Observing Ego and Experiencing Ego: Find Your Inner Self

The observing ego is a concept in psychology that represents our ability to step back and observe our own thoughts and behaviors.

Do you know that just because you’re aware of reading this post doesn’t mean that you’re self-aware? Those are two different things.

Self-awareness is the first step you need to take to improve your mental wellbeing. If you’re not aware that your quality of life isn’t good enough, there’s no reason to improve it.

It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.
Thomas Sowell

Observing Ego Meaning

The observing ego is your inner witness, the part of you that steps back to analyze thoughts, emotions, and actions.

Unlike the experiencing ego, which is caught up in the moment, developing your observing ego is key to self-awareness. It helps you identify unhealthy patterns, challenge limiting beliefs, and make conscious choices in alignment with your true self.

Want to break free from reactive behaviors and step into your full potential? Strengthening your observing ego is the first step!

Experiencing Ego Meaning

The experiencing ego is the part of you fully immersed in the moment – your thoughts, feelings, and reactions.

It’s fueled by desires, emotions, and ingrained habits. While essential for everyday life, an unchecked experiencing ego can lead to impulsive actions, unhealthy patterns, and difficulty seeing the bigger picture.

Understanding your experiencing ego is the first step toward greater self-awareness and conscious choice.

How do You Achieve Self-Awareness?

By starting to differentiate between the part of yourself that experiences everything that happens to you from the part of yourself that observes how you experience your life. If it seems confusing, have a little patience. Soon, it will be much clearer.

You identify with your thoughts, emotions, sensations in your body and often with your life events. For example, if you get a promotion at work, you feel an emotion we call happiness, and then you think: “I’m happy.” 

But in fact, happiness isn’t you. You’re the one who’s experiencing it due to the factors that cause that particular emotion. The feeling usually doesn’t last long because it’s soon replaced with other emotions caused by other factors. 

So, if the day after your promotion, someone scratches your car in the parking lot, you’ll feel anger, and if someone asks you how you are, you’ll tell them: “I’m angry.”

You can’t be either happy or angry. You can only feel those emotions. That part of you we’ll call The Experiencing Ego.

Something powerful happens when you identify the part of yourself experiencing your life. You’ll start to notice another part of you – the observer – watching that experiencing part.

We’ll call The Observing Ego the part that analyzes and observes what the experiencing ego is undergoing.

The first crucial step toward building self-consciousness is noticing the difference between these two parts.

Next Steps

When you manage to do that, you should try to direct more your conscious attention to the part of yourself that’s observing rather than to the part that’s experiencing. In time, it will turn into an automatic reaction.

Hence, in connection with already mentioned examples of happiness, because of the promotion at work, and anger because of the car damage, you’ll no longer say: “I’m happy” or “I’m angry”, but “I feel happy” or “I feel angry”.

However, you’ll be aware that happiness and anger are passing feelings that change due to various factors. By doing so, you’ll no longer go from extreme joy to excessive sadness.

You’ll start experiencing all those emotions more moderately because you’ll know that they aren’t you but that they’re your reactions to events. 

Thanks to this, you’ll become a more stable person who isn’t easily thrown out of balance by life events, which results in a better mental health.

Once you become aware of your observing ego, you have a tool to observe what’s happening in your life without identifying with it.

Then comes the next challenge you must overcome in growing your mind: How to look at yourself objectively?.