How do I become more authentic?
You become more authentic by noticing the specific moments you edit yourself and choosing, deliberately, to stop, not by adopting a general policy of "being real." Authenticity is not a personality trait you either have or lack. It is a set of small decisions, repeated under mild social risk, to let your actual reaction show instead of the version you think will land better.
What you are actually doing right now
Most people who ask this question are not liars. They are skilled editors. You take your first, honest reaction to something (a joke that falls flat, a request you resent, an opinion that would create friction) and you run it through a quick filter before it reaches your face or your mouth. The filter asks something like 'will this make me look difficult, needy, or wrong' and adjusts the output accordingly. You do this so fast you often do not register the original reaction at all, only the edited one, which is why you can feel vaguely fake without being able to point to a specific lie you told.
Why the editing exists and is not a character flaw
This habit almost always started as protection, not vanity. Somewhere, showing your real reaction cost you something: a parent who could not handle your anger, a friend group that punished disagreement, a workplace where the wrong facial expression got noted. The edit became automatic because it worked. The problem now is not that you have a false self, it is that a system built for a specific threat is running constantly, in rooms that are not actually dangerous, on people who would probably respond fine to the real thing. The cost of the old protection has quietly outgrown the benefit.
The actual mechanism that helps
Insight into the pattern does not change it. What changes it is picking one low-stakes relationship and deliberately under-editing in it for a stretch of weeks, on purpose, as an experiment rather than a personality overhaul. Say the mildly unpopular opinion in the group chat. Tell the coworker the deadline is tight instead of saying 'sure, no problem.' Let your face show boredom instead of practiced interest for three seconds before you catch it. You are not trying to become a different person. You are collecting evidence that the room survives your real reaction, because that evidence is the only thing that actually retrains the filter.
Where people get this wrong
A common mistake is treating authenticity as an excuse to stop reading the room at all, dumping every unfiltered thought as proof of realness. That is not authenticity, it is a different kind of performance, one where being seen as blunt or unfiltered becomes the new image to manage. The actual skill is narrower: know what you actually think and feel before you decide what to say, and let that private accounting stay accurate even when you choose, for good reasons, to phrase something diplomatically. The goal is an honest internal ledger, not a public confession habit.
When this runs your life, it usually traces to one underlying pattern. For this, it is most often the Mirror rhythm, the thing under the behavior.