Down with soul-searching: how to stop searching for yourself and start living

When wondering how to get rid of self-digging, we are not fully aware of the mechanisms laid down over centuries that force us to conduct an endless internal dialogue. After all, it is human nature to learn and draw lessons not only from successes, but also from failures.

To learn and develop, people have developed the ability to analyze their actions and compare them with the final result. Very often it is the negative experience that becomes more important at the stage of human development. But the problem lies in an exclusively negative, erroneous perception of the experience gained. Therefore, self-examination does not lead to development. Let's figure out how to avoid this.

What is self-examination

Self-examination is a destructive form of introspection that focuses on negative perceptions of one’s own personality and committed actions. Self-examination in psychology is not considered a syndrome or disease. But it involves overly careful analysis, making cognitive errors and obsessing over them. A tendency to self-consciousness can cause the development of anxiety disorders, low self-esteem and even depression. In simple terms, in the abyss of self-digging we bury confidence in ourselves and in the future, but we do not change the future for the better.

Self-examination is aimed primarily at finding mistakes and shortcomings and becomes a reason for new experiences. Constant soul-searching is a kind of malfunction in the mechanism that is responsible for analyzing the experience gained. When engaged in self-examination, a person is unable to give an objective assessment of what is happening.

Signs of self-examination

Always a “glass half empty” . Even if objectively things are going well, a person looks for the smallest roughness and second meanings, behind which there must be something bad.
A constant feeling of guilt and shame for what was done, said, and sometimes for inaction.
Thoughts wander aimlessly over events that happened in the past. Due to the tendency to exaggerate, each new memory becomes worse than the previous one.
Self-accusations and self-justifications alternate. In Quentin Tarantino's latest film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Leonardo DiCaprio's character, actor Rick Dalton, suffers as his career declines. He either remembers past roles, or scolds himself for a few words that he forgot on the set, or regrets and justifies himself with stress and a hangover.
A heightened sense of injustice and resentment towards the whole world. It begins to seem that others deliberately do not notice important achievements and actions.
Having realized his shortcomings, a person does not feel the desire to correct anything or at least accept himself as he is. Aimless and destructive thinking does not imply action.
Dependence on other people's opinions. The inability to please and please everyone is immediately overwhelming and forces you to return to unpleasant moments again and again.
Constant fears and worries. Focusing on the failures of the past makes it incredibly difficult to believe that the future can bring anything other than trouble.

Francis Scott Fitzgerald, in his novel “Beautiful and Doomed,” very accurately described the hardships of soul-searching of the main character, the young writer Anthony Patch:

“One of his solitudes was approaching, one of those periods when he either ran off to wander the streets, or sat aimlessly and doomed at the table, biting a pencil. A period of soul-searching that did not bring relief, an unquenched thirst for self-expression, a sense of time rushing unstoppably and senselessly by - and all this was barely softened only by the conviction that there was, in essence, nothing to lose, because all efforts and gains were equally useless.

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Losers believe in luck, successful people believe in themselves. A. Daniel-Brunet He who respects himself inspires respect in others. L. Vauvenargues

