Value Your Comfortable Feelings
Cognitive Dissonance Helps Execute Our Beliefs
The term “cognitive dissonance[1]” refers to a situation that when your beliefs are in conflict with your behaviors, the discomfort comes into being. In a nutshell, only when our behaviors are in accordance with our beliefs, we secure an internal peaceful mind.
Cognitive dissonance occurs when an individual’s behavior contradicts his beliefs in which are integral to his life value, self-identity or self-worth, particularly religious belief.
Life is all about making big and small decisions every single day. We tend to avoid making errors and make accurate or better decisions.
Chances are, there are no good or bad decisions but decisions with fewer regrets.
Our every move reflects our free will and it demonstrates our ability to execute self-discipline.
Value your uncomfortable feelings. Because they are good reminders indeed.[2]
Every uncomfortable feeling is the hint to press us to make some changes to secure a better life. There must be something wrong. Don’t ignore the warning signs Without comfortable feelings, there won’t be changes. And life can be still.
The sad truth is that most people are not confident enough to fight for what they want in life.
In A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, Festinger offers an example of how an individual deals with dissonance by discussing individuals who continue to smoke even though they know it is bad for their health.
Festinger asserts that a person might minimize the potential drawbacks of smoking by convincing himself that the negative health effects have been overstated. In a sense, those who can’t stop smoking tend to justify or rationalize their conflicting behavior by lowering the negative impacts.
Come to think it, everyone is keenly aware of the wrongdoing of cheating and unfaithfulness. Those who cheat might tend to rationalize their behavior or nullify their guilt by justifying their freedom to seek true love and lowering the possible harm they cause to people they love.
As we consistently undermining the wickedness of common sins such as pride, laziness or overeating, we keep performance the worst self by failing to execute self-discipline or temperance. By doing so, we get disappointed at ourselves consciously or not and we fail to be truly satisfied with ourselves or our life because we do not become a “better me” as we hope.
That might be the common causes of daily stress, depression and anxiety because we do not do our best to achieve what we truly want and desire.
In a sense, as we allow ourselves to spend time doing what we don’t truly believe, we get stressful, anxious and unnerving.
Resolving dissonance help us prevent from making regretful choices. As our inner desire is in accordance with our behavior, we secure inner peace without efforts.
There are too many temptations out there. Our life cannot be easily altered or reversed.
▲Amazon | Modern Love | TV Series (2019– )
The system is designed to confirm our choices and desires so as to ensure the consistency of our beliefs and behaviors.
Hence, I firmly believe this built-in system in the brain is a gift from God,[3] which helps us to confirm our life priorities. Cognitive dissonance helps us make sure that we execute our beliefs, so we can secure our dreamed life without deceiving our true selves.
Read more articles
[1] The theory is proposed by Psychologist Leon Festinger. He published the book “A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance” in 1957 to explain the theory.
[2] In psychology, cognitive dissonance is the mental discomfort or stress experienced by a person when his behaviors are contradictory to his beliefs, or values.
[3] Researchers have recently identified key brain regions linked to cognitive dissonance where is situated in the posterior part of the medial frontal cortex (pMFC). Studies have revealed that cognitive dissonance engages other brain regions, such as the insula and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). The insula is responsible for processing emotions, and it often becomes more active when people are being upset or irritated, and the DLPFC is strongly associated with cognitive control.
