It’s Time to Be Honest with Ourselves About How We Behave
Have you ever found yourself face-to-face with a tempting treat and gobbled it up after just telling yourself a minute before you would lose those extra pounds of fat?
Or perhaps you’ve pondered, not pounded on, the treadmill and opted for the comfort of your couch after telling your friend that you would start exercising again.
Welcome to the realm of cognitive dissonance—the internal tug-of-war between what you believe you should do and how you behave. Let’s look at the times when we don’t do what we think or know we should and how we reconcile it. Knowing this can mean the difference between health goal completion and complete failure.
Five Common Ways We Avoid the Truth About Our Behavior
1. Avoid the Discomfort: How does it feel when you don’t do what you promised yourself you would do? For most of us, it feels yucky. Because it feels yucky, it can be easier to ignore that feeling or downplay it. When we ignore the feeling cognitive dissonance gives us, we practice letting our bad behavior win, which allows it to rear its ugly head again and again until we no longer want to do the right action.
2. Downplay Significance: Another way we allow unwanted behavior to win is to pretend it isn’t a big deal and doesn’t matter much. When this happens to you, ask yourself what you value about the goal –what is it about it that matters to you? Is it important enough to do the action and overcome the temptation not to? To overcome this, connect your desired action with a strong value (i.e., I value being healthy so I can do activities I enjoy, or I value the ability to do what I say I will do). You may not refrain from the donut because of a social expectation of looking thin but will refrain because you want to prove to yourself that you have strong enough willpower to do so.
3. Delegitimize Truth: We often downplay our negative behavior. Let’s say you regularly consumes a high amount of sugary snacks and drinks, despite being aware of the negative impact on their health. You delegitimize this behavior by saying: “Oh, it’s just a small treat. Everyone indulges in sweets occasionally. It’s not a big deal, and besides, life is short. I don’t need to worry about it.”
In this case, delegitimizing poor health behavior (excessive consumption of sugary snacks) is done by minimizing its significance and rationalizing it as a common, harmless indulgence. This downplaying of the behavior’s importance serves as a cognitive defense mechanism, allowing the person to avoid the discomfort of our undesired actions (or inactions) on circumstances or others. Shift from blame to personal responsibility. To counter delegitimizing, try creating a mantra to remind yourself of your power over your circumstances. For example: “I am the owner of my actions, no matter the circumstances. So, I will choose actions that truly benefit me.”
4. Make Excuses: “I didn’t have time to exercise” is a phrase I’ve heard too many times to count. Of course, everyone has times when exercise is impossible to fit in, so that is true. But if we’re honest with ourselves, we will see that when there is consistently no time to be active, it is not an impossible situation – it’s an excuse. It’s time to go back to assess our values and see if there are ways to shift priorities to include exercise in our lives. In this instance, exercise is only an example that can be applied to other healthy behaviors. In my experience, justifying behavior is the most common way people handle cognitive dissonance when they don’t achieve healthy behaviors or goals.
5. Change Beliefs: Clever humans – sometimes, when we don’t want to do what is right, we change our perception of what is right instead of changing our actions to match what we originally defined as right. In this case, we must be honest with ourselves and ask what we consider “right” or “good” behavior. Being authentic and honest with ourselves is imperative. The alternative is akin to lying to ourselves, saying that we changed our minds and didn’t believe what we used to believe. Considering healthy behaviors, we might shift our belief that donuts are bad and see them as healthy food. Or perhaps we avoid exercise because we tell ourselves it’s necessary to save time for other endeavors.
Bridging the Belief – Behavior Gap to Further Your Health
Do you want to align what you believe you need to do with your actions to do it? First, acknowledge that you are a fallible human with a very complex mind. You will struggle now and then, and that is normal.
Then, become self-aware and sniff out times when you open a gap between your beliefs and behavior. You will know you do because you will likely feel slightly uncomfortable as if you let yourself down or you find yourself shifting your thinking to justify your actions. Those are symptoms of cognitive dissonance. Or, if you’ve been using the above approaches to justify poor health behaviors for a while, you may even have become calloused to doing so. Be honest with yourself, and have some humility. Honesty and humility are essential to crossing the belief-behavior gap, like a bridge over troubled water.
When faced with conflicting choices, talk to yourself as you would to a friend. “Am I using this as an excuse? Why did I do that? What would have made me do the right behavior?” Be understanding, compassionate, and encouraging in your internal conversations. You can also find an accountability partner or ask others about your behaviors. Do they see your actions (or inactions) as justifiable? How do they feel about your health choice? Answers to these questions don’t often feel good, but they help us uncover our true motivations and values. Ultimately, doing so allows us to achieve more than we would have otherwise. Don’t worry. You don’t have to go through this every time you make a poor choice, but once you begin this practice, you find that you won’t need to do it nearly as often once you understand your true motives.
Self-honesty and humility take you beyond weight loss or getting more active. You become equipped to accomplish incredible health goals, heal from sickness, and achieve feats of physical ability that used to feel beyond your reach. Building the bridge between what you believe and how you behave allows you to journey further into better health than you ever have before.