Tips for Reducing the Curse of the Self
1. Reduce self-chatter. Learn how to quiet your mind whenever talking to yourself becomes bothersome. Many approaches exist to help people to quiet their inner chatter, but most of them share an emphasis on keeping one’s attention rooted in the present situation and, thus, off of self-thought as much as possible. Think about yourself only as needed to take care of the practical matters of life. As unnecessary self-chatter subsides, you will feel generally calm, attentive, and content.
2. Don’t believe everything you think. Your perceptions of yourself and the world are biased in egotistical ways. Develop a healthy sense of ego-skepticism – to recognize that you do not always have an accurate view of the world and to be skeptical of your interpretation of events. Distinguishing clearly between what is real and what is self-talk, you will have a more accurate, insightful view of what happens.
3. Resist the urge to defend your ego. Unnecessarily
defending your ego against failure and criticism drains energy and
creates conflict
with other people. You have enough real problems to face to waste much
time or energy protecting a mental image of yourself. When you find yourself
becoming defensive, remind yourself that threats to their egos have no
real implications and turn your attention to dealing with the tangible
outcomes of negative events.
4. Practice self-compassion. When failures, setbacks, and losses occur, be gentle with yourself. Acknowledge and address your shortcomings with kindness, concern, and forgiveness. If you treat yourself with kindness and respect when things go wrong, your ego will not be battered by life’s circumstances and, thus, will have no need to defend itself.
5. Develop a metapersonal identity. Rather than seeing yourself as an isolated individual struggling against the world, recognize the ways in which you are connected to other people and the world at large.
6. Learn ways of optimizing self-control. Many of the urges that people try to combat emerge from how one is thinking to oneself about the issue at hand. Exerting self-control by practicing self-quieting, fostering ego-skepticism, and lowering ego-defensiveness in advance will do far more good than trying to exert willpower after situations get out of hand.
7. Don’t overfeed the self. Do not overfeed the self as your try to change or control it. There is nothing inherently wrong with figuring out what one wants out of life and making reasonable, strategic decisions to increase one’s chances of attaining it. But if we are not careful, these kinds of efforts to take charge of our life will feed the self and strengthen its curse. Chronically setting and pursuing goals can lead to a situation in which the purpose of life today is always the achievement of some goal tomorrow, leading us to forget that the only life we really have is the one going on right now.