Cognitive dissonance, a term coined by social psychologist Leon Festinger in 1957, arises when our actions contradict our beliefs and threaten our self-consistency, creating discomfort that motivates us to seek consistency. However, when we lack the inner resources, we may seek the consistency in negative ways, unconsciously distorting our thinking and adopting dysfunctional behaviours. These distortions of thinking create an invisible barrier, preventing us from processing the cognitive dissonance positively by confronting the discomfort and the deeper truths about us we need to face. This self-deception ultimately blocks our evolution and wellbeing. In this article, I’ll explore the various ways cognitive dissonance manifests, examine its impact on our lives, and offer practical strategies for overcoming it in positive ways to foster your wellbeing and unlock your full potential.
Understanding the Hidden Influence of Cognitive Dissonance
Cognitive dissonance arises when we hold conflicting ideas, values, or engage in behaviours that threaten our self-consistency. It’s a universal human experience, this struggle for internal consistency. This psychological discomfort isn’t something we necessarily experience consciously: it can operate beneath the surface, subtly influencing our choices and actions. We instinctively try to resolve this tension, but the path we choose can either lead to growth or further entrench us in self-deception. Often, without even realising it, we employ cognitive distortions—mental shortcuts that skew our perception of reality—to justify our inconsistencies.
The Personal Toll: Examples of Cognitive Dissonance in Daily Life
Cognitive dissonance manifests in countless ways in our personal lives, often undermining our wellbeing and hindering our development as we employ self-deception as a solution instead of facing and dealing with uncomfortable truths:
- The Animal Lover’s Paradox: Imagine someone who claims to love animals yet regularly consumes meat from factory farms. This creates a clear conflict between their love for animals and their dietary choices, a dissonance that separates them from their compassionate core. To resolve this dissonance, they might rationalise their meat consumption by downplaying the suffering of animals in factory farms or convincing themselves that their individual choices don’t make a difference. This denial, however, can lead to unconscious feelings of guilt and further their disconnection from their own values and spiritual essence.
- The Smoker’s Self-Deception: Consider a smoker who is fully aware of the health risks associated with smoking. To reduce the discomfort caused by this knowledge, they might downplay the risks, believing they are somehow less susceptible to negative health consequences, or that they will quit eventually. This self-deception protects them from the anxiety of facing their addiction and its underlying causes, but ultimately jeopardises their health and wellbeing, creating a further disconnect from their physical self and their spiritual potential.
- The Weight Loss Struggle: Many people desire to lose weight but struggle to change their eating habits. This often stems from a failure to address the underlying emotional issues that drive overeating, a disconnection from their emotional and physical needs. They may join a gym or start a diet, but without confronting the emotional connection to food, they are likely to return to old patterns, perpetuating the cycle of dissonance and undermining their self-esteem, physical health, and connection to their embodied self.
The Collective Consequence: Examples of Societal Cognitive Dissonance
Cognitive dissonance isn’t confined to individuals; it also operates on a collective level, hindering societal progress and our collective spiritual evolution:
- The World on the Brink: We witness negative global conflicts escalating, yet remain passive, feeling helpless, overwhelmed, or numb. This collective inaction stems partly from a cognitive dissonance: we know we should be doing something, yet we avoid confronting the uncomfortable truth of our own complicity in allowing these situations to continue. This passive stance weakens our collective power to demand peace and accountability from our leaders or to create a better world ourselves. This leads to a further disconnect from our shared humanity. The justifications used might be: It’s too complex, My voice won’t make a difference, or I’m just one person. We may fall for the show of leaders mocking each other and tossing blame back and forth, but the real issue is not who is the worst person, but why all leaders and people of influence, including ourselves, are not held accountable for failing to prioritise higher values such as peace, compassion, wisdom, and freedom.
- The Comfort of Convenience: Many feel a strong moral conviction that the vast gap between the rich and poor is fundamentally unjust. Yet, we often continue to purchase goods and services from massive, trillion-dollar corporations, prioritising convenience and affordability over ethical considerations. This disconnect between our values and our consumer behaviour represents a collective cognitive dissonance. We may rationalise our choices by telling ourselves that individual actions don’t make a difference, that these companies are simply responding to market demands, or that there’s enough money for everyone if they apply themselves. However, this self-deception allows us to avoid confronting the uncomfortable truth of our participation in a system that perpetuates self-centredness and destructive inequality. This cognitive dissonance hinders our ability to advocate for systemic change and co-create a more equitable, heart-centred society.