We all come into this world as confident people. We deserve all the best by birthright. We do not ask, but demand everything we need: affection, kisses, toys, sweets and food - everything in abundance, we pull our mother’s skirt when we get bored, and we directly tell people what we think about them. As a child, the world revolves around us, and our hedgehog in the picture is the best, and the song is the most beautiful. Time passes, we grow up, we begin to judge, analyze, compare and criticize... Petya’s hedgehog, whom Marya Ivanovna praised, is already better, and Masha dances the best, and compared to her I am a clumsy penguin. Criticism in the family, dismissive attitude of loved ones, careless remarks at school - you can name thousands and thousands of reasons for the formation of self-doubt. Sometimes these are harmless little things, which for a person turn into a big problem of lack of self-confidence, sometimes really serious things such as scandals between parents, childhood traumas. We can be absolutely confident in certain areas, and completely constrained in others. But our task is to become a person who is absolutely and completely confident in himself, who asserts the undeniable splendor of his individuality. And this confidence does not apply to any individual areas, but to all possible areas of life. Self-confidence opens any door! Confident people move through life easily, they are instantly noticed at work and promoted, they are successful with the opposite sex, respected by friends, they are always a pleasure to be around, they are at ease everywhere. And believe me, developing healthy self-confidence is very simple; it is an absolutely natural state for us. You spend much more energy trying to bully yourself and push yourself into a corner. Here are simple steps to help you gain self-confidence: 1. Praise yourself! Get up in the morning and say good things to yourself, start the day with a kind word addressed to yourself, who is loved, smart, beautiful, decent, kind, lucky and incredibly seductive and attractive. Make it a habit to celebrate everything you do well. Stop criticizing yourself altogether - don’t humiliate yourself either jokingly or seriously. You are a person, an individual. Smile at yourself more often, remember what makes you proud of yourself. When people praise you, respond with gratitude. There is no need to convince a person that he was mistaken. You deserve the highest performance! You literally ooze self-confidence! 2. Find the reason for your self-doubt, and understand that it makes no sense! It is very important not only to be superficially confident, but also to feel your own undeniable dignity at a deep level. Think about what lowers your self-esteem. You may need time to look into the most distant corners of your personality - what is it? Something from childhood or adolescence? Once you discover that spider of self-doubt, squash it! It makes no sense! Your dignity is much wider, deeper and more powerful! Neither fat or thin figures, poor speech, nor criticism of loved ones, nor stuttering - there is no reason that could block your original natural self-confidence. With the same “disadvantage” (this is how you perceive it, and this is a great advantage and a reason for development) there are a lot of self-confident people! Pay attention to them! If you don’t like yourself because you’re short, remember Napoleon! Turn your “flaw” into an advantageous feature! And love, love yourself, be sure! Celebrate all your strengths! 3. Have a “what if” behavior. The great Stanislavski also described a technique with which an actor can feel a role. And like a good, hard-working actor, you have to watch how truly confident people behave. Observe, remember, note features. You need to find some subtle gesture from these self-confident individuals, to catch a slight facial or bodily movement that you would associate with the quality of confidence and which you will be able to easily reproduce. And here is a top-secret and super-easy technique: when the associative connection between this “secret gesture” and the quality of self-confidence is created, use it! Magic wand in your pocket! Now, when you urgently need an instant boost of confidence in your abilities, simply reproduce this “X-action”. This is truly an incredibly powerful technique! 4. Build your confidence with activity! Do what makes you proud of yourself. Set yourself tasks and goals, the fulfillment of which will once again demonstrate to you how right you are when you consider yourself the very best. For women, beautiful dresses, thin, wasp waists very often boost their confidence, for men - pumped up biceps, sports, expensive watches or cars, and the ability to clearly state their position. Whatever goals or objectives you set for yourself, be sure to get your full approval first! If you are embarrassed to do something, be sure to do it! Tune in, get ready and go! And after you go through fear on your own, you will realize that the sea is knee-deep for you! Believe in your strength, in your enormous potential, which you will have to reveal throughout your life! Source: Natalya Gorbunova

Differences between self-examination and reflection

Reflection (from Latin reflexio - “turning back”) is a way of understanding one’s own “I”, comparison with others and constructive criticism of committed actions.

Self-examination and reflection are united exclusively by the object at which mental activity is aimed, namely, one’s own “I”. In other words, both soul-searching and reflection are self-observation.

The main difference is that reflection is rational, and soul-searching is emotional. For example, let's say you make an impulsive, expensive purchase at a clothing store. Already on the way home, the euphoria from owning a new thing evaporates and the acquisition is no longer pleasing. With a rational approach, you weigh the pros and cons and either return the item or decide that you can treat yourself and enjoy the quality. But upon self-examination, any decision will obviously be wrong. Emotions and imagination will come into play, and endless questions will begin: “What will the sellers think of me if I want to return it? What will others say if they find out how much it costs? Will I be judged for my frivolous attitude towards money?
Unlike soul-searching, reflection has a clear and specific goal. As soon as a person understands the reasons for his reaction to a specific stimulus, he draws conclusions and stops wasting energy simulating a different development of events or searching for other meanings.
Reflection is aimed at finding a reason for its further elimination. While soul-searching is aimed at making claims, assigning blame, making excuses and feeling sorry for oneself. This is analysis for the sake of analysis, without any conclusion or action following.
Reflection is creative. It helps you overcome the problem and understand why you need to stop obsessing and how to stop. Self-examination is destructive in its essence.

