#2. You are processing mountains of invisible information that can help you to discern what instincts to trust

Through its five senses your body receives over 11million bits of information in every moment, yet (even the most liberal estimate) is that we can only consciously process about 40-50 of those in any given second (Wilson 2012).

For example,

• Studies have shown that our bodies can detect stress in someone’s sweat and it shapes how warm or competent you perceive them to be — before you’ve consciously registered anything
• Other studies have shown that being in the presence of other people who feel stressed can trigger the same physiological response in us.
• When we co-sleep with a loved one our heart rhythms have shown to fall into the same rhythm 
• As we really listen and talk empathetically with others our brain waves start to synchronise
• Being primed with stimuli we’re not conscious of can affect our mood accordingly,
• Aggression has been shown to rise as the ambient temperature around us does, and
• A mountain of cognitive bias research affirms that no single human is immune from the impact of unconscious processing on their conscious thought.

You can have the strongest sense of who you are and still be shaped, moment to moment, by information you never consciously registered, and being aware of this is part of starting to know when to trust you instincts.

At a talk I attended in 2019 Dr Jennifer Eberhardt of Stanford, one of the world’s leading experts in unconscious bias, was asked how to tackle bias in what we see. Her answer: slow down.

Nextdoor, the neighbourhood app, came to her with a problem — a disproportionately high number of posts along the lines of “there’s a suspicious man in our neighbourhood,” with an obvious racial skew. On her advice, they introduced two questions that forced a pause before anyone could post. A little like the orienting we mentioned in #1:

1. What is this person doing that makes them look suspicious?
2. Describe their physical features (not just race and gender)
3. They then introduced a descriptor of unconscious racial profiling to prompt people’s conscious awareness of it.

That was it. Two questions, forcing one pause, and some context, before an unconscious cue got acted on — the same principle as the Orienting practice from #1. Their moto became, if you see something suspicious, say something specific. Racial profiling on the app dropped by 75% (Eberhardt, 2019).

This is what happens when you build in a moment to check what’s actually driving a reaction, being aware of what might be affecting it, rather than blindly trusting the first impulse that comes in a millisecond. That’s also how conscious thought and action can contribute to not second guessing yourself. 

We are all used to travelling so fast.

How many of your expectations – about strangers on our street or your own path to success – have you consciously chosen? And how often do we really slow-down to check?

Most of us never slow down long enough to find out whether our gut is reading the moment accurately, or running on an old assumption we never chose.

We tend to assume self-trust comes from knowing what we think.

It doesn’t.

True self-awareness starts with recognising that what you ‘think’ is only a fraction of the picture — one expression of what your whole system already knows.

If you were raised in a Western culture, you were most likely taught that your unconscious lives in your brain and your brain is in the driving seat. The neuroscience says otherwise: perception, cognition and emotion are entangled across your entire bodily system, not contained in your skull (Pessoa, 2022) — more on this in Principle #3.

Dr Timothy Wilson, who coined the term ‘adaptive unconscious’, frames the scale of this well: imagine your unconscious took a holiday. You’d struggle to get out of bed without falling over — that’s proprioception. You’d have no filter for what to pay attention to at all — that’s the lantern-perception problem from #1. Understanding language, feeling an emotion — none of it happens without unconscious processing running constantly in the background.

Next Doors Reporting questions are not dissimilar to what anyone interested in widening their sense of self-awareness in any moment might ask.

Dr Alan Fogel of the University of Utah distinguishes between two kinds of self-awareness: your embodied self-awareness — what you’re actually sensing right now — and your conceptual self-awareness — what you think about it. Most of us live almost entirely in the second. Ask someone how they feel and they’ll answer with a thought, not a sensation.

He says ‘the True Self is our embodied self-awareness, our ability to stay comfortably in the chaos of the subjective emotional present, and use that to inform our conceptual self awareness’.