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Feeling Lost? Try Being More Curious About Yourself
As Socrates famously once said, "The unexamined life is not worth living." If you've been feeling a little lost, then maybe it's time to reexamine parts of your life. Approaching your life with curiosity can help you spend more of your time on the things that you'd like to be doing, instead of the things that other people ask you to do. And who doesn't want that?
Why should we practice self-curiosity?
Have you ever been surprised by yourself? Maybe you said something you didn't expect to say, or reacted to something in a way that you couldn't have predicted.
"There are often things going on with us, [and] reasons and causes behind how we think and feel that are not so apparent," says licensed clinical social worker Matt Lundquist, LCSW, MSED.
Being curious about our inner workings, and eager to understand where our thoughts and actions come from, can help us understand ourselves better and grow.
For example, if you want to build new habits, such as working out, cutting back on alcohol, or eating more fresh foods, but find yourself repeatedly failing to live up to your own expectations, then it may be time to take a curious approach to your relationship with your goals. You can begin to understand why you want to set new habits, why you're failing, and how to work better with yourself to do what you want.
"At some point, I think there's a necessity in being curious and considering the possibility that your relationship with those activities or the absence of those activities, that is more going on there than is apparent to you," Lundquist says.
How to be more self-curious
1. Allow yourself to be surprised
Give yourself permission to surprise yourself—and then interrogate the surprise, according to Lundquist.
"When you're surprised, reexamine to say, 'Oh, that's interesting,'" Lundquist says. "I don't think of myself as the kind of person that does that. And yet here I am doing that."
Sometimes, there's a divide between what we intend to do and what we actually do, Lundquist says, driven by obstacles within ourselves that we may or may not understand.
Trying to understand your intentions and actions can lead to "wonderful discoveries" about yourself that can end up being useful, Lundquist says.
2. Try to avoid making judgments
Curiosity is stifled by rash judgments. When you're examining your behavior, try to separate your opinion from your curiosity. The best approach is neutrality.
"One real obstacle for curiosity is judgment," Lundquist says.
3. Cut through ambivalence
It isn't always easy to know what we want (or don't want). But when we find ourselves feeling unfulfilled and like we don't really enjoy our day-to-day lives, it might be time to wonder: Is it because I'm not doing much that I find personally fulfilling or enjoyable?
If you continue to carry items over from your to-do list to new days without doing them, for example, Lundquist says that might be an opportunity to examine your relationship with those tasks. Or if you're feeling stressed about an upcoming family vacation, maybe you need to interrogate your relationship with specific family members so you learn how to deal with them more effectively.
Self-curiosity can help you focus your time and attention on the things you actually want to be doing instead of falling into the trap of going along with plans for you laid out by other people.
4. Seek professional help
Licensed therapists can aid your self-curiosity by listening to you and asking the right questions for self-discovery.
At some points in life, we might get used to feeling unhappy because we don't really like specific aspects of our situation, such as our job, location, relationship, or social circle. By seeking therapy and approaching our lives with curiosity, we can help improve our situations and understand exactly what changes we need to make to get ourselves to a happier place.
The takeaway
Self-curiosity is a powerful tool for understanding our lives and mapping out a path that makes us excited for the future. To be more self-curious, we should allow ourselves to be surprised (without judgment) and make decisions for our own benefit. Seeing a good therapist can help us in our self-curiosity journey.
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