Live consciously How do you know you’re on autopilot?
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Do you decide for yourself where you want to go in your life? Or do you let the autopilot guide you? These signs point to the latter.
Life constantly presents unexpected opportunities that can lead to great experiences, successes, or relationships. But in order to seize such opportunities, we must be vigilant. To notice what is happening around us and react to it. On the other hand, if we are on autopilot, we will miss opportunities that could lead us to the beautiful, dazzling parts of life.
7 signs that you are running your life on autopilot
1. Your thoughts are often elsewhere
Since you don’t have much to control on autopilot anyway, your mind can easily wander in this mode, wandering from the future to the past, creating dream worlds, or rushing through world news. But they often focus less on the here and now.
2. You feel as if time is passing quickly
As you get older, time seems to pass faster and faster. However, if you are traveling on autopilot, this may increase this effect. Days, weeks, and months seem to blur together without anything happening. You lack variety, changes in direction, pauses or changes in pace that interrupt the flow of time for a moment in your perception.
3. You have difficulty remembering and categorizing important events
If all days are the same and you are not actively engaged in what you are doing because you are doing it automatically, you will miss the highlights, the first moments, the intense moments, and the emotions that you can remember and guide yourself over time. This means that you have problems registering events in your memory as well as categorizing when something happened.
4. It is highly predictable
Routines are beneficial to your daily life and essentially free up energy for new and special experiences. But if these new and special experiences are completely missing from your life, even if you fear and avoid them and leave no room for improvisation, flexibility and the unexpected, it may be a sign that you have turned on autopilot mode and no longer know how to do it. Do they have any control at all?
5. You do not know idleness
Rush from one task to another, and if there is time to relax in between, distract yourself with passive activities like watching TV or scrolling through your Instagram feed. Such daily living is typical of autopilot phases in which you miss moments to process yourself, reorganize yourself, or engage in activities that mean something to you (such as hobbies or relationships).
6. You don’t feel like starting your day in the morning
You don’t have to jump out of bed every morning feeling cheerful, motivated, and looking forward to your tasks. But if you wake up every day and think, “Oh, no, not again,” it may be a sign that you are a guest on a journey that you do not want to continue and that does not require or allow any initiative. From you.
7. You invest too much of your energy in things that mean nothing to you
You may not feel particularly energetic anyway, but when you’re on autopilot, you’re probably missing out on things you could devote your full energy and passion to. Things that can give you validation, strength and confidence. Therefore, you tend to throw yourself into every task that comes your way and take it seriously without thinking about whether it is really important to you. You do what you are offered to feel meaning and need, not what you choose.
Sources used: Psychologytoday.com, Success.com
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