Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Welcome to the Happy Stack Podcast where we explore the science and strategies behind creating a happier, more fulfilling life. I'm Teriann Richards and I partner with organizations to address the root causes of burnout, disengagement and stress. Equipping leaders and teams with the tools they need to thrive, both organizationally and personally. Each episode we dive into practical habits, insights and strategies to help high performers like you level up from the inside out. Let's get stacking.
[00:00:34] Let's start off with a feeling most people can't seem to name. Let's put it like this. You're doing all the right things, right? You're showing up, you're responsible, you're adulting, you're capable.
[00:00:48] And yet something feels awry. Something feels off.
[00:00:54] Not in a hey, I can put my finger on it kind of way, not in a dramatic way, but it's heavy and it's irritating and it's draining and you can't point to one big problem.
[00:01:10] But you know that your energy is leaking.
[00:01:15] That's not burnout, because I know that's what you wanted to say. That is not burnout.
[00:01:20] That a lot of times is cognitive dissonance.
[00:01:26] And once you see it, you can't unsee it.
[00:01:30] Cognitive distance is one of the biggest, the baddest, the most powerful and misunderstood psychological forces shaping our behavior as humans. In its simplest form, it's this, the stress that occurs when your actions, the things you're doing on a day to day basis don't match your values, your beliefs, or your internal navigator, your internal truth.
[00:02:00] And what's so important about this is that your nervous system experiences cognitive dissonance as a threat. It doesn't feel it like it's discomfort, it doesn't feel it like it's an inconvenience, like, oh, I don't really like that. No, it literally feels it as though it's a threat.
[00:02:19] That's why it's so frickin exhausting, right? Like you can be functioning at a high level and still feel chronically depleted because you are living in an internal conflict.
[00:02:35] Let me give you an example. Let's say you value honesty, but every time there's something happening in the the workspace, every time you're sitting around the board table and people are saying let's do this, let's do that, and you can that there's dishonesty happening, you bite your tongue instead. Or let's assume health is really important to you. It's one of your priorities, it's part of your value system. But you keep skipping the gym, eating crappy foods, overriding all the signals that your body is giving you.
[00:03:09] Or you know you value family, but you keep choosing work out of guilt or fear or name some other emotion that typically gets us to do things that are not in alignment or with our value system.
[00:03:23] Or you value freedom and your life feels too structured and rigid and over committed.
[00:03:29] Nothing is wrong if we looked at it on paper, but internally, you're constantly negotiating with yourself.
[00:03:40] Negotiation is exhausting, right? This is the paradox here. Cognitive dissonance drains more energy than hard work ever will.
[00:03:52] Why is that? Because your brain is running two opposing programs at once, right? One says, hey, this matters to me.
[00:04:04] And the other one says, yeah, but I'm not going to live it. I'm not going to, I'm not, I'm going to do it differently. And so your system is stuck trying to reconcile the gap on the in between.
[00:04:17] Psychologically, this creates tension and irritability and defensiveness and fatigue.
[00:04:24] Biologically though, it increases your stress hormones. So think cortisol impairs your ability to make quick and decisive decisions, to have clarity, and it lowers your emotional regulation, your ability to handle what life throws at you. Because we all know that life's going to keep throwing it.
[00:04:42] This is why cognitive dissonance often, a lot of times when I see it in high performing leaders, ambitious folks, I'll see them with chronic tiredness or just like that, short fuse. Like you're typically somebody who can handle things and process it, but all of a sudden you're more quick wit it, but not in the best of ways. Or there's a quiet resentment or anxiety, loss of motivation even. Sometimes it'll show up as like numbing behaviors. So like coping so that you don't have to feel. And so most high performers don't resolve cognitive dissonance.
[00:05:24] Let me say this in a different way.
[00:05:26] A lot of times when this is happening, what I'll notice with leaders that are playing in this space is they start to rationalize it, right? They start to tell themselves this is just how it is, or this is just this season, you know, I should be grateful for what I have. Other people have it worse. I'll deal with it later. The thought, the things that you're saying to yourself to rationalize it. They feel logical, but they're actually protective strategies, right? They help you tolerate the misalignment, the gap, instead of fixing it.
[00:06:02] And that tolerance, like everything, has a cost. And so the question I think that always comes up at this point is like why is this so common? Why are capable, driven people, high performers, rewarded, you know, culturally, societally, even in our own world, for overriding ourselves?
