The Most Important Patient You Have Been Neglecting Is You

How well do you know yourself? The person you have been with for the longest time is yourself – since the day you were born. Even though you spend every second with yourself, how much do you actually know you? And what does it matter?

Your brain is operating all the time, whether you are conscious of it or not. You come up with thoughts and ideas, some of which you are not even aware of. The more you recognize and understand what you are thinking and feeling, the more clarity you have. The more you know yourself, the better you can express yourself, the better you can enhance your strength, the easier you can find a routine or a method that works for you. In other words, better self-awareness enhances your efficiency.

Self-awareness starts with paying attention to yourself. In other words, uplevel your mindfulness. For many of you, especially physicians, when you are taught to focus on other people first, you may feel somewhat uneasy to shift gears to look within. It is important to look at yourself with the motive of observation and not of judgment. For example, what are you feeling right now? If you had to choose one word to describe your emotion, what would that be? If you are fairly new to this exercise, you may not have many words to describe your emotions. You have more vocabulary than you think; you just have not used those words to think about yourself. There are emotional wheels available online, or apps which help you describe your emotions. I invite you to explore those.

When you are feeling that particular emotion, how does that feel physically? For example, if you are experiencing gratitude, which part of the body do you feel it the most? Does it feel warm or cold? Is it a dynamic or stagnant type of feeling? The more you pay attention, the more details will surface for you to discover. The more awareness you have of your feelings, the more you get to experience them, both pleasant and not pleasant ones.

Why does it matter? The next question is to ask yourself why. What is the reason behind your emotion? It is easy and natural to think that the situation you are in affects how you feel. Not quite. Your circumstances are neutral until you have an opinion about it. For example, it is 35 degrees Fahrenheit today. You may feel annoyed because you are thinking that you do not like the cold. On the other hand, you may feel relieved because you are thinking that this is a heat wave compared to the past ten days. How you feel depends on what you think of something. Having the awareness of that is a game-changer.

Once you realize that you can have different perspectives or opinions about the same situation, you have the power to decide what to think. That directly affects how you feel. When you feel frustrated, for example, how do you act? When you feel calm, how do you act? Yes – your actions are affected by your emotions. And what you do or not do directly impacts the results.

So how does self-awareness enhance your efficiency? Before you explore all the tools and gadgets to make you more efficient and productive, before you dive into the “show me all the practical strategies to be efficient at work”, take a step back. Pretend you have an out of body experience and you are looking at yourself from the sky. You get to see your surroundings. What are you thinking when you go to work, before you start your day? How do you feel as a result of your main thought? Carrying that emotion as your fuel, how does that affect the way you work?

When you are feeling stressed, frustrated, overwhelmed, or any similar unpleasant emotions, it is difficult to focus, to manage distractions, and to be decisive. In other words, these emotions are not helpful in efficiency or productivity. On the other hand, when you are feeling calm, capable, focused or excited, you get very different results.

Having self-awareness helps you manage your emotions. You get to decide what you want to focus on thinking. You also develop a deeper sense of understanding your strengths and weaknesses. Over time, when you pay attention to yourself, you understand what style of working is most effective for you, what time of the day you are most productive. In addition, when you know yourself well, you get to know others better by creating better connections and collaborations.

When you have self-awareness, you get to manage your emotions better. You can optimize your efficiency by thinking differently, which changes how you feel. As we are emotionally driven beings, know what emotional fuel works best for you and tap into it. Each emotion is generated by what you are thinking. The more you pay attention to how you think, the better you regulate your emotions, the more you get to use them as your biggest energy source to work more efficiently. You also get to spend more time feeling the emotions which are pleasant for you.