- For decades, a billion-dollar
self-help industry has been built around helping
people find their true selves, discover their purpose, and
unearth buried emotions, but I'm here to tell
you that they're wrong. - Well, I can tell you,
I've never been wrong once. - People view self-awareness like money. If you have none, then you
desperately need to get some, but if you even have some, you can always benefit from having more. But there's recent evidence suggesting that self-awareness
is actually not like money, it's actually a lot more like medicine. If you're sick, you definitely need some, but if you're already healthy, too much could actually
make you, well, sick. In this video, I'm gonna explain how self-awareness can both help and hurt us and what we can do about it. But to understand how
self-awareness can cut both ways, we need to start by taking
a deeper look at a practice we're all probably familiar with, therapy. Despite data from millions
of people over a century, psychologists still
don't totally understand why therapy works. And how does that make you feel? Over the past hundred years, clinical psychology has produced
as many forms of therapy as Adam Sandler has cheesy romcom movies. The field is an alphabet
soup of modalities. You've got CBT, AEDP, DBT, IPT, ACT, CPP, SFBI, and REBT. You've got gestalt,
existential, interpersonal, Rogerian, Jungian, humanistic,
regression, psychoanalysis, and of course everybody's
favorite, family therapy. - That was a lot. - With so many approaches to therapy, researchers were rightly curious about which ones were
actually the most effective. They wanted to know which ones
worked and which ones didn't. So they ran a bunch of studies to see which therapies
produce the best results, and the answer will probably surprise you. It's all of them, they all work. Well, kind of. Pretty much every modality
produces, on average, relatively similar results. They work decently, but not perfectly. Some have slightly better
results than others, but on the whole, just the fact that you're doing
therapy has way more impact than the type of therapy you choose to do. In fact, dozens of studies have struggled to find
much measurable benefit to the therapist's
training and credentials. Many studies show that people benefit from
speaking to thoughtful amateurs just as much as they do professionals. Now, this is kind of stunning because it suggests that for all the theorizing and frameworking over the last 150 years from
Sigmund Freud to Dr. Phil, the content of the therapy itself actually isn't that important. What seems to be important is to simply get a person
in a room regularly to talk about their problems to another human being who is
thoughtful and listens well. That's the 1% that drives
99% of the results. The value of the therapy
isn't the therapy, it's the context, the environment. Really? You're paying to have a place to go where you can sort out your shit in front of someone trustworthy and not be judged. Everything else, the fancy acronyms, the degrees and frameworks, the couch, it seems to really just be an excuse to get you into that room
and into that context. Whoa, okay. So if most of the value of therapy is merely getting into a room and critically discussing
your own thoughts, ideas, and emotions, couldn't you just call a trusted friend and do it with them instead? Do we even need therapy at all? It turns out, you don't. In fact, this is probably why
journaling is so effective. You are essentially
accomplishing the same things as most therapy. You are creating a context in which you can express your feelings in a way that feels non-judgmental so that you can then
consider those feelings more objectively. And it turns out, in some ways, this might even be superior to therapy, which brings me to the sponsor
of this video, Day One. Day One is the most
popular journaling software in the world. It is available on any device, so you can jot down your thoughts and keep them secure forever. I first used Day One back in 2014 when I was dating my now wife. It's been fun to go back and look through some
of those early entries and see how absolutely clueless I was. But this is the advantage
that journaling has over something like therapy or counseling. It keeps a record of your
thoughts and a history. Day One is fully end-to-end encrypted and requires your biometrics to access, so your data is secure and
cannot be accessed by anyone. With their premium account, you get unlimited images,
videos, and journals, and you can access it from anywhere. Sign up now with the
link in the description to get your first two months for free. The design is beautiful,
and frankly, my only regret is that I haven't
journaled more consistently over the years. You can get two months of
Day One premium for free if you use my link at
dayoneapp.com/markmanson. It's in the description, check it out. So, why does writing out
our thoughts and feelings on a piece of paper help us? Hell, why does sitting in a
quiet room and meditating, observing our thoughts
and feelings help us? Well, it's because doing these
things help us dis-identify with whatever we're experiencing. Let me explain. The philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer argued that consciousness can
be divided into two parts, the subject and the object. Think of the subject as the observer and the object as whatever is observed. Both aspects are required
in consciousness. There's always something being watched and something doing the watching. Generally, we are the
subject of our consciousness and some external thing is the object. The microphone I'm speaking into is currently the object
of my consciousness, it's what I'm focusing on
and paying attention to, but thoughts and feelings can be the object of our
consciousness as well. I can sit here and imagine the amazing
dinner I'm gonna eat tonight and now that is the object
of my consciousness. As long as I am the subject and some external thought
or thing is the object, then all of my feelings,
impulses, and desires are bundled up into some
intangible subjectivity known as I. This I is then not analyzed or considered. After all, it's not separate. This unexamined subject is
often referred to as the ego. It's only when we turn
our focus on ourselves and make our thoughts and feelings the object of our consciousness that we are able to differentiate them and put them into perspective. "Oh, I'm feeling angry today,
and I didn't realize it." What was once the subject
