Being Conscious of Self-Consciousness

The social psychology of happiness and anxious reflection

Ask yourself if you are happy
And then you cease to be 
That’s a tip from you to me
And it’s worked for sure
I don’t ask myself for nothin’ anymore 
My peace is freedom from the masses
‘Cause the masses cannot see
That’s a tip from them to me 

— Jack White, “A Tip from You to Me”

Ask yourself if you are happy, and then you cease to be. Self-consciousness inversely correlates with happiness.

Generally speaking, you inhabit — think through, act out of — one of two modes. 

The intuitive mode is instinctual and automatic. You are intuitive when your attention is consumed by an activity involving an external person or object, such as a sport or a deep conversation, or when your mind freely flows from one thought to the next, like when you’re intoxicated or dreaming. There’s no self-monitoring, you aren’t thinking in words about what is happening or second-guessing yourself. You live in the present and respond to stimuli spontaneously out of reflex and ingrained habit. When you are fully intuitive, meaning completely engaged and uninhibited, you can enter the flow state. In this state, you overcome all sense of yourself and time and perform at your peak. 

The reflective mode is linguistic and controlled. You pause and assess, questioning and strategizing. You think in sentences about concepts, past events, or future plans. If you are reflective in a social setting, it’s usually because you don’t trust your instincts. Perhaps it’s your first day at a new job and you aren’t sure how to act in a way that makes a good first impression and appropriately conforms to the workplace culture. You self-monitor, thinking in words about the feedback you’ve received and how to adjust based on it. Time slows in this mode because reflecting requires considerable energy, and because the stream of self-conscious thought flows at a slower pace than external events that occur during an activity. A soccer player can run across the entire field before you can complete a reflective analysis of the weird comment your boss made yesterday. 

Anxious people inhabit the reflective mode more than confident people. Anxious thought is a type of reflective thought because it second-guesses you and the world. If you trust your instincts in a situation, you aren’t anxious or reflective. Some speculations about the social psychology of self-consciousness can be derived from this relationship between anxiety and reflection. 

Nothing creates anxiety like shame, the fear of being rejected by a person or group based on a perceived transgression against what is culturally deemed appropriate or valued. Anxiously thinking about yourself and your actions is an adaptive response to shame because it helps you identify problematic social behavior and strategize about how to avoid it in the future. For this reason, anxiety can be beneficial. It reflectively pauses the habits that run your life by default and creates space for contemplation about ways your habits could be getting in the way of your goals. You can’t plan to break habits or form new ones when you inhabit the intuitive mode. Although anxiety is useful for social acceptance, it’s obviously not conducive to happiness. Reflecting upon your happiness without anxiety already diminishes it. Anxious reflection is far worse for it replaces whatever happiness existed before with fear. 

Social groups with many difficult rules or ambiguous standards have higher shame potentials than those with a small number of clear rules that are easy to follow because there are more opportunities for transgression. A strict religious cult has numerous rules, so it can take a considerable amount of time for a new convert to conform her instincts to the legalistic group culture. She has to self-monitor constantly as she learns about these rules and re-habituates herself in accordance with them. The dynamics are similar in a progressive activist group that values political correctness. The rules of political correctness are ambiguous because they change quickly and frequently. Members have to routinely self-monitor to avoid committing a recently invented sin. In both situations, social acceptance necessitates reflective suspicion about existing intuitions. Anxiety is a prerequisite for successful assimilation and continued inclusion. 

Since reflecting means pausing and engaging in a form of energy-demanding thought, one of the best predictors of the intuitive mode is physical activity. It’s practically impossible to think reflectively while running intensely, for example. It takes way too much energy to do these things simultaneously. Social groups oriented around physical activity, such as a football team or motorcycle racing club, tend to have fewer and clearer rules for this reason. An activity that incentivizes the intuitive mode brings them together. If they were to suddenly impose many new rules or try to value an ambiguous standard, the members would be forced to spend more time in the reflective mode and their ability to perform the core activity would suffer. Their chances of “choking” would increase. (This is an awesome metaphor that depicts the danger of switching from intuition to reflection at an inopportune time. The person “chokes” on his own mind, suffering and risking total defeat due to an invisible obstacle.) 

Behavior is more seamless and easier to build upon when it’s not broken up by internal reflections, which indicates intuition’s close relationship with creativity. An actor can’t act out a role skillfully if he’s second-guessing himself during his performance. He must be “in the zone,” immersed, intuitively inhabiting the character’s instincts. A high shame potential crushes the artistic spirit. Therefore, creative groups tend to privilege emotional spontaneity over rational legalism. They value and cultivate intuition over reflection so creativity can flourish. 

These social psychological speculations may shed some light on how to decrease self-consciousness and increase happiness. Participating less in groups with many strict rules or vague values and spending more time in groups oriented around physical activity or creative expression is likely to decrease how often you inhabit the reflective mode. You’ll feel less anxious in general because you’ll have fewer reasons to be ashamed and self-conscious. Being conscious of self-consciousness is a step toward a happier life.