in this video you're going to learn about cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is when
we have a gap between what we believe is right and what we're doing. That creates dissonance in
our lives. This means that we believe one thing but we're acting on something else.
Dissonance feels like having one foot on one boat and the other foot on another boat. As the
two boats, as our actions and our beliefs drift further apart, the more uncomfortable we get.
When we have unresolved gaps between our thoughts and our actions, we feel intensely uncomfortable.
You can do all the coping and the meditation and the self-care that you can handle,
but if you can't figure out cognitive dissonance you're just not gonna feel good.
There is no substitute for integrity when it comes to peace of mind. So for example, Jenny knows that
she should exercise more. It's not that she's obese or anything, but her body feels slow and
sluggish, and she gets out of breath when she's walking up a flight of stairs. She knows that
she would feel better if she worked out, and each day that she doesn't exercise she feels a
tinge of disappointment and guilt. Now dissonance makes us feel bad. Dissonance makes us feel
unsettled or guilty or uncertain. Dissonance makes us feel fake or bad about ourselves.
And this feeling isn't just in our minds; it creates measurable physical tension. And this
isn't a bad thing, right? Discomfort can help us be motivated to change. This is strongest when it
has to do with a belief about ourselves. So for example, the thought, you know, I value kindness,
paired with the action "Oh, I just punched someone in the face" is gonna bring on some pretty strong
feelings of regret and guilt and disappointment. When we resolve dissonance, we can feel more
peace, we can like ourselves more, and we can feel clarity. The opposite of dissonance is integrity.
Integrity is not just about being honest with our words; integrity means that we line up
our actions with our values. And in my opinion, integrity is the path to positive self-worth, to
more peaceful emotions and a successful purposeful life. Integrity is all about
closing the gap between what we think and how we act. Resolving cognitive dissonance is essential
to living a life of purpose, meaning joy and growth. So if you want to get better at feeling
and if you want to feel peaceful, then you need to learn what to do with those gaps in your life.
Go ahead and write about one area in your life where your actions don't line up with
your beliefs or your values. How does this affect you? How do you feel about yourself in regards
to it? It's essential to acknowledge and resolve these conflicts as much as possible. When they're
left to just simmer, it leaves us feeling false and helpless and insecure. Dissonance leaves us
feeling uncomfortable and false, and integrity can lead to us feeling secure and capable and whole.
Now there are three ways to resolve dissonance, but not all are equal. So the first one is to
change our behavior to line up with our values. So whenever our values are positive and helpful,
changing our behavior is usually the best way to close the gap. So let's explore what this would
look like with Jenny, right. it sounds so simple, but if she were to start finding a way to exercise
a little bit each day, her feeling of dissonance would be replaced by a feeling of pride.
That seems basic enough, right? When we change our behaviors to line up with our values,
the dissonance goes away. This works great when our values are positive and helpful,
the kind of person we want to be. You don't have to be perfect to be moving in a good direction.
What matters most is that you're putting an effort to live the way that you think you should be.
Okay, the second way to close this gap is to change our thinking to line up with our
behavior. So sometimes our emotions are built on faulty beliefs, um we need to change how we think,
right? In that case we need to change our thinking to line up with our values and our behaviors
instead of trying to change our actions to try and reach some impossible goal. So this is common
with perfectionism or all-or-nothing thinking or with impossible expectations. So if you remember
with the example, Jenny thinks she needs to exercise more,
right? And she's not doing it. So in the previous way of solving that problem,
she exercised more and then she felt better. Now what if Jenny actually has an eating disorder and
she's already exercising three to four hours a day, but she "knows" that this isn't enough.
She thinks, "Oh, if I only worked out more, I would like myself." She she beats herself up. She
says, you know, "Why am I so lazy?" Right. So in this case, her distorted thinking has led to these
unrealistic standards for herself that aren't healthy. So what does she need to do to resolve
her feelings of inadequacy? She thinks she needs to work out more, but she can't, so she feels bad,
right? She needs to change her thinking to line up with reality. She needs to place more value on
health and moderation and improve her sense of self-worth and let go of these perfectionistic
ideals that are keeping her sick and making her miserable. So when she changes her thinking to
line up with a healthier set of behaviors like, you know, exercising less than an hour every day,
then she can feel more peace with her thoughts and actions. So that's that's the second way to close
that gap, as we change how we think to line up with our values. Now the third way to close this
gap is the worst option for trying to resolve gaps, right. It is justifying our behavior.
