the now, it allows us to disregard everything that is outside of ourselves. We rid ourselves of the past, we stop looking into the future, and we disconnect from the external world and society that plagues our being.

Know yourself, know thyself, and be yourself.

But what exactly does that mean? Is it some cliché Instagram post or Facebook status? I’ll tell you what it isn’t, to find yourself, isn’t a consequence of any outside forces, actions, beings, or persons. There is no-thing outside of whom you are that is the key or gatekeeper to whatever lies within.

The ancient Greeks traveled to the Oracle at Delphi to seek wisdom and knowledge. Before they entered the Oracle, there above the entrance, was in scripted “Gnothi Seauton” or translated “Know Thyself”. This saying was purposefully placed above the oracle, and would soon after be a prominent hashtag, as those who seek wisdom must first know who they are before obtaining any wisdom and enlightenment from outside forces.

If you know yourself, you will come to realize that everything that you need is within you. All of the power in the world lies within each and every one of us. It is deep within, waiting to be unburied.

“We say act yourselves, not acknowledging some have never met themselves”.

Those who truly know who they are didn’t always have the easiest path or journey to self-actualization. They fought with society and the image that they were told to be, and, to play the part. They had battles with their emotions, some they won and many they lost. They went to war with their insecurities, a victory often hard won.

We don’t meet or get to know ourselves just by being born. Birth is something that is gifted, a gift that is unknown to us, at least until we have enough self-awareness to realize the blessing of what it means to be alive. However, being alive and its accomplice of what is called life, is still incomplete if you never find your reason of why. Of why you are who you are, of why you were gifted life and to know what it means to be you.

“Maybe it’s dumb to look for signs from the universe. Maybe we don’t need the universe to tell us what we really want. Maybe we already know that, deep down”.

Let’s just be who we really are. It takes continuous self-reflection to get to know who you are. If you are like me, this self-reflection is often un-voluntary and begins to force itself from the deepest cracks of your internal being. But, it is also a sign of your internal power, which is, at the very least, a sign of order. That life is okay the way that it is. Everything that is outside of your own being begins to show itself as it truly is. They are things that you can mold, bend, and adjust accordingly to fit into your reality.

Nothing outside of yourself has any dictation on who you are and how you go about your life. When you know yourself, you will realize this, that life is so simple and that you control your own destiny.

Knowing who you are will always be more important than others knowing who you are. Some people will never get it; their egos won’t let them. Ego is the main threat to self-awareness; it is the evil villain in your superhero story. We rid ourselves of ego through practice, such as mindfulness, and as a result, we begin to be at peace.

When we get to know ourselves, we get to know the world. We start to see other people as our brothers and sisters. We begin to see life in the way that it is, that we are all truly connected and infinite beings. Knowing yourself is the greatest weapon that you can have in your arsenal. Its power lies in your strength and the confidence gained when you truly, know you.

Focus on who you are, block everything else out, nothing else matters.

This is a lifestyle & personal development blog to inspire you, motivate you, and to expand your self-knowledge and…

jeremydivinity.com

Written by Dr. Jeremy Divinity

Exploring ways of being. Critical Scholar, Strategist, Writer. Located in Los Angeles @Dr.Yermzus on Instagram.

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Self-Reflection 101: What is self-reflection? Why is reflection important? And how to reflect.

Socrates famously said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

And while this dictum is certainly true, self-reflection is not necessarily an easy thing to practice. We live in an incredibly fast-paced world. Our mobile phones are constantly buzzing, social media is infinitely calling, and Netflix always has something new to binge on.

Taking the time for reflection is a bit of a lost art. Most of us, unfortunately, are living unexamined lives.

This shouldn’t be the case. Few things are more valuable than self-reflection.

But what exactly is self-reflection? And what are some simple ways to practice it?

In this article, we’re going to break down the what, why, and how of self-reflection.

Ready? Let’s get started...

What Is Self-Reflection? A Self-Reflection Definition

Simply put, self-reflection (also known as “personal reflection”) is taking the time to think about, meditate on, evaluate, and give serious thought to your behaviors, thoughts, attitudes, motivations, and desires. It’s the process of diving deep into your thoughts and emotions and motivations and determining the great, “Why?” behind them.

Personal reflection allows you to analyze your life from both a macro and micro level. At a macro level, you can evaluate the overall trajectory of your life. You can see where you’re headed, determine whether you’re happy with the direction, and make adjustments as necessary.

