Self Awareness & Mental Health

Becoming more self aware can increase your mental well-being

Why you should learn to be more self-aware?

Self-awareness is the art of examining yourself, how you’re feeling and how your thoughts, actions, and emotions match up with who you are and how you want to be perceived. By focusing on yourself and how you are feeling, you can start to identify what causes certain thoughts or behaviors you no longer want to have. Once you become aware of them, you can start to change them.

It’s not all negative though! By practicing self-awareness you can also learn what makes you feel good and increase that, whether it can be an activity, certain people, or mindsets.

How to become more self-aware?

There are methods you can use to become more self-aware. You do not need to try to do them all at once. During the month of August, Quoka members can participate in the self-awareness with a challenge. It’s an easy way to practice and learn while limiting distractions. All prompts for the challenge are given through text messages. Sign up at tryquoka.com.

Become a subscriber to Quoka and learn more about becoming self-aware.

Focus on how you want to feel

Make a list of how you feel when you are at your best. Once you know how to describe what it feels like to feel good, you can begin to notice when you do or don’t feel that way and explore why. Without a list, you don’t know what you’re looking for!

Create your map so you know what you’re looking for. This list can also include how you feel when you are not at your best. Don’t limit the characteristics to only words. Think about how your body feels as well.

For me, I start to accumulate tension in my body, mostly in my legs and shoulders. When I start to feel angry, I feel hot.

Examine Your Behavior

Now that you know what you are looking for when you notice that you are either feeling your best or not your best, the next step is to look at how you behave. When you are feeling your best what do you do? When you are not, how are you acting? Often you can start to recognize patterns in your behavior.

This can be a challenging part of the process because it takes time. It helps if you have someone that you can talk to, that will listen to you as you explain what you did or did not do when you noticed your behavior and feelings.

Tell people that you’re working on becoming more self-aware. If you don’t feel like you have others that you can be honest, try messaging Quoka or journaling.