The Importance of Not Being Who You Think You Are
During adolescence, you may discover new parts of your identity and change who you think you are, but most adults eventually settle into a more stable way of being. On the one hand, the idea of stability is reassuring. The brain is not particularly fond of change. Yet, this stability may lead to a more “frozen” identity that limits your capabilities and life.
“Who you are” is synonymous with the “ego”—the sense that your identity is fixed, integrated, and immutable. Yet, as psychedelic research indicates, your identity is likely far less fixed than you may believe. Indeed, interrogating this fixedness may yield many psychological and physical benefits.
This freedom to be someone else—to be someone other than who you thought you were—can be very healing indeed. Studies indicate that psychedelics may relieve anxiety and depression and enhance an overall sense of emotional wellbeing. In addition, other ego-dissolving methods such as transcendental meditation (TM) may decrease anxiety and stress, and group virtual reality (VR) experiences are similar to psychedelics in leading to ego-dissolutionallowing people to feel more connected to one another. Indeed, in VR, when an illusory self takes on a primary experience of the virtual world, the self is divided into your actual self, and the one in VR, and the calming of the illusory self can transfer to your actual self too.
When you fix “who you are”, you may be freezing the activity in the DMN, thereby starting a cascade of inflammation that leads to physical and psychological distress and illness. Ego-dissolving modalities (such as psychedelics, TM, and VR) can “unfreeze” who you are, allowing you to reconstitute yourself. As a result, this decreases the body’s inflammatory response to your frozen identity and the associated diseases and discomfort that come with it.
If you feel anxious, sad, inflamed, or sick, consider that you may have invested too much of your identity in an unchanging way of being. Take a step back from who you think you are and consider exploring another version of yourself for your well-being.
What are your thoughts on this topic?
#Adolescence #Ego #Personality
