Know yourself: How can Mindfulness improve Self-Awareness?

El Mindfulness, a meditation technique that involves paying attention to current experience without making any judgment, can help us learn more about our personality, according to a recent article published in the March 2013 issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science, a magazine of the Association for Psychological Science.

Recent research has highlighted the fact that we have many blind spots when it comes to understanding our patterns of thinking, feeling, and behavior. In some cases, blind spots in self-awareness can have negative consequences and lead to poor decision making, poor academic performance, emotional and interpersonal problems, and lower life satisfaction.

In this new article published in this psychological journal, the scientific psychologist Erika carlson from Washington University in St. Louis explores a possible strategy to improve self-knowledge: Mindfulness or mindfulness.

Mindfulness, a technique widely recognized for its positive effects on mental health, involves paying attention to your current experience (for example, thoughts, feelings) and observe in a non-critical way.

According to Carlson, these two components of Mindfulness, mindfulness and non-judgment, can overcome the main barriers to knowing ourselves. Not judging the observation of one's thoughts, feelings and behaviors, It may reduce emotional reactivity, such as feelings of helplessness or low self-esteem, which often interfere with self-awareness.

Lack of information is another obstacle to self-knowledge. In some situations, people may not have exactly the information they would need to self-assess. For example, it is very difficult to observe much of our non-verbal behavior, so we cannot know that we are grimacing or showing signs of restlessness. Mindfulness could also help in this area as research has shown that mind training is associated with increased body awareness.

Carlson outlines a theoretical link between attention and self-knowledge which suggests focusing our attention on our current experiences in a non-critical way. He concludes that it could be an effective tool to get to know each other better.

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