The Strategy of Denial: How Cognitive Dissonance Hinders Wellbeing
Negatively processed cognitive dissonance and its strategy of denial takes a toll on our individual and collective wellbeing, impacting our spiritual development:
- Psychological Stress: The internal conflict leads to chronic stress, creating a sense of fragmentation within ourselves. This fragmentation can manifest at a societal level as widespread unease, social division, and a sense of helplessness, hindering our collective spiritual evolution.
- Behavioural Consequences: To reduce the stress and avoid our faulty thinking, we may adopt harmful reactive patterns of behaviour, such as addiction, avoidance, aggression, apathy, or numbing out with excessive screen time and compulsive entertainment, further disconnecting us from our true selves. Collectively, this can translate into social unrest, mindless conformity, and social and environmental damage.
- Emotional Health: By fostering self-deception, cognitive dissonance can increase feelings of anxiety, guilt, shame, and even depression, while hindering our ability to experience joy, peace, and contentment. On a larger scale, it can lead to a breakdown of trust, a decline in empathy, and a weakening of social bonds, hindering our collective capacity for empathy, compassion, and connection.
Positively Processing Cognitive Dissonance
The ability to positively process the inner conflict and resistances behind your cognitive dissonance requires a strong spiritual presence in your true self and the right strategy of mindfulness-based self-development. Your mind is very powerful, and while it remains under the sway of reactivity, it will do everything to keep in place the fragile coping mechanisms and resistances that have led to your negatively processed cognitive dissonance. It will deceive you with illusions and cognitive distortions to justify the behaviour that conflicts with your highest values. Being present in your true self frees you from conditioning and empowers you spiritually, while mindfulness both maximises awareness and minimises reactivity.
Spiritual Centring: Empower Yourself in Your True Self
To create a strong centre of inner resourcefulness and wisdom to support your transformation of consciousness, it’s important to come back to your true self and be present in it. This is the most powerful place for you to be, as it is your true, spiritual nature. It’s untouched by the conditioning that has made your personality so vulnerable to reactivity. The unconscious impulses will no longer be fuelled here. With a strong presence in your true self, you are in a good position to uncover your resistances and move beyond them without reactivity, enabling the cognitive dissonance to be processed positively.
Anchoring your presence in your spiritual centre with meditation provides a foundation of inner strength and wisdom. It aligns you with your highest values and helps you make choices that are congruent with your true self. By drawing upon the strength and wisdom of your true nature, you can face your inner resistances.
Practise my Meditation to Find Your True Self before processing any cognitive dissonance, and on a daily basis to anchor its presence more fully within you and further your spiritual embodiment.
Uncover Your Cognitive Dissonance in Mindful Self-Inquiry
To uncover your unconscious cognitive dissonance, follow the steps below. You may like to read The Art of Self-Inquiry and The Art of Critical Thinking: Key Steps to Free the Mind before doing so.
- Relax and enter a state of mindful self-inquiry.
- Consider the higher values you aspire to, such as love, compassion, joy, peace, freedom, truth, wisdom, unity, and empowerment. Really appreciate and feel them.
- Now review your life and the compromises you have made in relation to these higher values by measuring your life choices against your higher values.
- As you bring any inner conflict into conscious awareness, keep your attention anchored upon your observer self. This will prevent you from being hijacked by your reactivity.
- What inner resistances are you aware of? Observe them with mindful, non-judgemental curiosity.
- Do you see any cognitive distortions at play, such as selective thinking, minimisation, maximisation, and jumping to conclusions.
Facing Uncomfortable Truths
Processing inner resistance requires you to confront uncomfortable truths within your life and within our collective lives. Are you willing to hold yourself accountable where you are responsible? And are you willing to hold yourself accountable where you share responsibility with the collective?
For example:
- What if you have been personally irresponsible by failing to take important action?
- What if we have all been conspiring in the collective support of a harmful society through our adaptation to it?
- What if people’s lives have been lost in wars and other schemes because we collectively failed to acknowledge the madness and put a stop to it?
Being willing to take responsibility or share responsibility is a key requirement for positively processing a cognitive distortion. It is easier to do once you have centred yourself in your spiritual nature and are in a mindful space.