of my consciousness, my feeling of anger is now the object of my consciousness and is now separate from me, and once separate from me, I can consider my anger
as though it were not me. I can ask myself, "Why does it exist? "What's the purpose? "Is it useful? "Should I even care?" (objects clunking) Ultimately, all the stuff you and I learn, they're just tools, tools for building self-awareness and chipping away at our ego. Therapy does this by some
thoughtful person inviting us to express ourselves and then helping us analyze
our thoughts and feelings. Journaling does this by getting us to write down
our thoughts and feelings, and then meditation does this by helping us observe
our thoughts and feelings as though they're separate from ourselves. This is how self-awareness
can make us better because when our feelings and impulses are undifferentiated from ourselves, they hold control over us. And as long as I'm unaware of my anger, I can't recognize the
transient nature of my anger. As long as I can't see my
biases and insecurities, then I'll never question whether
they're legitimate or not. This is why self-awareness
is a prerequisite for handling any emotional baggage that may be holding us back. The question is, "Is it possible to be
too aware of my anger?" Turns out, it is. (Mark screaming) (intense rock music) (drill whizzing) (lighthearted music) Let's return to the example of therapy. Let's say you've been seeing a
therapist for a couple years, and in that time you've
learned a lot about yourself and made a lotta progress on problems. Tell me about that. You really like your therapist and you feel some sense
of loyalty to them. Yes, yes, yes, okay. But then, something
weird starts happening. You start showing up to
your therapy sessions with nothing to talk about. And how does that make you feel? But you wanna keep improving
and working on yourself, right? So you start thinking really hard about "What could I talk to my therapist about?" And that's where the problem starts. Before, you simply came in and unloaded the big and
heavy stresses and emotions that were burdening you, but now you're actively
scanning through your life, looking for anything that's
even somewhat uncomfortable, even the light little things because you wanna keep the process going. Let's say you've been at
your new job for a year now, but you still don't feel like
you connect your coworkers. In fact, now that you're
thinking about it, you've never really connected
with your coworkers. It's always taken you a really
long time to make friends and this has caused a lot of
frustration and loneliness throughout your life. Why is that? Your therapist predictably
asks about your childhood. You mentioned that your
mother was very protective. It would be very much like her to discourage new friendships with people you didn't know well. Next thing you know, a faint memory materializes in your mind of your mother warning you against playing with
kids across the street. You don't totally remember
where or how this happened, but you have this vivid image in your head of her standing above you saying scary things about
people you don't know. Wow, another breakthrough, or is it? (record scratching) Because what's actually
happening in this example is likely not self-awareness,
but self delusion, and it's dangerous because the two can feel exactly the same. Now, let's back up for a second. (record rewinding) First, you come into therapy without a clear problem in mind. This should be a signal. Your life is going pretty well,
don't fix what's not broken. Second. In order to fulfill your desire to have another problem
to analyze in therapy, your mind naturally
inflates a small problem to make it feel more
important than it actually is. This makes sense. It will get you validation
from your therapist who you really like and it justifies spending 100
some odd dollars to be there. In order to justify this newly inflated problem in your mind, you start scouring vague
and empty memories, trying to materialize something that can justify this new
feeling of loneliness. It turns out, the human
brain is actually really good at inventing memories when the conscious mind
feels it needs one. So, boom, there you go, vague recollections of a stern mother warning you against playing with friends. Now, the above steps have been
well documented and studied. It's called false memory syndrome, and there was a period in
the seventies and eighties where particularly aggressive therapists were inciting fake memories
in their patients regularly and causing disastrous results. It caused this shitstorm and took over a decade for
the profession to recover. It's not really hard to see how
this newfound self-awareness has actually made you worse. Perhaps the best way to think about this is that healthy self-awareness will normalize what is pathological, whereas unhealthy
self-awareness pathologizes what's actually normal. Awareness of mental health
issues is at an all-time high, yet, mental health itself
is at an all-time low. So clearly, the extra
awareness is not helping. Somewhere, something is going wrong. We are no longer normalizing
the pathological, but instead, we may be
pathologizing the normal. And worse, we're teaching young people that this is a normal, healthy,
acceptable way to live. (lighthearted music) I wanna offer a few pieces of advice in case you feel like you are someone who is too aware of their emotions and is constantly self-conscious. Number one. The first thing to do is to stop seeing discomfort or challenges as something to be solved or fixed. Anxiety is a natural and
healthy part of life. Anger can be useful. Fear helps you alive. These are not problems to
be unpacked and solved, but rather simple feedback, and you don't always have
to take the feedback. Second. Don't fix what's not broken. If your life is going
well, then let it go well. Don't look for problems or inflate small problems
into bigger ones. And if someone in your life pressures you to pathologize the normal, be explicit and tell them that's
exactly what they're doing, and to go fuck themselves. Third. Get some physical activity. The best way to quell an overactive mind is to keep the body busy, not only will you physically feel better, but some sort of physical activity will keep your mind off things. And finally, stop giving a fuck. If you're upset about
that thing your mom did, can you change it, can you control it? No? Then just let fucking let it go. And if you're still
struggling to do that, well, I know a guy who wrote a book about it. (upbeat music)
