How often should you reflect? Twice Daily, Daily, and Weekly Compared

As someone who had my life changed with daily reflections, I started to wonder about research that found out that too much self-reflection can be bad. As always, I went to research to find things out from a neutral perspective. From my research and experience, I have found some interesting ideas that are worth sharing with everyone. We are going to talk about how often should we really reflect to get the benefits of self-reflection.

You should reflect every day because reflecting once a day is a good way to get ready or to summarize your day. Reflecting constantly would eventually make a habit that will help you understand your feelings, thoughts, and actions which leads to happiness and contentment.

While it is true that daily reflections are a good way to make ourselves happy, I also believe that everything that is too much is bad. My life has changed for the better ever since I’ve put reflection into my daily habit. But what is too much? How often should we self-reflect? Can we really reflect too much? Is reflecting too much bad? We will all answer them in this blog post.

How often should you self reflect?

You should self-reflect once a day because it helps you understand your thoughts, feelings, and actions in relation to your past experience, current life, and future plans. This helps us go through life with a clear sense of purpose and makes us sure that we are living life to its fullest.

My answer will stay the same. It is ideal to reflect every day.

Doing some sort of reflection every day helps us summarize or prepare for our days which is really helpful to make sure that we are living according to our values and goals.

For example, if my goal is to be a good content creator, then I have to make sure that I have published something today whether it may be a blog post or a YouTube video.

Thus, I believe that self-reflection daily is ideal.

However, I also know that not everyone can do what I am doing. I know that most of us are busy and some couldn’t reflect every day.

Thus, I believe that if we don’t reflect daily, we should at least aim to reflect at least once a week.

Reflecting once a week is good if you want to have some jumpstart on your week.

In weekly reflections, you try to schedule your whole week.

For example, you could set some quotas on how much work do you need to finish the whole week.

It can be the number of papers you’re going to finish, the number of calls you are going to make, or the number of deals you are going to sign.

Weekly reflection is ideal for busy people and I think it is really good as a long-term strategy.

The good thing about weekly reflection is that it just saves time. Plus, you get the benefits of goal settings.

Furthermore, the weekly reflection is very flexible.

For example, if you start reflecting weekly, it doesn’t matter if you got sick for a day since as long as you finish your weekly goals, then it is perfectly fine.

Frequency of Reflection	Advantage	Disadvantage
Twice a Day Reflection	Can reflect on everything	Not sustainable or can be too much
Daily Reflection	Sustainable, Flexible	Can be hard for extremely busy people
Weekly Reflection	Very flexible	Can’t reflect on everything since we often forget

Both daily and weekly reflection is ideal. The only thing not good about weekly reflection is that we sometimes forget things.

Once we forget, we can’t really reflect on them anymore.

But in terms of results, both daily and weekly are ideal.

What I can’t really like is reflecting twice a day.

I believe that you can reflect twice a day. It gets the benefit of both preparing for your day and summarizing your day.

However, the problem here is that it is not sustainable. Even I, who is doing daily reflection for years, can’t sustain reflecting twice a day.

It just takes a lot of time and I have a lot of other things to do.

In my opinion, the benefits of reflecting twice a day are not enough to make me do it.

That’s why in my tutorial on self-reflection, I suggested people choose just one. Either reflecting in the morning or at night. That way, it would be sustainable.

I believe that consistency is key.

That is my video explaining how to properly do reflection. To make sure that you won’t be doing it too much, I made sure that it will only last you 5 minutes and 15 minutes tops.

If you need my full guide on self-reflection, you may check this blog post: How to reflect on your day

But my point is this.

Both daily and weekly reflections are perfect to achieve most of the benefits of reflection. Doing it twice or even thrice per day is just too much.

Furthermore, frequency is not the only thing to worry about. We also need to worry about how much time we give to reflection which we will discuss in the next section.

Can you reflect too much?

You can reflect too much especially if you will do it for more than 30 minutes every day. For one, it can take up a lot of time daily which prevents us from doing some work. Furthermore, too much self-reflection can cause the law of paradoxical intent which makes people more anxious, stressed, and less satisfied with their life.

