Training the brain for self-awareness
Change begins by telling your brain that you want to change.
Growth begins by telling your brain that you want to grow.
How do you train your brain? First, you set an intention.
But, here’s the deal: You can’t set it and then float along, expecting that simply by setting an intention, you’ll get to where you want to go. Nope! The work is just beginning.
Once you set an intention (say, a daily intention or a word of the year), you need to have enough self-awareness to recognize when your behaviors are aligned with that intention and when they’re not. Only with self-awareness can you expect to make any sort of sustainable change.
Self-awareness allows you to practice metacognition, or the ability to recognize your thoughts and actions, in order to make adjustments that benefit yourself and the world around you.
There are many different types of self-awareness, including spatial (e.g. where your body is in space, in relation to other objects around you) and emotional (e.g. how you’re feeling), but the one I’m most interested in - because it’s a requirement for developing mental strength - is self-evaluation or introspection. Interestingly, all of these types of self-awareness share a common brain area: the medial paralimbic network.
Why do we care which brain region is most involved with self-awareness? Well, if we want to develop self-awareness, then theoretically, we can engage in practices that modulate activity in the brain region involved with self-awareness. And that’s exactly what the data show.
It’s pretty cool that self-awareness can be developed at all. It’s a trainable quality, just like every other mental skill. So, don’t worry if you lack self-awareness (of course, if you don’t have a lot of self-awareness, then you also don’t realize that you don’t have a lot of self-awareness - ha).
So, if you’ve been here a while, you should be able to guess the answer to this question: What practice might produce changes in the medial paralimbic network?
[Drum roll please] . . . meditation.
Yep. Meditation strikes again as a scientifically-valid method for improving self-awareness. In a 2016 study, the brains of experienced mindfulness meditators were compared with those who were meditating for the first time. Researchers found that mindful meditation reduced activation in regions associated with mental chatter/rumination, and increased activation in regions associated with body- and emotional-awareness. While this pattern was more robust with experienced meditators, it was also seen for short-periods of time with the meditation newbies. That’s encouraging!
By practicing mindful self-awareness, or paying attention, non-judgmentally, to your body and the contents of your mind, you are slowly strengthening the parts of the brain related to self-awareness. And self-awareness, my friends, is a prerequisite for change.