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Forms of reflection

Depending on the time taken as a basis during reflection, it can manifest itself in 3 main forms:

Retrospective form. Characterized by analysis of past events.
Situational form. Expressed as a reaction to events happening to a person right now.
Prospective form. Future events that have not yet occurred are subject to reflection. These are the dreams, plans and goals of a person.

Retrospective analysis of the past in a person's life

Important! Retrospective reflection is considered the most common. It is used in pedagogy, when students reinforce material, and in psychology, when analyzing past events to solve psychological problems.

Reasons for the appearance of self-examination

Self-examination is not a classic human reaction to events happening to him. As children, none of us could say: “I’m doing soul-searching.” First of all, self-examination is characteristic of people with an analytical mindset. They are characterized by a desire to evaluate events and facts. But under some circumstances, this essentially useful trait turns into a stage of obsession and soul-searching. Here are the reasons that lead a person to painful, destructive soul-searching:

Stress . A Harvard study found that stress is one of the most common causes of self-doubt.
Painful experience. A person is unable to survive some very important and unpleasant moment. In total, his thoughts move to the past, but with the subjunctive mood “if”. For self-examination, constant worrying and replaying episodes from the past in your head is in the order of things.
Low self-esteem. Low self-esteem makes you question any of your actions. Uncertainty creates dependence on the opinions of others and turns into complexes that only spur internal dialogue.
Loneliness or failed relationships. Lonely people have very few real information reasons, so they tend to get fixated on literally any event. Toxic relationships, in turn, can lead to the fact that the bullied person begins to weigh literally every word he says. He is in constant tension and can endlessly scroll through the quarrel in an attempt to find his guilt.
Unemployment. An abundance of free time with constant background dissatisfaction is an ideal recipe for withdrawal into negativity and soul-searching.
Disease. Bad thoughts come along with poor health, and a slight fever deepens the colors even more.
Inflated expectations and demands on yourself. The “excellent student syndrome” does not let go of control for a second. Addiction to approval prevents you from concentrating on yourself and your own desires.
Resentment, plans for revenge. Many of us found ourselves in a situation where we could not adequately respond to the offender, but later such precise and biting words came that it was impossible to calm down and not go over the situation over and over again. Back in the 18th century, the French philosopher Denis Diderot called this phenomenon the “ladder mind.”
This is exactly what Evgeny Grishkovets spoke about in his one-man show “How I Ate the Dog”: “... something is tormenting you, someone offended you, and offended you greatly, and you lie there at night, trying to sleep and so accurately imagine how you will be tomorrow tell the offender everything. And you’re already talking, and he’s answering, and you so cleverly manage to screw him in with the right, exact word and... you fall asleep in the morning, for only about forty minutes, then the alarm clock...”

Thoughts about relationships were constantly spinning in my head

What's the point?

The third type of soul-searching is the experiences of sound people. The age-old question: “What is the meaning of what I do, my life and everything in general?” can haunt them literally at every step.

The answer is related to such concepts as freedom of choice and will, design, disclosure of one’s psyche and the psyche of other people. And the answer to these questions is not for one person, but for humanity as a whole. Briefly about it here. When you receive an answer to your question, life turns from dull soul-searching into a conscious and fulfilling process.

Whatever the reason for self-digging, you can get rid of it. You just need to understand how we ourselves and other people are mentally structured. You can start this most important acquaintance at the free online training “System-vector psychology”.

Author Tatyana Prokhorova Proofreader Natalya Konovalova

The article was written using materials from Yuri Burlan’s online training “System-vector psychology”

searching for yourselfSystem-vector psychology by Yuri Burlan

Why self-examination is considered harmful

Psychology is built on analysis and introspection. We are encouraged to get to the bottom of the problem, not just to find it, but to solve it and remove the painful pressure.

The problem is that self-digging lives its own life, does without a clear vector and feeds itself. After all, fixation on the problem leads to moral decline. In a depressed state, we are more often visited by negative thoughts, our immunity suffers, and our consciousness helpfully returns us again and again to moments of failures, offensive mistakes and wrong decisions. The vicious circle closes, and the person has more and more prerequisites for clinical depression.

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This state distorts perception, it becomes increasingly difficult to switch to positive thoughts, we are literally buried in an endless series of intrusive memories and cannot do anything with our life in the current moment.