So justifying attempts to resolve this feeling of dissonance by numbing, blaming, avoiding, or just
excusing the fact that we have a gap, right. So going back to the standing on two boats analogy,
as the two boats separate, your legs begin to stretch apart and weaken, and it becomes painful
and harder to stand. But instead of climbing aboard one boat to relieve the pain or pulling the
two boats together, you just keep taking Tylenol, right? You just pop a bunch of painkillers. This
is what justification does. Your problem isn't solved, but at least it doesn't hurt as much.
Now this is obviously a bad situation. But despite the harm that justifying causes, research shows
that it's the most common way people do respond when they've done something wrong. Most of the
time, people change what they believe to fit their behaviors instead of the other way around. So they
say things like "Oh, no one will know. Everyone does it. It's not that bad. Uh she's worse than I
am. I'm not a bad person." Or they'll justify like "Oh, I only stole this because I needed it more."
This is all justification. It's all when you know in your heart that what you're doing is wrong
and you make excuses so that you don't feel bad about it. Never ignore that guilty feeling. Don't
just avoid it or try to make it go away. Take time for introspection. Take time to clarify
what you really believe you should be doing. It's it's easy for us to just try and make ourselves
feel good, but in the long run that makes us feel miserable. So if you want to get good at
processing emotions, you need to learn to notice the signs of rationalization and justification.
So going back to Jenny, Jenny values health. She believes she should take care of her body,
um but she's not working out. So if she were justifying her behavior, she might start thinking
"Well, I just don't have time to exercise." Or she might get even meaner - justification is nasty,
right? She might say something like "Well, at least I'm not as fat as my sister." Or
she might say something like "It's not my fault that I'm overweight; it's my genes."
And she would use these as an excuse to quiet the guilt that she feels about not living her values.
Now any of those statements could be true, right? It might be genetic that she is overweight, right?
But she only needed that as an excuse when she was justifying.
So clarifying what you really value and what's helpful for you is really quite different than
justifying, which is trying not to feel bad when you have a gap. Okay guys, I have to interrupt,
because when I was making this video I was just really focused on the idea of cognitive
dissonance, and I maybe should have chosen an example that wasn't such a loaded topic. So
I just want to clear things up. Your worth is not dependent on your size or your appearance.
You can be healthy at many sizes. You don't have to lose weight or change anything about
yourself to live with congruence. You don't have to look a certain way or weigh a certain
number of pounds to be a good person, right? Your body is an instrument to do good in the world,
not an ornament to be objectified. Now that being said, the truth is that with anything you value,
some real obstacles may come up, obstacles that you can't do anything about. So this could be
genetics or it could be racism or sexism or, you know, whatever outside circumstances that you
can't control. Honoring your values and resolving dissonance is really about being intentional
instead of reactive. So it's like you lay out your values and your desires and your obstacles on the
table, and then you choose what you're going to act on. So you may say "I'm going to choose to
exercise even though I'm genetically predisposed to be bigger - I value exercise anyways." Or you
may look at all these parts of your life, and you may say "I value health, but for me I value
reading more" or "I value spending more time with my friends, and the obstacles to exercising
aren't worth it to me, so I'm going to choose to spend time with my family and friends instead
of fighting my biology." Either way, whether you choose to exercise or you choose not to exercise,
that cognitive dissonance can be resolved because you make a choice instead of just feeling like you
should be doing something that you're not doing. Resolving cognitive dissonance is about
being honest with yourself about the choices you make. So I just I just want to be really clear:
even though I use this example of someone who wants to become healthier,
your worth is not dependent on your weight. You don't need to exercise to be a good person. It's
really all about choosing what you value, where you're going to put your energy. So anyway, so I
hope that clears things up. And let's get back to the video. Now saying "Oh, at least I'm not as fat
as my sister," that sounds mean, right? But that's because justifying is mean. It's a dirty lie
that we use to cover up our own emotions, and we secretly do it inside of our heads all the time.
