When we reflect too much.

When we reflect too much.
Posted on 18-03-2022

Reflection is a very important function in the human experience. It is an evolutionary achievement, that, in conjunction with the development of language, differentiates us from animals. Awareness and reflection on ourselves began an evolutionary path that brought us to this day.

Humanity, initially, carried out actions without being aware of what it was doing. The unconscious inherited automatic patterns led the way. With evolution, we were able to access a greater awareness and reflection about our actions, our past, and our future.

Reflection is, then, a great achievement, and what can help us today to overcome crises and transform our reality. We can only change what we accept and become aware of.

However, modern societies have led to a certain abuse of reflection. What happens when we reflect and think excessively? Can that really lead us to the solution to certain problems?

Excessive reflection can lead us, trying to reach the right answer, to stay in a purely rational field of ideas and words, losing contact with doing, with the sensory, and with other areas of our experience such as feelings and emotions. intuitions.

Excessive reflection can lead us to overanalyze situations, find a pro and a con for everything, and make decisions difficult. Emphasizing reflection can be a defensive position, fleeing from the material towards the world of ideas, where everything can easily remain in indeterminacy and inaction. That is why it is very important to observe what dimension reflection occupies in our lives, and how to balance it.

We are at a time when reason is valued excessively, to the detriment of emotion, for example or bodily sensations. This leads us to live unilaterally, leaving out a wide spectrum of our experiences.

If we reflect too much and observe that thoughts form repetitive circles of analysis that never reach a point, we should think about taking our problem to another plane. Carl Jung has a popular saying: "Often the hands will solve a mystery with which the intellect has struggled in vain." Sometimes being creative, intuition, or taking action gives us the answer we are looking for so much.

Reasoning strives to have certainty, to know and have an answer for everything. However, this is not possible, and at many times his insistence further complicates the resolution of the conflict. Reflection loses its virtues in excess and repetition. 

Just as it is not expected to turn exclusively to the sensory or the intuitive to the detriment of reflection, it is not appropriate to put all the weight on the latter either.

Reflection unfolds its full potential if it is put into play in interrelation with other ways of perceiving and elaborating what happens to us. Reflection allows us to become aware, take responsibility, observe what has been traveled. We need it to solve convicts, but we must also integrate the other functions. Otherwise, the experience becomes biased, and too much energy is imprinted, thus exhausting the potentialities of that function.

 

Thank You