At some point in your life, you may have had the feeling that you were observing yourself. And not in the out-of-body way that we typically associate with near-death experiences, but in a way that felt like you were disconnected from participating in reality.
This feeling, known clinically as depersonalization, is a lot more common than you might expect.
Depersonalization is a condition where people experience a distressing fracture in their first-person perception of the world, accompanied by the feeling that they are ‘watching’ or ‘witnessing’ themselves go about their lives. These ‘self-splits’ can manifest as a detachment from the body (or parts of it), emotions and feelings or even an individual's personal life narrative, causing sufferers to not feel fully ‘real,’ or as if they're running on autopilot.