At a micro level, you can evaluate your responses to particular circumstances and events. Geil Browning, Ph.D., talks about personal reflection like this:

"Reflection is a deeper form of learning that allows us to retain every aspect of any experience, be it personal or professional — why something took place, what the impact was, whether it should happen again — as opposed to just remembering that it happened. It's about tapping into every aspect of the experience, clarifying our thinking, and honing in on what really matters to us."

Practicing self-reflection takes discipline and intentionality. It requires pressing pause on the chaos of life and simply taking the time to think and ponder about your life, which is not an easy thing for many people to do. But it’s an incredibly valuable practice.

This short video captures the importance of self-reflection and introspection beautifully:

The Importance of Self-Reflection

Without self-reflection, we simply go through life without thinking, moving from one thing to the next without making time to evaluate whether things are actually going well. We don’t pause to think. To analyze. To determine what is going well and what isn’t working. The unfortunate result is that we often get stuck.

For example, a lack of personal reflection may lead us to stay in a job we don’t like or a relationship that isn’t going well.

A lack of reflection causes us to simply keep running, trying to keep up with things even if things aren’t going well. We feel like we’re simply trying to keep our heads above water. We end up doing the same things over and over again, even if those things aren’t producing the results we had hoped for.

The Benefits Of Self-Reflection

Yes, taking time for self-reflection can be difficult. It can be challenging to take the necessary time to step back and reflect on what truly matters. Nevertheless, there are numerous wonderful benefits of self-reflection and we should all make time for it.

It Allows You To Gain Perspective

Emotions can cloud your judgment and you can lose sight of what truly matters. Some things seem bigger and worse than they truly are.

Self-reflection allows you to take a step back and gain perspective on what matters and what can be ignored. It allows you to process events and achieve clarity on them.

It Helps You Respond More Effectively

Most of the time, we simply react to whatever circumstances come our way. This can lead to us saying and doing things we regret. When we’re in a reactive mode, we don’t take the necessary time to consider our actions and words.

Personal reflection allows you to consider the consequences of your words and actions. It also enables you to consider the best, most effective, most helpful way to act in a given situation.

It Promotes Learning and Understanding

When we go through life without pausing to think and reflect, we don’t learn or gain a deeper understanding of life. We simply move from one thing to the next, never pausing to consider what valuable lessons we might learn.

Self-reflection, on the other hand, enables us to evaluate and process what we’ve experienced. It allows us to think deeply and ponder the meaning of our circumstances, emotions, and motivations. It enables us to live holistic, integrated, and healthy lives.

Self-Assessment Sample

So how exactly do you perform self-reflection? How do you appropriately and helpfully reflect on yourself and your life?

One easy way to perform this self-reflection exercise is to use a journal (an online journal or print journal ). Simply write out these questions and then take your time to thoughtfully answer them. Make sure that you don’t rush. Pause and ponder. Think deeply about what truly matters to you.

First, determine the period of time you plan to look back on. Do you want to look back on the last week? Last month? Last year? Last 5 years?

Then, begin by taking stock of what actually happened during this period. If you already keep a journal, this step will be easier for you, and perhaps a solid reminder of the value of keeping a journal.

Take a look through your planner, journal, and photos, and list out the highlights and lowlights.

Stuck? Here are a few tips:

• Did you travel anywhere this year?
• Experience any personal or family milestones?
• What changed in your relationships, work, or passion projects?

Look back at your new list of highlights and lowlights try and see if there are any patterns.

Do your highlights generally involve certain people in your life? Or any specific activities?

It can be difficult to revisit lowlights, but it is also a great way to find peace and growth.

For each lowlight, ask yourself: Was this within my control?

• If yes , ask yourself what you may do differently next time.
• If no , ask yourself how you may find peace with it.

Write down both the highlights and lowlights in your journal, then take time to reflect. What things do you want to accomplish over the next month, year, and five years? What do you want to change about your life? What things can you improve on?

Taking the time to walk through this exercise will help bring clarity and perspective to your life.

A Guided Self-Assessment

Looking back at your chosen time period, rate yourself on a scale of -5 to +5 on each of the following six areas of your life.

After selecting a number, write what made you feel that way. Expressing the emotions and feelings that you have, is a great way to have a deeper and more meaningful reflection.

