How and Why to Look Inside Yourself

One of the first skills you need to master on the journey to self-discovery and self-control is the ability to see what’s happening in your own mind from a dispassionate, objective perspective. From our earliest childhood, we see the world from a first-person perspective and very naturally view everything through the lens of “How does this affect me.” But, as you might suspect, the rest of the humans living on the planet, as well as the dispassionate Universe, does not view the world in terms of how it affects you personally. So to master yourself, you must first understand your place in the cosmos, and to do that, you must learn to see yourself from a different perspective than the one you were born with.

It’s easy and quite seductive to think of ourselves as the protagonist in our own story. That the world and all the people that come into and out of our life are just the stage and supporting characters, respectively, but that we are the star of the show. And as the protagonist, we think there are certain rules that apply only to us. This is obviously untrue; consider even the people in your closest circle - family friends, neighbors, workmates. Even in that small of a group, it becomes quickly obvious that everybody can’t be the main character in the story you all share. This is important for a couple of reasons. First, when you stop seeing people as supporting characters in your story and understand that they see themselves as the main character in their story, then their actions start to make a lot more sense, and become a lot more predictable. And secondly, it starts to open up the idea in your mind that you are also a supporting character in more stories than the one where you are the main character. It becomes apparent that spending the time to think about how other people view you can make your own planning and predictive models more accurate, and events then become more likely to manifest in the way you want them to. That’s a useful tool, isn’t it?

So every once in a while - perhaps a couple of times a week as a starting point - it behooves us to look at ourselves as someone else would. How you accomplish that, as a technique, is purely up to personal preference. I personally like to envision a perspective from about thirty feet in the air above my head. Looking down like a video camera, and imagine that I’m elsewhere and just observing the events play out below me. You could also just pick a handful of people in your inner circle and try to put yourself behind their eyes for a moment and look back at yourself and your behavior. Or you could imagine trying to explain your actions to a judge or some neutral third party, and guessing what their opinion might be. However you do it, it’s not only a useful technique in understanding yourself better, it’s also perhaps the quintessential characteristic of intellectual maturity.

But that only addresses our external actions. Most of the actions you take on a daily basis are not external, but internal. The maneuvers you make inside your own mind are no less important, and in truth typically inform and shape the external actions that you take in the outside world. Unfortunately the tricks we just mentioned for seeing ourselves through someone else’s eyes don’t apply very well to our mental processes. Yet it is just as if not more important that you engage in that same perspective shift within the confines of your own mind. Otherwise, no appreciable self-work can ever be accomplished.

To successfully accomplish this, you need to section off a piece of your inner mind and set it to be the observer over the rest of your mental processes. That may sound a little hocus pocus or New Age-y, but it’s not really. In fact, you’ve probably already done something similar any number of times. For example, many of us have an “autopilot” function that performs routine tasks for us while our “main” mind is thinking about something else. Or sometimes you might have a social section of your brain that is used in situations where you need to socialize with other people, and it contains your mannerisms an exercises that you perform while in a social situation. But when these sections of the brain are not needed, they lie dormant in stasis waiting until the next time they are needed. Most likely you sectioned off these purpose-built subroutines when you were very little, and quite possibly unconsciously as you were adapting to a very new environment, so it may have completely escaped your notice that you were sectioning off pieces of your mind like this, but you were not born with these functions. So while you may not remember doing it, you have done this same exercise before, and while it may feel a little awkward and these skills may need some dusting off, you can absolutely do it. You’ve done it before.

If it helps, start with some place comfortable and stress-free, and just picture the process visually in your own mind of piecing off a portion of your own mind like breaking a hunk of bread, and setting it aside, devoting it as an observational process. This portion will watch everything else that is going on in your mind as if from a third party perspective. It will watch what thoughts are going through your head, what emotions are happening. It will gauge the level of activity from frantic to passive, as well as keep an eye out for anything unusual. And it will report what it notices back to the conscious mind as passive information without judgement. “You’re thinking a lot about Kathy today.” “You just got defensive about your eating habits. That’s not typical of you.” “You have been going full-tilt for over 3 hours.” Your conscious mind can then take this information and decide what, if anything, to do about it. “Hm, that’s true, I wonder that’s about,” or “Mm… Ok, but I’m too busy to look at that right now, but I’ll take a look at it later.”

Either way, having this information about yourself is wildly valuable.