We Are Totally Wrong About Ourselves

Mindfulness meditation increases self-reflection and helps in overcoming two major hurdles: Distorted thinking and justification of our egoistic nature.

Meditation makes us remove our identification with the constant stream of thoughts, and simply observing the mind increa...

People who are insecure are the ones who are more aligned towards behaving in a moral, socially acceptable way. Those who are really sure that they are intelligent, good looking, generous or sociable are confident about themselves and make less effort to prove it to others.

Our outward appearance, hairstyle, clothes, behaviour (like averting a gaze or hand-wringing) indicates a lot to other people without our being conscious about it.

We are not always aware of our hand gestures, facial expressions and body language, and are blind towards the effect ...

The Dunning-Kruger effect says that most incompetent people are not aware of their incompetence and have inflated self-esteem.

Believing we are better at something than we are in reality has an advantage: it makes us cope up with the daily ups and downs in a better way.

Our desire to impress others leads to self-deception. To make sure that others are convinced about our truthfulness, capabilities and IQ, we ourselves have to be convinced first. Extensive studies show that our self-deception fluctuates depending on factors like how we believe others will...

While our moral values are relatively stable, our preferences can change. How we view our true self plays a big role in our self-worth.

Being faithful to our true self reduces complexity in a world that is complicated and always in flux. Our true self becomes the c...

Being overly critical of oneself and developing a negative self-image is a sure-fire way to create a distorted self-perception.

People with self-doubt are more susceptible to confirmation bias about their own incompetence. This subconscious phenomenon is like a reversal o...

Self-image can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. We need to see ourselves as a process, an evolving individual who is adaptive, flexible and shape-shifting. If we see our traits (like willpower or IQ) as fixed, we won’t be able to improve upon those.

Example: Fear of failure can be the ro...

• We have certain unconscious inclinations and motives, a part of our personality that is hidden from us.
• An extensive psychological experiment that examined the automatic, reflexive response in participants revealed that the image conveyed in surveys has little to do with the actual...