• Mind - Do you feel clear-headed, engaged, and intellectually challenged?
• Body - Does your body feel healthy, nourished, and strong?
• Soul - Do you feel at peace and connected to the world around you?
• Work - Do you feel interested in and fulfilled by your work?
• Play - Do you feel joyful? Are you engaging in activities that bring you joy?
• Love - Do you feel positive about the relationships in your life?

Don’t rush through this self-assessment. Take the necessary time to reflect on each area of your life. If you rush, you’ll miss out on the value of self-reflection.

Self-Reflection Questions to Ask Yourself (What Are Good Questions for Self-Reflection?

Self-reflection questions are powerful tools you can wield to inspire and empower you to discover your own inner truth.

Still, it’s often hard to know where to start.

Be gentle with yourself.

Question-asking is a skill to develop like anything else, and that takes time and practice.

But the more questions you ask, the easier it will get.

Here are some questions for self-reflection pulled from our Holstee Reflection Cards deck to get you started:

If you could change anything about your childhood, what would it be?

What is something creative you did when you were younger that you no longer do? Why don’t you do it anymore?

What’s your superpower?

What types of things have you collected in the past?

Use these questions as a starting point to come up with your own.

You know yourself best, and your best self-reflection questions are just under the surface, waiting for you to ask them.

When Should You Practice Self-Reflection?

There are a number of times when self-reflection is particularly helpful. First, it can be useful to do it for a few minutes each week. You don’t have to go through all of the questions or take hours to do it. Focus on what has been on your mind that particular week.

It can also be helpful to practice self-reflection as an end of month personal review and end of year personal review.

In other words, at the end of each month and year, do an in-depth personal review of your life. Look back over the previous days and months and analyze your life. This practice will provide you with a helpful perspective and ensure that you are living life to the fullest.

Don’t Live The Unexamined Life

When we fail to reflect on our lives, we lose perspective, get caught up in things that don’t matter, and often lose sight of the things that are most important. Socrates was right when he said that the unexamined life isn’t worth living.

Don’t live an unexamined life. Practice self-reflection today.

Interested in developing your reflection practice? We built Reflection.app, a free online journal that helps you capture your highlights and lowlights as they happen, and shares back your entries to your for guided reflection at the end of each month and year.

The team at Holstee also uses a similar framework for their annual Guided Reflection Journal .

Looking for self-reflection questions you can use in a group or take with you? Check out Holstee's deck of Reflection Cards .

Are you a practitioner looking to support your clients with reflection exercises? Check out Quenza and send out stunning digital activities to clients.

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Levie's Musing

Reflection on knowing oneself.

  In this chapter I have known that self can be defined in various ways: philosophically,psychologically,spiritually, and also in thoughts, actions, and behaviors. Personality was also defined.And it was stated how our personality can change depending on the situation that we are in. Personality is also influenced by our nature and nurture, and can be measured through different personality tests such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). There were also different personality theories and one of the is The Big Five or Five factor model by Costa and Mcrae,which states and defines five dimensions of personality such as openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion,agreeableness,and neurotiscm.

  Of all things mentioned above I believe that this chapter focuses more on knowing our “self”. Since self has been defined in a lot of ways. but regardless of this it just about knowing who we are.  As what Socrates have said, “Know Thyself” which indeed was true. I believe that as a human we should know our self, starting from the simplest details like what’s our favorite food?,what’s our hobbies? the genre of the music that we listen to, or our favorite color. To know one self is not easy especially to the people who are currently in the adolescent stage. As an adolescent we experience different struggles or troubles when it comes to knowing who we really are. But once you tried to get to know yourself it’ll feel so great. Its like you’ve accomplished one of the things that one has to achieve in life. Knowing yourself can be very challenging, especially for those people who believe that they do not know who they really are yet, and that they’re still on their journey to know themselves. But no matter how hard or challenging it may seem especially with all the different influence around it will all be worth it in the end. Yes it may take time, since you have to learn, explore, and discover a lot of things, but it will definitely be worth it.You will also understand more about the complexity of us as an individual, we’ll realize how we differ from the others. But regardless of this at the  end of the day, I believe that one of the great things is knowing thyself, for you know who you are as an individual no matter  what other people will say about you. Because you simply know that what they say won’t matter for you know yourself better. 🙂

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Home / Essay Samples / Philosophy / Socrates / Socrates Philosophy of Self and Personal Reflection

Socrates Philosophy of Self and Personal Reflection

• Category: Philosophy
• Topic: Existence , Personal Philosophy , Socrates

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