Were you ever in an argument where the other side so viscerally dismissed all you said that you were shocked? Did you yourself feel instant anger and disorientation when presented with some new information to the point where you couldn’t rationally listen anymore? This is cognitive dissonance – one of the most common uncomfortable tricks of psychology, the universal pitfall caused by inconsistency.

We all have our own beliefs of how the world works, what is good, bad, wrong or right and some of those beliefs are so strong to serve as an axis we build our personalities around. They are called core beliefs. The thing is that just because we believe something to be true doesn’t necessarily make it so, and when presented with evidence working against our core belief the new evidence cannot be accepted and the body rebels. You will feel not just a cognitive distress and tension but a full blown body reaction, a revolt of the though that could shatter your belief system. This is the brain trying to protect the consistent story it’s telling itself in order to not get stranded in the place where nothing makes sense any more. This can of course happen with smaller belief as well but the strength of the reaction is directly proportional to how central the belief is in your personal mental climate. The dissonance is no thereat in itself, it can actually be a good learning experience, but your body goes into red alert mode, signals all the sirens and wants to resolve it because it has to protect the congruency of your person.

Left unresolved it will be uncomfortable, destructive and draining so you can try to beat your brain and resolve it by changing the conflicting thought, change your behavior to better suite the dissonance causing thought, add a new thought to ameliorate the gap between the two convictions, or trivialize the issue and push it into the “not that important ” quarantine in the mind. Dissonance chooses to ignore new information because building your world view from scratch again in the light of new information will take more energy and somehow leave the feeling that all you’ve lived previous has been a lie. So you decide to protect and dismiss all other data than those confirming what you already know or think you know.

A bit of discomfort is good, embrace it, lean into it, don’t run away and try to neutralize it – your body just showed you what was a deeply important topic, explore further. The illiterate of the new millennia won’t be those who can’t write but those who can’t relearn.