So Jenny really values being healthy, but when she doesn't act in line with that value she feels bad.
Each of these ways of justifying keep Jenny stuck in the same loop of believing she should exercise,
not exercising, and trying not to notice it or feel bad about it. We all justify, but the less
we do it, the better off we are. So let's talk about some of these signs of justification and
rationalization. These include blaming others, comparing yourself to others to put them
up or down, labeling yourself like "Oh, I'm a good person even though I just stole that stuff from my
employer; I'm a good worker." Or excusing yourself "Oh, I just stole that stuff from my employer. I'm
just a bad person; I can't help it. I'm just such a bad person." That's justification. Excuses. So
we usually don't need reasons when we know we're doing the right thing. So for example, with Jenny,
she potentially could have genes that make her more overweight,
but it would still like make sense that she values exercise to stay healthy. So the only
reason she needed to remind herself that her genes were the way we, the way they were were
to keep her from feeling bad about something she knew she valued - she values exercise, right?
I once heard a clinical psychologist whose responsibility was to determine whether inmates
were responsible for their crimes or not, right? So basically he was evaluating them to see if
they had the mental capacity to understand guilt and to understand right and wrong.
And he said that the way he could always tell is if they excused their actions,
if they had reasons and rationalizations for why they committed the crime that they did.
If they did, if they used a reason, a rationalization, an excuse, or blame,
that indicated that they did have a sense of guilt, that they understood enough that what
they did was wrong, that they needed to cover it up. The inmates who were actually innocent due to,
you know, an inability to understand guilt, they didn't have any reasons
or excuses for what they did - they just did it. Another sign of justification is
denial. There's also extreme statements, right? Minimizing your problem, horriblizing others.
And in this, you know, if you catch yourself trying to convince others that you're right,
that's another sign of justification. Holding different standards for yourself than others.
All of these things, all this justifying usually leads to suffering. This is the type of mental
purgatory that often shows up as shoulds, right? "Well, I should be exercising more, but I just
don't have the time." Or "I should be kinder, but he is such a jerk." Shoulds are one way we create
our own suffering. Keep an eye out for my upcoming video on how to work with those shouldy feelings.
When it comes to cognitive dissonance, it's best to resolve it by really taking the time to
clarify, notice what your values are. We're going to spend time on that in an upcoming video. Notice
what your thoughts and your behaviors are. Write about them. Don't allow yourself to make excuses.
And choose whether you need to change your thoughts or change your behaviors to create more
integrity in your life. I encourage you to take a time regularly to do an inventory with yourself
once a week or once a day or once a month, and take a look at your life and just check in and ask
yourself "Am I being the person I believe I should be?" And if not, try to be one percent better each
day. This is all about striving for integrity, working hard to have your actions line up with
the kind of person that you want to be. Integrity is the source of self-respect, and, in my opinion,
it's essential for fighting depression and anxiety. But nobody's perfect, right? I mess up
all the time. We all have these gaps. It's what we do with these gaps that matters for me. This gap,
the gap between what is right and what I do, as much as I try to bring my life in line and I
work hard to improve myself each day, the only way for me to actively accept the reality that I have
this gap is through the grace of God and trying hard every day to be humble, be willing to change
myself and to be brutally honest with myself as much as possible. As you work to clarify your
cognitive dissonance, as you work to understand your values and the kind of person you want to be
and bring your action and your values in line with each other, you're going to find greater peace and
greater happiness. And as you stop justifying as much, you're going to have better relationships.
Thank you for watching, and take care. This video is one skill from my 30-skill course, How
to Process Your Emotions, where I teach 30 of the most essential skills for resolving depression,
anxiety, and improving mental health. Emotion processing is an essential skill for working
through intense emotions, but most people have never been taught how to do it. I'm putting every
single main video lesson on YouTube for the world to access for free. You watching these videos,
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If you would like to access the entire course in one place ad free with its workbook,
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