The more time one spends with oneself, the more time we can have to think about ourselves, reflect on our past or our future, and evaluate it all.

However, this time spent with ourselves might be taken over by activities like scrolling through social media, listening to content, or some other way to be stimulated by incoming information.

It’s a stimulation that can serve our need to be informed, our desire to learn something, or our desire to avoid discomfort.

Whenever it is the latter, it might be useful to take the time to learn more about how we think about ourselves, that is, how we talk to ourselves. It may very well be that this way of conversing with ourselves has become invisible to us because of how we experienced it. Our desire to be stimulated might have been our solution to distract ourselves from our own thoughts.

It’s a solution that will have worked until now. But whenever the chosen distraction becomes a cause for regret, the way we talk with ourselves has reappeared. Instead of helping us, it now has become a risk. Instead of slowing down on the cause of our regret, for example, surfing the web, it becomes its amplifier. That’s because the chosen solution to deal with the discomfort of regret is to seek distraction.

Making us aware of our thoughts and our reactions to them can create the space to review how we think about ourselves. It might also be the moment when we realize that thinking about ourselves does not imply that we are our thoughts.