This is proven by an experiment conducted at Stanford University. Researchers asked one group of volunteers to reflect on their feelings for eight minutes. And the second is to distract yourself and think about beautiful places and travel. At this point, scientists did not try to influence people's emotions in any way. At the end of the allotted time, people from the first group, who were slightly sad and prone to self-reflection, admitted that they felt much worse. Participants in the second group, on the contrary, spoke about an increase in mood or no change.

Another similar study conducted at the Australian National University suggests that self-reflection has a negative effect on the thinking process. After eight minutes of concentrating on their own experiences, the volunteers experienced a deterioration in memory and attention.

In addition, self-examination becomes an excellent disguise and excuse for procrastination. Going over a lot of little things in your memory, beating yourself up and looking for excuses requires a colossal amount of energy. As a result, there is neither energy nor time left for real action or at least for competent planning.

method two: meditation. Well, or at least an imitation of it

This rather obvious recommendation is actually not so simple: if you have ever tried to meditate, then you know how difficult it is to clear your mind of thoughts. Discussants on Quora write that this method works very well because you focus on not thinking at all, rather than on stopping yourself from thinking about a topic.

The easiest way is to set a timer for 10-15 minutes and try to concentrate on an empty mind. Most likely, you will spend this time struggling for inner silence, and at the end of the meditation (no matter whether it is successful or not), you will be surprised to find that reflection has receded.

How to stop self-searching

First of all, you need to stop and think: “Am I thinking rationally now or am I doing soul-searching?”

Studying our own Self is wonderful, but if we want to get rid of self-digging, we need to switch our attention from the inner world to real events. It has been proven that a person feels happiest and functions most effectively when he or she is completely in the present moment, rather than in the past or future.

Here are some more tips on how to calm your own mind, improve your quality of life, and get rid of self-consciousness:

Take care of your physical health. The sages of Antiquity spoke about the close connection between a healthy body and a healthy spirit. Of course, physical activity will not solve all problems, but physical education, unlike soul-searching, involves action.
Switch your attention to helping your loved ones. We are focused on ourselves and do not notice the problems of others. Very often our far-fetched experiences disappear as soon as real difficulties get in the way. In addition, by helping others, we begin to feel important and needed, and this significantly increases self-esteem.
Understand and accept that the world does not move around you. Most people are focused on themselves and do not notice anyone around them at all. This sobering thought will help you realize that the terrible failure you can't stop thinking about wasn't actually noticed by anyone.
Find a hobby. Any activity that captivates you so much that you have no time to remember your own experiences over and over again is suitable. Just don’t give the white noise in your head a chance to switch to the soul-searching channel. Read, listen to music, play games, watch useful webinars. All this will help not only to get distracted, but also to spend time usefully.
Look for the positives. You can’t stop yourself from thinking about something, but you can learn to switch. Imagine that you have in your hands a remote control from your own mind. And instead of viewing a summary of terrible incidents, you are free to choose any other channel. Yes, at first it will be difficult and you will have to put in a lot of effort, but gradually you will feel that you are able to switch without even noticing it.
Meditate. Meditation is an excellent simulator for managing your own thoughts and emotions. Just don’t try to stop the flow of consciousness right away. It's like trying to run a marathon without training. Just detachedly observe the thoughts that come and let them go.
Praise yourself. Learn to appreciate and love yourself. There are no people who do not deserve encouragement. And simply transfer self-criticism into another aggregate state - into specific goals and objectives.

Development of reflection

Anyone can learn to reflect. To start the process, you should practice more by doing simple psychological exercises. They will teach a person to analyze everything that happens around him and live his life meaningfully.

Interaction with the world

Reflection is always a reaction to external influence. Everything that fills a person’s consciousness came to him from the outside. Therefore, the best training for reflection will be interaction with the world around him: with other people’s opinions, criticism, conflicts, doubts and other difficulties.

Contacts with stimuli coming from outside expand the range of human reflexivity. By communicating with other people, a person learns to understand them, and this allows him to understand himself more easily and simply.

By interacting with other people we learn to understand the world around us.

After finishing a day spent surrounded by other people, it is important to reflect on all the events that happened. Analyze your behavior and actions performed during the day. What do you think about it? What do you feel? What were you wrong about?

By doing this exercise daily, you can achieve excellent results.