Clearing Cognitive Distortions: Challenging Your Inner Narratives
Cognitive distortions are distorted patterns of thinking that reinforce cognitive dissonance. They are generated from an unresourceful place when you don’t feel able to handle the cognitive dissonance. As I mention in The Art of Critical Thinking: Key Steps to Free the Mind, common cognitive distortions include:
- Overgeneralisation: making a general rule based on the experience of one or few instances.
- Filtering or selective thinking: focusing on selected, often negative, information and filtering out the rest that is often positive.
- Jumping to conclusions: reaching conclusions, often negative ones, with little, if any, evidence.
- Magnification: exaggerating the importance of something bad.
- Minimisation: reducing the importance of something good.
- Emotional reasoning: believing something based on the emotions.
- Black-and-white thinking: believing that something can only be one thing or another.
Challenging, and clearing the distortions you’ve identified in self-inquiry is crucial for a more accurate perception of the inner conflict behind your cognitive dissonance. This self-inquiry can be uncomfortable, but it’s essential for breaking free from the self-deception that fuels cognitive dissonance. And you’ll be supported by your spiritual alignment and mindful presence.
To challenge a cognitive distortion, ask yourself what cognitive distortion is at play in your belief and what the evidence for and against the belief is. Is it necessarily true? Once you have challenged the distorted belief and verified it as a cognitive distortion, reframe your belief and thinking to embody a healthier, positive perspective, aligned with the wisdom of your spiritual self.
Practical Example: Breaking Free from Smoking
Let’s look at the cognitive dissonance associated with smoking in this example. Observe how the person is being brutally honest as they hold themselves to account:
- Is it really the case that I’ll be lucky and my health will be fine if I smoke?
- Is it really the case that I don’t care about my health if I smoke and it makes me ill?
- Is it really the case that I can’t handle the addiction of the smoking?
- Is it really the case that I can’t handle the emotions that gave rise to the addiction?
- Is it really the case that I’m a tough guy if I smoke?
Once the cognitive distortions are exposed, they can be reframed and a healthier, positive statement can be made to release the dysfunctional behaviour:
- I’m willing to stop smoking now so I’m in my power rather than trusting in exaggerated luck.
- I care about my health because I’m worth it.
- I can handle the addiction of the smoking with the right resources, power, and wisdom that are available in my centre.
- I can handle the emotions behind the addition with the right resources, power, and wisdom that are available in my centre.
- I’m a tough guy if I can face and overcome my inner resistances and reactivity by being present in my centre.
The positive behaviour will inevitably follow from this inner work as responsibility is taken, as will the collapse of the cognitive dissonance. Of course, setbacks are always possible when the work hasn’t been thorough enough, so, if this occurs, continue with the process as more material is exposed for working on. Commitment to the process and a dedication to your freedom and alignment with your true self will carry you through to the end.
Clearing Negative Emotions
In addition to clearing distortions of thought, you’ll also need to clear any associated negative emotions. Common examples of negative emotions involved in cognitive distortions include fear, guilt, and pain. The force of these negative emotions will be in direct proportion to the conditioned, reactive nature of your ego. The more conditioned and imprinted you are, the more vulnerable you are to fear and guilt.
The process of clearing the negative emotions is as follows:
- Align to your true spiritual nature in meditation and adopt a mindful state.
- Allow the emotion to emerge and welcome it with an attitude of non-resistance and non-judgementalism.
- If the emotion starts to overwhelm you as you experience it, bring your attention back from it and strengthen your spiritual alignment as you allow the feeling to pass.
Summary: Embracing Authenticity for a Thriving Future
Cognitive dissonance, a common state of inner contradiction, is a pervasive challenge that affects us all. It acts as an invisible barrier to personal and societal evolution, hindering growth and impacting wellbeing. By cultivating mindfulness, challenging cognitive distortions, and centring yourself in your true nature, you can break free from the cycle of cognitive dissonance and move towards a more authentic, conscious, and fulfilling life. This journey of self-discovery is not just about personal transformation: it’s about contributing to a more evolved and compassionate world. As more of us positively process cognitive dissonance, we empower ourselves to create a more positive and authentic future for all, and create the space for higher values to take root. This journey of healing and embodiment is a return to our true spiritual selves, both individually and collectively. It’s a journey towards wholeness, authenticity, and a deeper connection to ourselves, each other, and the world around us. By addressing the root causes of our suffering—spiritual disconnection and disembodiment—we can unlock our full potential and co-create a better world.
Next Step: Ready to release cognitive dissonance? Book a personalised Guidance Call with me to transform your wellbeing and supercharge your growth.