A heightened awareness of what we’re doing, how we’re doing it, and how our actions and words and public personae might be interpreted by others can be a source of satisfaction or shame. And the line between one and the other can be razor-thin.

The term “self-conscious” can refer to a feeling of awkwardness or an empowered sense of awareness and self-worth.

I have regular periods of self-reflection baked into my schedule, and one of the benefits of this routine is that when I’m feeling stressed or anxious or out of sorts, I can often trace any low moods or negative feelings I might be experiencing back to a moment of unproductive self-consciousness.

I did or didn’t do something, said or failed to say something, responded or neglected to respond appropriately because I was feeling self-conscious.

There are conversations I should have had that I put off because I worried about how I might be perceived. There are gestures I could have made and wounds I could have healed—or preempted—had I faced down certain fears and frets and flusters.

Thus, when I find myself fruitlessly ruminating, I sit, relax, and trace my tension backward, seeking a source, and I almost always arrive at some speck of distress that, splinter-like, has hooked itself into my subconscious flesh and caused the well-meaning denizens of my subliminal immune system outsized alarm.

A variation of this process is part of my daily, informal meditation routine.

I take stock, mentally pat myself down to see if I’m harboring stress or guilt or worries, and I tug on any threads I find until they unravel and reveal their source.

When referring to an ever-growing sense of oneself, one’s capacity and goals, one’s value and how much one has left to learn, however, self-consciousness is important for personal development and psychological situational awareness.

Lacking this cognizance, we tend to depend upon external reflections and loose caricatures of ourselves: both of which depict superficial sketches of who we are rather than the more accurate blueprint we can render when we’ve taken the time to understand our holistic push-pull tensions, our load-bearing elements, and what we’re really made of.

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