Do you decide for yourself where you want to go in your life? Or do you let the autopilot guide you? These signs suggest the latter.
Life constantly presents unexpected opportunities that can lead to wonderful experiences, successes, or relationships. But in order to seize such opportunities, we must be vigilant. That we notice what is happening around us and react to it. On the other hand, if we are on autopilot, we will miss the opportunities that can lead us to the dazzlingly beautiful parts of life.
7 Signs You’re Running Your Life on Autopilot
1. Your thoughts are often somewhere else
Since you don’t have much to control in autopilot anyway, your mind can easily wander in this mode, wander from the future to the past, create dream worlds or rush through the world news. But they are less often focused on the here and now.
2. You feel as if time is rushing past you
As you get older, time seems to pass faster and faster. However, if you are traveling on autopilot, this can increase this effect. Days, weeks and months seem to blur together without anything happening. You lack variety and changes of direction, pauses or changes in pace that interrupt the flow of time for a moment in your perception.
3. You have difficulty remembering and classifying important events
If all days are the same and you are not actively involved in what you are doing because you do it automatically, you will miss highlights, first times, intense moments and emotions that you can remember and orient yourself over time. This means that you have problems recording events in your memory as well as classifying when something happened.
4. They are largely predictable
Routines are good for your everyday life and basically save energy that you have available for new and special experiences. But if these new, special experiences are completely missing from your life, even fearing and avoiding them and leaving no room for improvisation, flexibility and the unexpected, it may be a sign that the autopilot mode is switched on and you no longer know how to do them control at all.
5. You don’t know idle
Rushing from one to-do to the next and if there is time to relax in between, distract yourself with passive activities like watching TV or scrolling through the Insta feed. Such everyday life is typical of autopilot phases in which you miss moments in which you deal with yourself and reorganize yourself or pursue activities that mean something to you (e.g. hobbies or relationships).
6. You don’t feel like starting the day in the morning
You don’t have to jump out of bed every morning feeling elated and motivated and looking forward to your tasks. But if you wake up every day thinking “Oh, no, not again,” that could be a sign that you are a guest on a trip that you don’t actually want to go on and that doesn’t require or allow any initiative from you.
7. You invest (too) much 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 things that you can devote your full energy and passion to. Things that could give you validation, strength and confidence. Therefore, you tend to throw yourself into every task that comes your way and take it too seriously without thinking about whether it is really important to you. You do what is offered to you to feel meaningful and needed, not what you choose.
Sources used: psychologytoday.com, success.com