Ever find yourself stressed out about little details in your day, which you will later realize didn’t matter 1 bit?
Narrow awareness.
Ever look back on where you were 10 years ago, realize how far you’ve come and feel deeply satisfied, despite there being so much you could still think of wanting to change?
Wide awareness.
Ever been at a group gathering where you felt uncomfortable about a particular individual and you found yourself tracking their movements in the space, to make sure you’d stay far away from them?
Narrow awareness.
Ever been at a group gathering where you felt so relaxed that you found yourself just leaning back, witnessing everything happening inside the space, delighting in all the little details and the magic of the group interactions?
Wide awareness.
Ever been so laser-focused on a task that someone could be kidnapping your dog and you wouldn’t even notice?
Narrow awareness.
Ever been laser-focused on a task yet somehow still able to perceive everything going on around you?
Wide awareness.
Ever noticed mid-conversation that you’ve only been talking about yourself?
That’s a pivotal point from narrow to wide awareness.
When you pay attention, these are distinct modes of experiencing reality:
Narrow awareness is a helpful state for the specific, the urgent and the intense. For troubleshooting details, or precise actions like threading a needle.
The shadow side of narrow awareness is the potential for rumination or hyperfixation on the same thing when the context that made it matter is no longer there.
Wide awareness is a helpful state for big-picture thinking, strategy, creativity, adaptability and connecting dots.
The shadow side of wide awareness is losing sight of important details and—if not paired with a regulated nervous system—potential overwhelm or confusion.
Speaking of nervous system regulation:
While the correlation isn’t 100%, generally speaking, we’re more likely to have wide awareness when we are relaxed and narrow awareness when we are experiencing a degree of tension, contraction or stress.
Now, when I say “tension, contraction or stress”, I mean that neutrally. I’m aware these are terms that carry some negative load in the self-help-o-sphere anno 2026, but these are all things that are part of a healthy functioning:
Tension is necessary for anyone who wishes to stay alive, and stress in healthy amounts makes you grow. Oh, and without contractions we wouldn’t have even been born.
Why are these things correlated with narrow awareness?
As we’ve seen, one potential issue with wide awareness is losing sight of important details.
But when I said so, I was oversimplifying a bit. It’s perfectly possible to have wide awareness and not miss a single detail. Advanced meditators are an example of this. As are great military strategists. It’s just that this requires enormous capacity.
For most of us, at some point, when our awareness gets too wide, we must compensate for it by compressing the data, meaning we’ll interpret reality through a lossy signal.
When we have wide awareness but can’t make sense of it, we relate to it with confusion and overwhelm.
There are 3 ways of dealing with this:
A) Embrace the confusion and overwhelm, ride out the wave
B) Increase your window of tolerance so that your capacity grows and you can see more details at once
C) Collapse into narrow awareness, now you see less, but you can handle the information you get
The easiest option is always option C. Which is why we do it almost instinctively.
In fact, this is what a trigger is:
A trigger is an instant collapse from wide into narrow awareness, allowing you to no longer see anything except the thing the trigger focuses on.
In my own case—and I don’t know if this is universal, but it’s worth explorimenting with—I even find that I can reverse triggers by playing with awareness through my senses:
My vision is narrow and sharp when triggered.
Inviting peripheral vision or including more of the context around the person seems to bring me back, often reversing the trigger.
(That said, I don’t believe triggers are bad either, but that’s for another day.)
As already hinted at the start of this post, learning to recognize the difference between narrow and wide awareness opens the door for many practical applications.
But what I’m particularly interested in sharing with you is how different ranges of awareness impact communication—a topic I will write about in much more detail the following weeks and months.
In the above example, you can see that, depending on how wide their awareness is, each person has a completely different experience of reality.
The person outside of the dark circle is aware of all 3 fields (the outer circle, the inner circle, and the even wider one which they are standing in). They have wide awareness.
The person in the inner circle is mostly aware of their own circle, and to some degree the edges of the next one (narrow awareness).
If the person with the wide awareness would yell “Bro, come over here! I’m in this vast field of pleasing, empty, canvas where it’s bright and free and you can create anything you want!” , that would not be effective communication.
Because the person with narrow awareness is shining a spotlight, and what the spotlight reveals is darkness. It seems like the wide awareness person is lying dumb or delusional. How can they not notice all this darkness?
On the other hand, if the narrow awareness person would yell at the wide awareness person and say “Bro, I’m in this small confined space surrounded by darkness.” , then that wouldn’t harm communication. The wide awareness person can see it too.
A lot of communication breaks down this way.
For example, we may notice the other person is triggered and try to rationalize them out of it. But this message can not be received. A triggered person is in the smallest circle. They have clear evidence to validate the reason for being triggered, but zero evidence of all the stuff you’re trying to point at that is outside the circles.
To communicate with someone in a state of narrow awareness, you start by establishing shared reality:
Meet them where they are, point at things that are visible to both of you. Don’t insist that they must see the world as you do.
The best communicators act as bridges between these circles. They find ways to create communication channels that can invite people into slightly wider awareness, without overwhelming them with so much foreign information that their system overheats and instinctively collapses into narrow awareness again.
You may have experienced this before, when a patient or skilled teacher gently guided you to understand a complex topic.
But it isn’t limited to teaching or therapy.
In a sense, every truthful thing communicated with you is an invitation into wider awareness.
Every little fact or feeling someone shares with you about them is allowing you to have wider awareness every time you interact with them. To be in that conversation with awareness of both of you, your backgrounds, your contexts.