The Attention You Stopped Paying Yourself

How to Be Human — A Three-Part Series on How Women Have Lost Our Humanity

In our society today, self-awareness has never been widespread. Human beings have always struggled to confront their internal contradictions, their fears, the grief they’d rather not name. That work requires space, time, and a tolerance for discomfort that most of us were never taught. But the forces working against it now are more organized, more sophisticated, and more relentless than anything previous generations faced.

The attention economy doesn’t simply distract; it repurposes human cognition, fragmenting inner coherence into consumable reactions. Every notification, every curated feed, every algorithm is designed to intercept the small moments where reflection might arise and replace them with the next immediate stimulus. The average person checks their phone 96 times a day — once every ten minutes of waking life.

Each interruption isn’t a momentary break in concentration. It’s a reset of attentional capacity, a fracture in the cognitive continuity required to know yourself at all. But technology alone can’t explain what’s happened. There is something deeper, something that was already broken before the first smartphone lit up.

The Fear Underneath

As women, self-awareness is frightening because it forces confrontation. Not just with our aspirations but with our failures. Not just with our pain but with the ways we’ve contributed to other people’s suffering. It demands honesty without brutality, tenderness without indulgence, responsibility without self-destruction.

Most systems — religious, educational, corporate — never equipped us for that work. They trained obedience, productivity, certainty. Very few trained the resilient capacity to sit inside ambiguity and contradiction and feeling without fleeing. So we developed sophisticated imitations instead.

The language of personal growth and emotional intelligence is everywhere now — personality tests, self-help programs, online quizzes that promise to reveal who we really are. Most of it produces categorical identities rather than complex understanding, simplified narratives rather than ongoing inquiry. Performative self-knowledge. The appearance of introspection without its substance. It treats symptoms rather than identifying root causes.

What the Horse Saw

I learned what fragmented attention actually costs when I began working closely with horses. Horses respond to what’s invisible to most humans — the tension running beneath the surface, the incoherence between the body and whatever performance the mind is projecting. During one session, I was trying to guide a nervous gelding through a ground exercise and I could feel my frustration building, my impatience tightening everything. Nothing was working.

Only when I stopped — truly stopped, not the performed version of stopping where your body stills but your mind keeps grinding — did I feel what was actually there. Simmering shame and exhaustion from earlier failures that week, running underneath every interaction like a current I’d refused to acknowledge. The horse felt it before I did. He’d been responding to the truth of me while I was busy responding to the story of me.

Self-awareness is not surface noticing. It’s the willingness to encounter the raw material inside yourself, unfiltered and unedited, and to let it inform the present without drowning it. Most of us are trained to skip that step entirely. We perform calm, authority, competence, while the undercurrents of fear and grief and anger run unattended. And everything — relationships, decisions, the way we move through a room — suffers for it.

Small Acts of Reclamation

Rebuilding self-awareness begins with reclaiming attention, and not just from technology. From our own conditioned avoidance. Sitting through the discomfort of a waiting room without reaching for the phone. Naming an emotional state before reacting to it. Noticing when a habitual narrative is running and choosing to pause rather than repeat it unconsciously. These sound small. In a world engineered to capture and monetize every flicker of attention, they are acts of resistance.

Self-awareness is not self-obsession. It’s self-stewardship — the ability to notice what’s true inside without immediately fleeing, fixing, or performing.

It’s slow work, often invisible. But it’s the foundation without which nothing else holds. Without it, emotional regulation becomes suppression. Communication becomes manipulation. Purpose becomes performance. The entire architecture of a human life depends on this one capacity — the willingness to turn toward rather than away from your own internal landscape.

In a world designed to fragment and capture attention, there is nothing more countercultural than sustained, curious awareness of your own interior. Nothing more radical than the choice to notice, stay, and witness your own experience without judgment or the compulsive need to make it content.

When did you last stop long enough to hear something inside you that wasn’t curated for anyone else’s consumption?