FEELING UNSETTLED & DON’T KNOW WHY – COGNITIVE DISSONANCE
Stormy Feelings

Cognitive dissonance refers to a situation involving a conflict between your values and your behaviour. This produces a feeling of discomfort, you feel very unsettled, quite irritable for no apparent reason, which then requires an alteration in one of your values, or beliefs, or in your behaviour in order to reduce the discomfort and restore balance.

Cognitive Dissonance & Unusual Feelings of Discomfort

For example: let’s say that a person who values health and fitness is a smoker. When people smoke (behaviour) and they know that smoking affects their health and fitness and causes cancer (cognition), they are in a state of cognitive dissonance. What is quite likely to happen then is that in order to restore the balance in their mind they will offer justifications: I only smoke a few a day; I only smoke when I have a drink; I really enjoy the first smoke of the day etc.

The theory is that we have an inner drive to hold all our attitudes and behaviour in harmony and avoid disharmony (or dissonance). When there is an inconsistency between attitudes or behaviours (dissonance), something must change to eliminate the dissonance. (Principle of Cognitive Consistency: Festinger 1957.)

A way to recognise that you might have cognitive dissonance is this: If you find that you are feeling quite irritated, ratty, frustrated, antsy, and you can’t understand your moods, you’re angrier than normal and for no apparent reason, there is a strong possibility that you are doing something or behaving in a way that is contrary to your values and beliefs.

How to Alleviate the Dissonance

The process to follow in alleviating this feeling that you have has one major flaw. Once again, as mentioned in a few of my previous writings, this flaw lies right at the starting point. To alleviate feelings of cognitive dissonance correctly it is necessary to first find out and understand who you are. Otherwise, you might be removing a feeling of cognitive dissonance that you have, which is based upon a value that is not actually yours, the real you.

Since the discomfort that you are experiencing relates to the way that you feel about the way that you are behaving, there are three ways to remove or reduce your discomfort, the dissonance:

  1. You change how strongly you feel about something, say from “this is very important to me” to “it’s no big deal” or, “I couldn’t care less.”
  2. You change your behaviour; don’t do it any more.
  3. You change your value and/or belief; finding the real you and your new values and beliefs.

You can also change more than one of these, anything will do as long as you restore the balance and remove the unsettled feeling.

Practical Steps to Remove Cognitive Dissonance

Analyse your present circumstances and see if there’s anything that you are doing that is contrary to any of your new set of values and beliefs. Another interesting feature of this feeling that you have been having, and possibly why you couldn’t understand it is that your core values and beliefs have always been inside you, the real you. You are not learning to become a new person; you are rediscovering the real you deep down inside. Your feelings of cognitive dissonance will have been feeling strange and weird for you for this very reason; deep down you are opposed to the way that you have been behaving, whereas on the surface you may have been okay with it.

Be aware that it is easier said than done to make these changes. Using the example mentioned at the start, it is difficult to convince yourself that smoking does not affect your health & fitness and cause cancer, because you know it does. On the other side it is also difficult to quit smoking.

Another tip is that you can try and obtain new information that outweighs the dissonant beliefs. An example where this is possible: say that you eat a lot of a cholesterol high food which makes you feel uncomfortable because it is said that high cholesterol causes heart disease. These days if you do some research about cholesterol and heart disease you will find that there are new studies and views which oppose this old assertion. Once again though it is necessary to issue a warning here. When you do research on the Internet, where there is a massive amount of data, you will pretty much always find contrary views on everything. You can even find a society with active members called The Flat Earth Society, no jokes.

To use the old Latin saying – caveat emptor – which actually means, “let the buyer beware.” You’re not buying a product, but you are about to buy into an idea. And the warning that I am offering is this: do not fall into the trap of “confirmation bias.”

Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favour, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one’s prior beliefs or values.

Be sure that you have given each side to the argument equal due diligence, without favouring either party. Let the facts speak for themselves. Note: facts, not theories and opinions.

For your own peace of mind and to live a more peaceful and happier life, you could try to reduce the importance of the cognitions, but again, this is fraught with dangers. You could try to convince yourself that a short life filled with smoking and the pleasure you derive from it is better than a long life denying yourself this pleasure, and so by comparison your health and fitness is not so important. Hmmm …

How about starting to believe that spending most of your day scrolling through social media, and that the number of likes you have is not really that important. Well is it?

 

13 June 2022