Too much of everything is bad even reflections.

In a study by a Psychologist named Tasha Eurich, Ph.D., she has reported that too much reflection can cause a more stressful, less satisfied, and more anxious life.

In all honesty, I was not surprised by the results since we will not talk here about why.

The first thing to note is that some people reflect the wrong way.

A lot of people say that reflection is all about finding yourself, knowing your goals, learning about your past, and getting you into the present.

While that is true, that is just a part of reflection.

The second part of reflection is preparing some plans to achieve these goals you have.

If you only know your goals without creating any plans to achieve them, you will really feel hopeless and less satisfied in life.

That is why some feel that they are helpless.

That is why in my tutorial where I taught how to do reflection, I made sure that you should write a highlight or write the most important task for the day.

The most important task for the day is your step towards slowly reaching your goal. This empowers you that you are slowly reaching your goals.

So, make sure to check my video above or to read the blog post I’ve given. Their only difference is that my blog post is more detailed than the video. But the message is the same.

The second thing to note is the time it takes to do reflection.

If you check my video or blog post, I made sure that you will finish your reflection in just 5 minutes daily.

This is because we want things to be extremely efficient.

I believe that reflection is useless without work. And if we just use all our time in reflection, this leaves no time to work on our goals.

Without any time to work on our goals, we will not work on them which makes us less satisfied in life.

That’s why I made sure that the tutorial I’ve made will make you finish reflections in just a few minutes tops.

This empowers us and gives us time to work on our goals preventing the feeling that we lack time and we aren’t enough.

The last thing is the law of paradoxical intent.

To make things simple, here is the law of paradoxical intent in a nutshell.

The more you seek something, the more you lack it.

The more you seek happiness, the more you feel that you aren’t. The more you seek relationships, the more you will be sad about your current social life. The more you seek money, the more you will feel that you lack money.

The most you reflect, the more you will see that you aren’t enough.

That’s why there is such thing as reflecting too much. Remember that reflecting too much has two things.

One is the frequency, the other is how long do you reflect.

Remember this basic rule: Once a day, 5-15 minutes each.

Anything more than that can be too much.

For a detailed guide on how long should you Reflect daily, weekly, and yearly, feel free to check this blog post: How long should we reflect?

Is reflecting too much bad?

Reflecting too much is bad because it takes up a lot of time and research has found out that too much reflecting leads to a more stressful life. Furthermore, it makes us feel less in control, and less satisfied in life. This is because everything in life that is too much is bad.

I hope this doesn’t stop you from reflecting.

The reason I am giving you these ideas is not to stop you from reflecting but to help you know how to prevent any problems.

We reflect because we want its benefits. We do not want any adverse effects from reflecting too much.

While I presented you with a study about reflection being bad, I would like to end this blog post by presenting a study that says it is also good.

A study from the Australian Psychological Society has found out that self-reflection may be beneficial to individuals who do not enjoy high levels of happiness.

However, I should note that it is on the neutral side. They also said that for some, reflection has detrimental effects on happiness.

Now, why is that the case, it’s going back again to the three things I’ve talked about later.

To prevent this from happening, I made a perfect guide for you where I gave examples, taught you what to write on your reflection, and a video guide.

This is to make sure that you get all the benefits of reflection minus the disadvantages. Again, you can find it here: How to reflect on your day

Sources:

1. Eurich, Tasha. “The Right Way to Be Introspective (Yes, There’s a Wrong Way).” Ideas.Ted.Com, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2 June 2017, ideas.ted.com/the-right-way-to-be-introspective-yes-theres-a-wrong-way.
2. Elliott, Irina, and Suzanne Coker. “Independent Self-Construal, Self-Reflection, and Self-Rumination: A Path Model for Predicting Happiness.” Australian Journal of Psychology, vol. 60, no. 3, 2008, pp. 127–34. Crossref, doi:10.1080/00049530701447368.