How to Become More Self-Aware and Why You Should

Self-awareness contributes to healthy decisions and relationships.

KEY POINTS

Research shows that self-awareness wards off depression and anxiety and improves your physical health.
There are 3 key areas of self-awareness: relational, emotional, and physical.
You can only know your important personal qualities by paying close attention to yourself.

What does it mean to be self-aware? It means having what therapists call an “observing ego.” The observing ego is a part of yourself that is able to observe yourself with some amount of objectivity. When your observing ego is healthy, you can, for example, look back on a way that you acted or spoke and accurately say, “I think I was a bit harsh there” or “I should have stood up for myself more.”

Your observing ego is able to watch your actions, your choices, your feelings, your needs, and your wants. This makes you a reliable reporter when you need to share any of that information with others. The key to a healthy observing ego is simply paying attention. And it’s vital to have this to live a healthy life and thrive.

How can you seek what you truly want, choose options that will bring you joy, and make decisions that are healthy for you if you are not quite sure what you want, enjoy, or need? You can only know these important personal qualities by paying close attention to yourself.

The 3 Key Areas of Self-Awareness

Physical: This involves being aware of your body and what it needs to be healthy and strong. This includes the amount of sleep you need, the amount and type of food, rest, recreation, and exercise. It also means being aware of your body’s cues to you about what’s wrong or what it needs.
Relational: How do others see you and experience you? What are your strengths, weaknesses, foibles, and flaws when it comes to your relationships? Being aware of your habits and qualities and how you relate to others enables you to manage your own reactions and responses and also understand others’ reactions to you.
Emotional: This type of self-awareness is the most important. It involves being able to notice when you are experiencing a feeling and being able to identify what that feeling is. Knowing when you are angry, hurt, or lonely, for example, allows you to attend to the feeling and use it to motivate, inform, guide, and enrich you.

Knowing yourself well and being aware of your physical, relational, and emotional needs and rewards pays off in substantial ways. A 2023 study by Sung and Rubens et al. found that self-awareness is a buffer that prevents life stressors, even trauma, from becoming depression and anxiety.

Higher emotional self-awareness has been found to improve your overall health. Loucks and Britton (2015) found that people who are more aware of what they are thinking and feeling in the moment have lower BMI (body mass index), lower fasting glucose, less smoking, and higher levels of physical activity.

It is true that some people have higher levels of natural self-awareness than others. One of the biggest obstacles to self-awareness comes from childhood. Those who grew up in a household where their emotions were ignored or discouraged by their parents tend to push their emotions and emotional needs away and try to make them disappear. This is the definition of childhood emotional neglect.

Those who grew up with childhood emotional neglect are going through their adult lives unaware that they are squelching a deeply vital resource from within: the natural fount of emotions that is wired into all human beings at birth.

Living your life without full access to your own feelings can leave you with a sense of emptiness and purposelessness. With your emotions tamped down, you may lack enough of the very substance that should be keeping you connected to your body, feeding your relationships, and stoking your energy. You may end up feeling disconnected from yourself and your life in a way that eventually becomes your new norm.

How to Increase Your Self-Awareness

Start thinking of your body as something to take care of. Pay attention to your body’s needs, day after day, and collect data. What’s the optimal amount of sleep it needs? What foods make it feel the best? How much of what kinds of exercise give it energy? Track your answers, write them down, and try to live by them.
Pay closer attention to the feedback you receive from the people who know you best. The people around you may have observed more about you than you have observed about yourself. You may be missing lots of valuable information about how others see you, especially if this is not a concept you’ve thought about before. By simply paying attention to how others react to you and what they say about you, you can gather, and file away, loads of useful data about how others perceive you and how you are in your relationships with others.
Begin to pay more attention to what you are feeling. This is the single most powerful way for you to build your self-awareness. If you grew up with your emotions neglected, you are probably continuing to neglect them. Becoming aware of your emotions is becoming aware of the most deeply personal, biological expression of who you are. It is also a giant stride toward healing the emotional neglect you grew up with, which comes with a whole host of other life advantages.

Becoming more aware of your body, your relationships, and your emotions all combine in a wonderful way to make a profound difference in your life. Knowing who you are, what you need, what you feel, and how you affect others gradually helps you to feel more grounded, more fulfilled, more connected, and more alive.

References

To determine if you might be living with the effects of childhood emotional neglect, you can take the free Emotional Neglect Questionnaire. You’ll find the link in my bio.

Sung, Angelina, Rubens, Sonia L., Soliemannjad, Rose R., & Zeringue, Megan M. Socioemotional health, trauma exposure, and internalizing symptoms in students attending an alternative high school. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, Vol 93(3), 2023, 269–278.

Loucks, E.B., Britton, W.B., Howe, C.J. et al. Positive Associations of Dispositional Mindfulness with Cardiovascular Health: the New England Family Study. Int J Behav Med. 22, 540–550 (2015).