This article is about the simple but significant role that the act of "noticing" plays in our psychological lives. While at first blush it may seem basic, do not be fooled. Truly witnessing our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors is the first, and quite possibly the most important, ingredient in creating desired change. While it seems magnificently simple, it is, in fact, positively revolutionary.
What do I mean by "noticing"?
Now, what do I mean by "noticing" exactly? What I'm talking about primarily here is the importance of bringing conscious awareness to any needed area of one's life. It's a concept that's central to meditation, as well as the analytically oriented therapies, and it's part of why those two friends go hand-in-hand so well.
Why should you care about this?
The reason that this is so important is that, sadly, so many of us often sleepwalk through life. We make decisions unconsciously based on past conditioning. We get overwhelmed with all the things on our proverbial plates and we go on autopilot. We binge drink. We emotionally eat. We say mean things to ourselves that we don't even hear because they barely register above the din of all the other thoughts jostling around in our monkey minds. But when we look — when we truly look — at ourselves, without judgment or reaction, we see what needs to be changed.
How the unconscious things we do are the most damaging
The irony of our psychological lives is that the difficulties that we face often aren't nearly as problematic as the things that we unconsciously do to avoid the emotions that they evoke. In an effort to make negative feelings go away, we deny them and repress them, project them and displace them, or try to numb them with sex and drugs or shopping (or work or TV or the Internet — the list goes on). In the short term we find relief; but in the long term, those coping mechanisms create more problems for us than the original issues ever could have.
How therapy and mindfulness-based practices help
Therapy and mindfulness-based practices are helpful because we get to take our thoughts and feelings out in the cool light of day and look at them for what they really are. In therapy, not only do we get to notice what we hear ourselves saying out loud, but we also get to borrow somebody else's brain for a time and see what they notice too. Sometimes, from there, there's something we can do about what we've noticed (you know the expression, the first step to fixing a problem is acknowledging that you have one); but frankly, often all we need to do is simply mentally acknowledge the thing that has otherwise been hidden from us all this time.
