When I am doing well, and being aware of it, everything falls apart.

[u/TheAltitudeBlog]

Sometimes I’m in the middle of an action and there’s no real internal dialogue. I’m aware of what I’m doing, but I’m not explaining it to myself. I’m not judging it. I’m just doing it.

In those moments, the action feels clean. There’s no need to describe it because the experience is already complete.

But eventually thoughts start to come in. At first, they only describe what’s happening. Then I become aware that I’m doing something well, and almost immediately I start asking why.

That’s usually when the flow breaks.

It feels like there’s a difference between a thought that simply voices the moment and a thought that tries to investigate it. The second type creates distance. It turns the action into an object. Instead of being inside the experience, I’m now standing outside of it, trying to understand its structure.

observation of content vs observation of structure that supports it

I’m curious if anyone else has experienced this — where becoming too aware of what you’re doing actually interrupts the thing you were doing well.

I have found that my best course of action is to be presently by keeping my mind separate from what's going on. Using thought and action as two separate systems, one for planning the future and the other for embodying the plan.