The Dark Side of Self-Reflection

Happy Sunday, my friend!

This week — I am curious about one of my key principles of life: self-reflection. Self-reflection takes on many forms, but the main idea is to take time to digest and reflect on the actions you have taken the last couple of days or week. This is extremely useful for those of us looking to improve upon our previous selves and stack up a higher levels of success.

The problem with self-reflection is that the practice becomes vain and many lose themselves in the pursuit of pointless berating rather than acceptance and calm action towards our goals.

Getting lost in self-reflection is a prime result living in the past. Living in the past is our minds way of keeping us from enjoying the present. We need to be aware of hyper-fixation on the past, as the past has already passed!

How effective would your driving be if you only focused on your rear-view mirrors? You would probably get into some accidents due to your focus on what is behind you. Not to say that looking back and reflecting is not important, it’s to say that we need to spend less time reflecting and more time living in the present.

I posed this question to myself the other day while journaling: Do I absolutely need to reflect on everything that happens?

The answer is no. I don’t need to sit down and reflect on why I scrolled on my phone this morning instead of doing my planned reading. The answer is clear and I need to accept it rather than sit around reflecting on something obvious. (Paril knows reading is more effort than scrolling, so he defaulted into the more comfortable routine. He doesn’t need to hate Paril for this decision, he just needs to accept the past and move forward with calm focus.)

Constant self-reflection causes us to freeze up instead of live freely. I have experienced this first hand — it is annoying to live life with the reflection cannon constantly aimed at self. Once I become aware of my extreme self-reflective tendencies and how it was negatively impacting my life experience, I shifted into different behaviors and opened up to the world of self-acceptance and patience. I am just now stepping into this world and it is wonderful. I hope you can join me!

Here are 3 steps I took to get over excessive self-reflection and some lessons I learned along the way! Let’s step into this weeks Corridors of Curiosity.

The Constant Pursuit of Perfect Productivity is Unproductive

The first step was to let go of the extreme self-critical voice in my mind. This voice was often screaming at me to live a perfect life filled with extreme productivity and focus. I am simply not that kind of person (yet!) and even if I got there, would that be very much fun? NO! I don’t care to be a productivity prince, so I decided to let go of the outlandish standards. I have found myself being more productive now that I’m not wasting time hating on myself for being unfocused.

Try this:

1. Identify what your inputs need to be to gain the outputs you’re looking for. Most of the time we don’t need to go crazy with our inputs to gain our outputs. Find your balance.

2. Cut the fat! Subtract the distractions that are causing you to lose focus.

3. Spend time getting your basics under control. It is useless to try to become ultra productive if you’re home is constant mess. Spend time getting things organized before skipping ahead to advanced methods.

This is a more efficient way to approach productivity rather than guilt tripping yourself into increased outputs. You’ll find the the constant stress of being productive is unproductive and be thankful for the shifted focus towards actually getting work completed versus leveling up productivity points.

Ditching Daily Reflections for Mid-Week or Weekly Reflections

The next action I took was to get rid of my daily reflections (at times, I may still reflect daily, but I do not spend more than 5 minutes on it. If something important happened and I need to break it down, I allow myself the time to explore the situation.

Lately, reflecting on my week during a 15-20 minute period has been more impactful. This helps keep the important things from sipping away and allows me to shed the unimportant things. The weekly reflection process is simple and you can tweak it your liking. I start with some questions and then finish off with planning out the upcoming week.

Here are some questions I use for my weekly reflection:

• Did my previous week go how I wanted it to? What didn’t work?

• What experiments am I running this week, if any? (Mental, physical, spiritual, financial)

• What were my daily routines like? Smooth or difficult?

• What went great? What could I improve upon?

• What are my goals for this next week?

Brain Dump via Keyboard (instead of with pen + paper)

As I have mentioned plenty of times before, I love to spend time journaling with pen and paper. However, as far as brain dumping goes, I have shifted to typing into a document. The biggest reason for this is the speed and flow. Typing out my brain dump is just faster than writing it out. The document factor is nice because it keeps everything organized without physical clutter.

I still reflect via pen and paper, I have just shifted my brain dump practice to my computer. This gets the shit out of my mind and onto the document faster than pen and paper. I am thankful for this simple tweak in my process, as it has opened up much more time for work on my projects and goals.

I like to limit my brain dump sessions to about 5-10 minutes. This is just to drop off the things floating around top of mind before I lock in on my focused work.

Closing Thoughts

Self-reflection is such a great tool in our arsenal. We should avoid using this tool all the time, and shift to using it with more focus and dexterity rather than whipping it out at any inconvenience. One of the biggest obstacles I had in accepting this was the fact that some things would fall through the cracks and “get lost” in life. That is not the case at all, I have found that the important reflections are able to shine through cleaner than before. The meaningless reflections come and go with ease, I notice them as they float away.

Have a great week everyone, thanks for your time and attention!

Paril

(I was walking with my dog when the idea for this week’s Corridors of Curiosity came up. I recorded a video with my thoughts so I could write this later on. What a situation we found ourselves in. You should watch this video for a nice laugh!)

pinkyringp

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Parils Top Five Genres of Music

1. Rap/Hip-Hop

2. 90s Country

3. 80s/90s Funk

4. Punk (blink-182 type shit)

5. Classic Rock