You could sit in a room and ask questions of yourself all day. You could ask why, how, what and whom 24/7, 365 days a year and you’d perhaps be none the wiser of the reasons for certain things in life. Having no curfew for introspection is a bad habit to get into. It means you can dig as deep as you want into the rabbit holes of your mind without a care in the world.
Sometimes that can be a good thing but more often than not, I found, it leads to more confusion and a significant reduction of happiness. As you fall deeper and deeper into your mind's eye you can get into the bad habit of berating yourself for answers. Being hard on yourself for not knowing the answers to the huge questions is self-sabotaging. I’ve been there and in the depths of your own mind, you lose perspective on the world.
“We can spend endless amounts of time in self-reflection but emerge with no more self-insight than when we started.” — Tasha Eurich
Introspection has some negative trade-offs. Some research has suggested that excessive introspection leads to:
- More anxiety
- Less positive social experiences
- Increased negative self-perception
The reality is most people don’t know what they want to do with their life, most people spend time worrying that they're doing this life thing wrong and they’ll wake up one day and regret the decisions they made today. There is something wonderfully human about being paralysed by uncertainty. *We all are. *In the depths of your own mind though, you forget that there are 8 billion other people in the world that all struggle with these deep questions. In the depths of your own mind, you feel like it’s only you.
That isolating thought can become overwhelming and end up making you feel more lost than when you started. That’s why I find that having a cut off time for the deep thinking stuff is a good thing. It stops you from forgetting that there is a whole world out there to be explored. It allows you get to gain a good balance between deep thinking and surface-level stuff.
Build a cut off period to the time spent introspecting. There is a lot of happiness to be found on the surface.