It is often said that a person is only as good as their word. If we say one thing yet do another, are we truly trustworthy? Often, we lie to others because it’s easier and/or we don’t want to hurt or offend someone else. Often, it’s to escape judgement. We’re going to take a different look at that in this piece. Are you lying to yourself? It’s more common than you think or may care to admit. Why and what happens when we lie to ourselves?
“Whatever we do, we want our actions, attitudes, and beliefs to line up together. So, if you perform an action that goes against your beliefs, such as making a snide remark about someone, it makes you feel uncomfortable.
This feeling is the result of cognitive dissonance, which happens when your thoughts and beliefs fail to align with what you do. We try to get rid of the dissonance, so we either justify our actions or change our beliefs to fit what we did.
For instance, you might feel bad about the hurtful things you said, so you try to reduce your feelings of guilt by telling yourself, “Everyone else is doing it, so it must be okay.” While doing so helps us sleep at night, there are times that our justifications can have serious repercussions (medium).”
Now, this makes sense. Back to the all to often mentioned commuting in Pinellas County. My anger and lack of patience gets the better of me too much while driving around here. I make snide remarks about other drivers far more than I would like to admit. Next thing I know, I feel uncomfortable and I try to justify it; “They should have used a turn signal. You don’t stop in the middle of the road. They should have used the turn lane when turning.” It doesn’t matter what the justification is. Making the snide remarks towards others doesn’t line up with my values which is why I feel uncomfortable afterwards. I mentioned it before, but I am now looking at driving around here as a personal test of sorts.
Why do we lie to ourselves? For starters, it’s comfortable. It is a way to justify our behavior that allows us to escape facing and correcting the behavior which isn’t always easy. Right in line with comfort, we lie to ourselves because it’s convenient. It allows us to keep doing what we’re doing without making any changes.
Similar to not lying to another person so we don’t offend them, lying to ourselves may allow us to feel better about ourselves. This is a short sighted and shallow solution. If we don’t correct what it is that we’re lying about, the lies we tell ourselves may begin to lose their ability to make us feel better. Over time, this may add up and lead to depression, anxiety or any number of negative results.
Right in line with making us feel better about ourselves, we lie to avoid the responsibility of our actions. If someone is mean to us and in return our reaction is to be mean to them, we may try to justify that by lying to ourselves, saying that they deserved it because they were mean. That if they had only been nice to us, we would have been nice to them in return. We’ve all heard it before, two wrongs do not make a right. Just because someone is mean to us doesn’t determine how we treat them. Always be kind. If not for others, for your own sake.
Being nice to others, even when they’re mean is not a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of strength. If you are confident in yourself, then how others treat us should have no consequence on how we treat them. It’s the golden rule; “treat others how you would like to be treated.” Do we want others to treat us poorly? Surely not.
Unfortunately, we do not live in a time in which everyone operates by the golden rule (imagine if we did though!). Others will mistreat us from time to time which is unfortunate. When we respond poorly by mistreating them, we only attract more of that to ourselves. When we respond by simply being kind, not only do we feel good about ourselves, we attract more kindness towards us.
Are there other reasons and way we lie to ourselves? What are they? Do you operate by the golden rule? How do we get others to see the value in the golden rule? How does it improve us, our health, those around us and in consequence, the world? Let’s talk about it!
Keep Smiling,
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