I’ve looked it up, but still feel a little confused
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Cognitive dissonance is a feeling of discomfort that you want to get rid of.
The discomfort comes from holding beliefs that can’t be held at the same time. Cognitive dissonance often pops up when you learn something new – something that fights with something that you already believe.
There’s a constant struggle to try and believe all the things, but when you put in the effort to believe all the things, only to hit brick wall after brick wall because they can’t all be reasonably believed at the same time, that feels uncomfortable.
In addition, choosing to irrationally believe all the things also feels uncomfortable. Even if you don’t realize they can’t all make sense together, believing all of them still feels a little “off”, a little uncanny.
Your choices are to scrap the problematic beliefs, or to reframe one or more of the beliefs in a way that makes sense with all the other ones.
Sometimes reframing beliefs isn’t possible – logic just doesn’t allow it. How do you make sense of loving both cows and beef? You can’t – you have to do something drastic like admit that you don’t in fact love one.
Until you scrap a belief, you’re stuck in cognitive dissonance.
But when you do scrap the belief that you love beef, for example, how do you make sense of how much you enjoy beef still? It seems like we still have a problem. Cognitive dissonance.
Cognitive dissonance can be hard to alleviate, and it feels very “off” until you do.
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