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Cognitive Dissonance

Holding two contradictory beliefs at the same time is not just uncomfortable — it's so uncomfortable that your brain will quietly rewrite reality to make it stop.

Cognitive dissonance is the tension you feel when your actions and your beliefs don't match. You value honesty but you lied. You believe in equality but you benefit from an unfair system. You trusted someone who turned out to be wrong. The discomfort is real, almost physical — and your brain wants it gone immediately.

Here's the problem: the easiest way to resolve the tension is almost never the right way. Changing your behaviour is hard. Admitting you were wrong is painful. So instead, your brain adjusts the belief. The lie wasn't really a lie — it was protecting someone's feelings. The system isn't unfair — people just need to work harder. The person you trusted wasn't wrong — the evidence against them is flawed.

This is how good people defend bad decisions. Not through malice, but through a psychological pressure valve that prioritises internal comfort over external truth.

When you catch yourself inventing reasons why something you did was actually fine — stop. That feeling of creative justification is dissonance doing its work. The discomfort you're avoiding is usually the more honest signal.

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