New information

Being in your comfort zone makes it difficult to learn something new about yourself. Constantly communicating with the same people, watching films of the same genre, reading the same books, a person stops developing as a person. To improve your ability to introspect, you need to learn something new that is the opposite of your usual interests.

We need to constantly step out of our comfort zone, otherwise we won’t develop.

Talk to someone who has a different point of view on important issues than you, or who lives a different lifestyle. Start a book that is unusual for you in a genre that you have not tried to read before, listen to music that you were not familiar with before, and you will be surprised how much new and unusual there is around you.

Analysis of one thing

Neuroscientists believe that the large amount of information received at the modern pace of life has a bad effect on a person’s mental functions and memory. With an abundance of unnecessary knowledge, new information is poorly absorbed and creates interference in the thinking process. Therefore, it is important to analyze the things and relationships that occupy a person’s thoughts.

During this training, you need to select one subject and analyze it in detail. A new interesting book, a favorite TV series, a favorite song, or, say, communication with a new acquaintance may be considered.

When analyzing things, you need to ask yourself a number of specific questions.

When thinking about the subject of analysis, ask yourself the following questions:

Is this item useful for me?
Did I learn anything new from it?
Can I use this knowledge?
How does this item make me feel?
Do I want to study it further, am I interested?

These questions will help you get rid of unnecessary things in life. They will free up useful space for more important and interesting things, and will also teach you to concentrate and weed out everything unnecessary on your own, automatically.

Questions of concern

To get to know yourself better, write down the questions that concern you on a piece of paper. These may be questions that arose just yesterday, or that have interested you for many years. Make a detailed list and then divide it into categories.

These questions could be:

about past events;
about the future;
about relationships with people;
about feelings and emotions;
about material objects;
about scientific knowledge;
about spiritual matters;
about the meaning of life, existence.

By asking questions to yourself, make them exciting and important.

Which group collected most of the responses? Think about why it turned out this way. This is an excellent training that helps reveal information to a person that he might not be aware of.

How to get rid of the negativity of people around you

Freud said: “Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not surrounded by idiots.”

And it is right. Different people influence us differently, and half of our success depends on our environment. If you have whiners, crybabies, bores and leeches gathered around you, there will be no point. They will drag you to the bottom, killing any hope of success in the bud, and driving you into depression.

Before you run away from these people headlong, let us remember that like is drawn to like. If people around you are boring, maybe you have this trait too? If there are only pessimists around you, maybe you yourself are not a very cheerful person? After all, it’s more convenient to blame someone for your failures, but not yourself.

First of all, in order to get rid of the negative influence of people around you, you need to soberly evaluate both them and yourself. How do you influence each other? After all, it’s easy to be strong if you have no rivals or competitors. Do not forget that the absence of obstacles relaxes, makes life boring, and makes a person lazy and weak. In fact, all these people who test your patience every day give you more than you can imagine. But this is only if you resist this negativity and do not succumb to general despondency.

It is true that we are influenced by our environment, but what is “environment”? These are people, and if they influence you, you can influence them in the same way, and change the polarity of your environment to positive. Of course, this will not happen in one day, but this is practically the only way to get rid of negativity in life. Change your attitude towards people and their attitude towards life. Yes, they have problems, and they are used to pinning them on you, but don’t let them do this on a regular basis. You are not a “vest for tears” or a psychologist, but endless complaints tire you and make your brain dull. And this is not a figurative expression, but an objective reality. Screaming, swearing, unpleasant conversations, all this destroys the neurons of the hippocampus, and their death leads to a decrease in intelligence.

If you cannot help a person, distance yourself from his problems. After all, most often a person does not expect help, but simply wants to dump his negativity on someone. He will feel better after this, and you?

It’s worth trying to get creative and learn to feel people. Empathy is not always an innate feeling, but it can be developed. Feel for each specific person and try to understand what will please him, how you can motivate him and how you can help him?

A lot of people don't know their talents or don't value them. Praise a person for their skills and you will immediately see a response. Happiness, joy and luck, like a virus, it spreads within the team in the same way, but only this virus of happiness carries positive energy.

It is difficult to get rid of negativity on your own; it is easier to do it in a team that you have quietly cured of the blues and despondency. If at least a third of the team begins to look at life more optimistically, the rest will also catch up.