Are You Being Too Self-Centered
“Be kind, everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” This insight is universal because it reminds us that the people in our lives are dealing with their own hardships; that they have their own pain to process.Even with a sage reminder like this, why is it that we only see our own distress when in the middle of hard times? Why do we feel that we have a monopoly on pain? We first must understand why we become more self-centered in times of anxiety. A recent study found that troubled feelings increase our reliance on egocentric thinking--meaning that we stop seeing other’s perspectives while distressed. We become more self-centered when experiencing unhappy circumstances and this causes us to only see our own agonies because of our agitated, single-focused minds. Our selfishness is bound to be apparent to others as well. One study has shown that patients who used more first-person pronouns (I and me) during therapy sessions had a higher incidence of depression while...