Each person is capable of reflection, but not all people give it the attention and time it deserves. Reflection is a useful skill that can be specifically developed. The more often a person reflects, the better their cognitive abilities and their level of emotional intelligence.

Without reflection, people run the risk of making the same mistakes over and over again. Moreover, it’s unlikely that without self-reflection, a person will understand what they want from life.

Benefits of Reflection

Let’s look at why it’s important to engage in reflection in everyday life:

• Self-knowledge. Reflection is necessary for a person to understand what their personality consists of. Reflection helps answer a lot of important questions, such as “What is the meaning of my life?”, “What do I like?”, “What are my strengths and weaknesses?”, “What character traits should I change?”, etc. In the process of reflection, a person begins to realize their needs and aspirations.
• Personal growth. An individual develops when they analyze their experiences and take responsibility for decisions. In order not to repeat mistakes from the past in the future, it isn’t enough to just learn a lesson from them. It’s also necessary to fundamentally change harmful patterns of behavior.
• Improve interpersonal relationships. Without a deep understanding of oneself, it’s impossible to learn to understand relatives and friends. The more often a person thinks about the motives of their behavior, the easier it is for them to correctly assess the actions of loved ones. Reflexion teaches us to respect others as independent individuals with an individual set of values, beliefs, and aspirations.
• Making well-considered decisions. Reflexion gives an opportunity to look at life in a more balanced way and not go along with superficial reactions. It helps you put emotions aside to act systematically on the way to the goal.
• Emotional well-being. Through the process of reflection, a person realizes what types of situations cause them negative emotions and psychological tension. They learn to manage stress rather than blocking it in unhealthy ways. A reflective person knows how to calmly experience negative situations and fully enjoy positive moments.

Key Types of Reflection 

Reflexion is divided into types depending on the subject of analysis:

• Empirical reflection is related to the evaluation of a person’s concrete experience and events that have happened to them. An individual can try on the life experiences of other people.
• Theoretical reflection is concerned with thinking about one’s thoughts, beliefs, values, and views. It’s also aimed at planning the future, even if this future is related to planning your bets based on Betting Odds, Predictions & Betting News.
• Emotional reflection involves awareness, acceptance, and analysis of one’s own feelings. A person searches for the causes of specific emotions and determines how they influence thinking and behavior.
• Social reflection manifests itself through thinking about one’s role in society and examining relationships with loved ones. Furthermore, the individual evaluates how their behavior is influenced by the expectations of others and moral standards.
• Metacognitive reflection is an in-depth study of the processes responsible for attention, information perception, and memory. A person learns whether they are affected by some typical distortions in their thinking.

Also, depending on the time to be analyzed, reflection can be:

• Situational. A person evaluates their actions or makes decisions in the here and now. They examine the current state of affairs and the environment around them, and then adjust their behavior to certain conditions.
• Retrospective. An individual evaluates events that have already happened, analyzes their actions, and thinks about what they could have done differently.
• Prospective. A person plans, chooses the most appropriate options for action, and evaluates what result they can achieve.

Each type of reflection complements the other. All types of reflection should be used for a comprehensive assessment of one’s personality.

Reflection Levels 

Researchers distinguish several levels of depth in reflective skills:

• Descriptive level. An individual records what is happening around them, memorizes information, and then, in the process of thinking, tells themselves about events and facts.
• Emotional level. An individual analyzes the feelings they experience and then thinks about what they reacted to. It may also be noted how the emotion manifested itself at the level of physical sensation, e.g., through body tremors, headaches, tension in the legs, etc.
• Analytical level. A person understands the causes and effects of different events. They evaluate the factors influencing their behavior.
• Critical level. The individual reflects on their actions in terms of their correctness, effectiveness, permissibility, and adequacy.
• Contextual level. An individual realizes how their thinking and behavior are influenced by social and cultural stereotypes, their parents’ upbringing, and other people’s actions.
• Value level. A person analyzes their beliefs, patterns of behavior, and thinking. They decide what needs to be changed for the better on the path of self-development.

