Every now and then it’s good to step back and reflect on ourselves and the state of our lives, but too much awareness can be a bad thing too.
Our minds are exposed to massive amounts of information in any single day – and our conscious minds aren’t designed to handle all that information at once.
Instead, a lot of it is supposed to get filtered and processed through our unconscious minds. And by doing this, our brains preserve a lot of our focus and mental resources for only the most important things.
Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you feel like you have too much awareness? It can be incredibly distracting and draining.
Maybe you’re trying to focus on taking an exam at school, but you hear other students clicking their pens, chewing gum, mumbling to themselves, or making all sorts of weird noises.
In that moment, you’re hypersensitive to your environment. You have way too much awareness going on of all the little things surrounding you, and it actually hurts your ability to focus on what you should be doing.
One study published in Current Biology suggests that our ability to ignore and suppress background stimuli is an important predictor of intelligence. This is when we can focus on what’s important in a given situation, but also ignore what isn’t important.
So in a real way, too much awareness and too much mindfulness can actually become counterproductive.
This ability to suppress certain kinds of awareness doesn’t just improve intelligence, but creativity too.
A recent study published in PLOS One found that when Jazz musicians improvise they often show less activity in their prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain associated with conscious thinking and self-monitoring.
When people “let go” creatively, they become less aware of their thoughts and actions in the moment – instead, they are put into a type of trance that allows them to freely flow from one idea to the next without hesitation or second-guessing themselves.
A lot of creativity is dependent on hindering these inhibitions and analytical thinking, which are often byproducts of too much awareness.
Another study published in the Journal of Pain discovered that distraction can sometimes be more effective at reducing pain intensity than acceptance or cognitive-restructuring.
This goes to show that sometimes shifting our awareness away from negative emotions and painful stimuli can actually be an effective way of suppressing our negative experiences in a healthy way.
For more on the importance of distraction check out: Healthy Escapism: The Emotional Intelligence Behind Fantasy and Distraction
There are also many things we learn throughout our lives that happen without much awareness, and it turns out too much awareness can actually hurt this type of learning.
For example, implicit learning is a type of learning that happens below the surface of our consciousness, which often occurs by doing something, not thinking about it. Some examples of this may be: walking, riding a bike, or playing sports.
A recent finding mentioned at the Neuroscience 2013 Conference found that too much awareness and mindfulness can actually inhibit this type of learning and prevent the formation of automatic habits.
Think about when you first learned to ride a bike. You were probably over-thinking it, trying to get all the mechanics in your head – but the truth is the only way to really learn it was to just keep doing it until you got the feel for what riding a bike was like.
These are just a few ways that too much awareness and self-monitoring can hurt us.
Certainly, improving awareness can still be beneficial in many situations, but we have to keep it balanced and also recognize that our brains aren’t built to be “super aware” of every single thing that’s happening – and that’s a good thing.
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