be to focus on a beatific vision after death. The thirteenth century pope Innocent III wrote about the essential misery of earthly existence in his "On the misery of the human condition"—a view that was disputed by, for example, Giannozzo Manetti in his treatise "On human dignity". Renaissance A famous quote of Shakespeare's Hamlet (II, ii, 115–117), expresses the contrast of human physical beauty, intellectual faculty, and ephemeral nature: René Descartes famously and succinctly proposed: Cogito ergo sum (French: "Je pense donc je suis"; English: "I think, therefore I am"), not an assessment of humanity, but certainly reflecting a capacity for reasoning as a characteristic of humans, that potentially, could include individual self-reflection. Modern era The Enlightenment was driven by a renewed conviction, that, in the words of Immanuel Kant, "Man is distinguished above all animals by his self-consciousness, by which he is a 'rational animal'." In conscious opposition to this tradition during the nineteenth century, Karl Marx defined humans as a "labouring animal" (animal laborans). In the early twentieth century, Sigmund Freud dealt a serious blow to positivism by postulating that, to a large part, human behaviour is controlled by the unconscious mind. Joseph Conrad uses the analogy of chemistry to describe how the tiniest idea can stimulate a person during reflection like a "little drop precipitating the process of crystallization in a test tube containing a colourless solution". Mandatory or advisory periods for reflection are built into some regulatory requirements, for example changes to divorce law in England and Wales adopted in 2022 prescribe a 20-week period of reflection before certain proceedings are concluded, and the European Union's Mortgage Credit Directive allows for a seven-day period of reflection before a mortgage offer needs to be accepted. Impact Self-reflection is a process of communicating internally with oneself. When one takes time to think about their character or behavior, they analyze the reasons that caused the behavior, where this comes from, what the outcome of the behavior means to them, is it effective for them and what they can do about it. Individuals process this information about themselves to help them find methods to deal with the information gained during the self-reflection process and applying this information to future behavior has been shown to elicit strength and joy. Self-reflection helps people in multiple ways: First, self-reflection fortifies an individual’s emotional stability. When setting aside some effort to self-reflect they are