Potential Dangers of Inappropriate Reflection

Improper reflection can cause distorted perceptions of past experiences or the current situation. This will lead to making inadequate decisions. So, in the process of reflection, one should try to evaluate events objectively, taking into account both one’s own behavior and the influence of external factors.

Focusing only on the negative during reflection plunges an individual into chronic stress and anxiety. A person with a negative type of thinking can be disliked by others because many people don’t like to communicate with a friend or colleague who always has everything bad.

An overly critical attitude toward themselves reduces self-esteem and even sometimes leads to depression. However, in some situations, people, on the contrary, engage in self-justification, deny their mistakes, and refuse to take responsibility. If people don’t learn from the past, they don’t grow as people.

Reflection will go wrong if it’s guided by harmful values or false beliefs. It’s also easy to come to wrong conclusions under the influence of cognitive distortions.

Here are the typical cognitive errors to watch out for:

• Shoulds. Catch yourself when you start using the words “should,” “must,” “must,” “need,” etc. They indicate that you are trying to adjust both your behavior and the behavior of people around you to some strictly defined framework. However, most likely, these rules exist only in your head, so you don’t have to obey them.
• Filtering. This cognitive distortion prevents an objective perception of the situation because the mind concentrates only on the negative aspects of what happened. To overcome this “negative filter” and start noticing the positive, it’s better to analyze difficult situations and problems in writing.
• Overgeneralization. A person makes a global conclusion on the basis of a single case. For example, a woman was not hired after a job interview, so she decided that from now on she would be haunted by failures. It’s because of overgeneralizations that harmful stereotypes like “All men cheat,” “Good looks are a woman’s main virtue,” etc. most often arise.

Reflection Techniques

Reflection can be conducted in a free way, that is, simply in the head, to analyze their actions and reactions to events, to look for mistakes, and to come up with strategies for the future. To make reflection more profound, it’s better to additionally use special techniques.

Cognitive Restructuring of Thoughts

Reflection is impossible without identifying the positive and negative sides of one’s personality. However, we often evaluate ourselves with inadequate beliefs. For example, “I don’t know how to do anything,” “Nobody likes me,” “I behave stupidly in company,” “I don’t deserve happiness,” etc.

Such thoughts should be checked for their correspondence to reality. To do this, you should be alone with yourself, and then come up with as many arguments as possible in writing to confirm or refute these beliefs.

Consider whether your thought pattern has a secondary benefit. For example, the belief “I’m not capable of anything” seems to absolve the person of responsibility, so they don’t try to change their life.

You should check whether the thought is accurately based on real facts rather than emotions or feelings. Also, think about how a person with a completely different life experience would evaluate your situation.

Reflection in this form makes us realize that our thoughts are not always adequate and correct. Sometimes, on the contrary, they deceive us, so they lower our self-esteem and cause groundless anxiety.

SWOT Analysis

To assess the adequacy and effectiveness of your own behavior, it’s worth using the SWOT method. It’s suitable both for examining actions that have already been performed and for thinking about potential courses of action.

Write down the answers to the following questions:

• What are the advantages of this behavior?
• What are the disadvantages?
• What positive opportunities arise because of this behavior?
• What problems or simply negative consequences might arise?

It’s also worth using a SWOT analysis to make an overall assessment of your personality. To do this, write out your character strengths and weaknesses. Then think about how these qualities could potentially be used to improve your life. Then note any difficulties that might arise.

Keep a Diary

A diary is a simple but effective tool for self-reflection. You should fill it out daily, weekly, or at least monthly. However, you don’t have to make keeping a diary a chore. It’s better to treat this process as a conversation with a friend, to whom you tell about all the significant events of the past period.

You can take notes in a free-form manner, or you can take notes in an emotion diary format. An emotion journal is useful for people who often experience negative feelings but cannot understand why they are happening.

Fill out an emotion diary using a ready-made chart:

• The strongest emotion for the day, its intensity on a scale from 0 to 10.
• The event that caused these feelings and thoughts about what happened.
• Feelings in the body against the background of the strong emotion.
• Reaction to the emotion in the form of subsequent behavior.

The content of the diary will help you track recurring patterns of harmful behavior, intrusive thoughts, and false beliefs.