“Self obsession is the root of all unhappiness.” – Naval Ravikant.

The squares marked A and B in the image below seem like different colours. But they’re identical. Same colour, same brightness.

 

What you see isn’t always what’s true. The same goes when you peer into your mind.

As many wise people – from Buddhists to stoics – have noticed about the mind, excessive thinking about oneself is a sure road to unhappiness. This is vaguely counterintuitive, because you might think that a person who constantly explores the contours of their own mind would develop an in-depth, nuanced understanding of what makes them happy and what doesn’t. “The unexamined life is not worth living” and all that.

But the mind doesn’t work like that.

The introspection illusion

What could be more important than the ancient Delphic maxim to “Know thyself”?

The Nobel physicist Richard Feynman famously said, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”

Nowhere is this clearer than in the “introspection illusion”, a cognitive bias that leads us to believe we have clear insight into our own minds while believing that others’ self-assessments are riddled with blind spots.

As it turns out, we can put a rough number on this. To quote research by the organisational psychologist Tasha Eurich and her team:

Even though most people believe they are self-aware, self-awareness is a truly rare quality: We estimate that only 10%-15% of the people we studied actually fit the criteria.

What are most people getting wrong? It has to do with the types of questions they ask themselves. Just because someone is introspective, doesn’t mean they’re self-aware. In fact, as Tasha and her team note:

One of the most surprising findings of our research is that people who introspect are less self-aware and report worse job satisfaction and well-being. Other research has shown similar patterns.

The problem isn’t introspection or self-reflection itself; it’s that “most people are doing it incorrectly”. The mistake they’re making is looking inward and asking “why” questions, like “why did I react that way?”

Why asking “why” leads you astray

So much of our behaviour comes from unconscious motivations buried in parts of the mind we can’t directly access. However, instead of us getting an “access denied” message like you might on a computer, or even just a feeling of bafflement about the workings of our minds, we effortlessly spin up convincing explanations for our behaviour. Many of these stories feel true but aren’t, and we mistake them for self-awareness.

For example, someone might ask, “Why can’t I stay motivated to exercise?” and come up with, “I must be lazy,” when the real issue is that they haven’t found a routine or activity they genuinely enjoy.

Or they might ask, “Why can’t I focus?” and decide, “I’m just scatter-brained,” when the real problem lies in a distracting environment or a work style that doesn’t suit them.

Or the question, “Why don’t I feel happy when everything in my life looks fine?” can lead to false conclusions like, “I’m ungrateful” or “something’s wrong with me.” The real answer may lie in not having enough genuine connection with others, spending most of your time on work you don’t find meaningful, or chasing goals that impress others more than they fulfil you.

That’s why psychologists don’t ask people “why” questions – like “why do you feel that way?” – because they know that the brain is a spin doctor. It brilliantly fabricates stories to answer such questions. Why-based introspection is not a transparent window into the mind’s inner workings, and it’s not a good guide to a happy life.

So what works?

The research found that the most self-aware people instead ask “what” questions, like “what patterns do I notice?” or “what can I do differently next time?”

This helps people understand themselves better largely because it puts emotional distance between them and their thoughts.

Distance enhances your clarity, letting you see opportunities much easier. You can observe what energises you, what drains you, what excites you, what makes you lose track of time, what is easy for you but hard for other people and vice versa. Observation from a distance brings clarity. It’s similar to how you can give a friend good advice (because you have more emotional distance) far more easily than you can give yourself good advice.

If you want to do this in a structured way, keeping a diary will help. In fact, a great technique for getting the distance and clarity you need to solve problems is to write a list of what you have to do, and refine the list into smaller and smaller steps, until the giant undertaking in front of you has been defanged and reduced to a series of small, easily doable tasks. As a bonus, it’s been proven that journaling for a few weeks has been shown to measurably improve people’s health and well-being, including improving their immune system.

Memory is a sloppy historian

Another feature of the mind that everyone should know about is mood-congruent memory: When you’re happy, it feels like you’ve always been happy. The whole photo album of happy memories in your life opens up in your mind to be sifted through. Likewise when you’re angry or miserable, it feels like your whole life has been that way too. Unhappy memories flood in and take up space, nudging the happy memories out of the way. Both are illusions. If you’re too lost in the forest of your mind, fixating on trees, you’ll easily miss the bigger picture. All things will pass.

Awareness of these mental tricks doesn’t stop them, but it helps you plan around them or put them in perspective. The psychologist William James said: “The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.”

Seeing clearly

One last note on introspection. Although we don’t have full access to the deeper layers of our unconscious minds, we can observe ourselves fairly accurately, and that makes all the difference. When life is going great, consider taking this tip from Kurt Vonnegut (from his book A Man Without a Country):

“And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is’.”

I hope you get to say that many times in your life.

Awareness is only half the story. The next step is learning how to use that insight — how to steer your life and work toward lasting happiness. That’s what I’ll explore in the next post.