[00:06:26] A lot of us at a young age, we learned early to push through the crap, right? To push it down, to be dependable, to not rock the boat, not agitate the masses, to handle it, to just, you know, figure it out.
[00:06:44] And those traits, in a lot of ways we were taught, will bring success. And in a lot of ways, they do, right? Like being somebody who can bite your tongue and kind of fall.
[00:06:58] The masses sometimes can get you the promotion and get you all the great things until they get you to the spot where you abandon yourself. Self abandonment.
[00:07:10] Cognitive dissonance is often the price of being the steady one or the strong one. You become so good at carrying things that you stop noticing what it costs you. And the important distinction here is that cognitive dissonance is not the same as discomfort.
[00:07:29] Discomfort says, this is hard, but aligned. Cognitive dissonance says, this is wrong for me and I'm going to do it anyway.
[00:07:40] Your body, even if your mind isn't telling you, your body knows the difference. And that's why some hard things can feel super energizing and some easy things feel soul draining.
[00:07:55] Let's kind of bring this into some practicality for a second. So there are three core ways that cognitive dissonance is going to show up.
[00:08:05] So first, saying yes when you really mean no. So this is the most common. This is the one that you see. It's the easiest, I guess, you know, point a finger to. So every unspoken no becomes that internal friction. You smile, you agree, you comply, but your nervous system says, hey, what about me? Why didn't you protect me? And it's interesting because this is two parts of you, right? There's the part of you that's making the decision who's rationalizing that it's okay to do this thing, it's the right thing to do. It's, you know, let's not rock the boat, all of those things. And then there's your internal compass that is flagging this as a threat. And what I want to say here is that is biology. And then second, living by values you don't actually believe anymore. So some of us, we decide at a, you know, at a younger age, five years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, this is my value system. This is what I stand for. But every year we upgrade. We become slightly different. We learn new nuances about ourselves and the world around us. And sometimes those values, we still have titles and words for them, but they're not actually in alignment with who we are today. And so sometimes the dissonance isn't between actions and values. It's between old values and who you are now, right? So, like, you're living a life that once made sense. You're aligning yourself with values that you once held high, but they don't fit you in the today and now.
[00:09:39] And what that does is it creates kind of a quiet grief and a confusion, because the grief is, well, that's what I used to believe in. That's who I used to be.
[00:09:49] And the confusion with your internal compass is, wait a minute. This is not in alignment with who we are today.
[00:09:57] And then the third is performing an identity you've outgrown.
[00:10:02] So we all have an identity of who we believe we are.
[00:10:07] You know, I've always considered myself to be the achiever I am. I'm always chasing the next thing. That is who I am. And I've had to teach myself regulation skills so that I'm not doing it at the expense of my internal systems. But maybe you're the achiever or the fixer or the agreeable one, the people pleaser, the always available one.
[00:10:29] And identities, in a lot of ways keep us contained. They keep us safe, right? They keep us, you know, we understand the four walls of our identity.
[00:10:39] However, maybe the identity we had, again, similar to those values, is different now. And so now, because you're not in alignment, there's a gap. It costs you your energy.
[00:10:54] And the longer you ignore cognitive dissonance, the louder your body will get.
[00:11:01] You'll feel more tired, more fatigue, anxiousness, and worst, burnout and shutdown.
[00:11:08] These are signals. This is why it is so important when you're a high performer, when you are somebody just trying to make stuff happen in your life that you start to figure out those subtle signs that your body will give you. Because we all have different signs, it shows up differently for all of us.
[00:11:29] So how do you resolve cognitive dissonance without shutting it all down, blowing up your life, you know, like making some, like, severe left turn.
[00:11:39] It is not something dramatic that needs to happen.
[00:11:42] A lot of times it's alignment repair. And there are three tactics that actually work. So first, name it. This is just the same as, like, emotional intelligence. When I teach that, just, like, name it. You cannot resolve what you don't name. That's like Life 101, right? So ask yourself, where am I consistently acting against my own truth, my own values, my own internal compass now, not just when things are hard. But when things feel off, off the beaten track, awareness alone reduces that internal tension.
[00:12:20] Second, stop negotiating with yourself. Negotiation sounds like, I'll deal with it later. It's not that bad.
[00:12:30] I'll just do this, just this one more time. I mean, man, the amount of times I've said that one to myself, those are just delay tactics.
[00:12:38] Instead, ask, what boundary would reduce this tension by 5%, 10%? Like boundaries and borders, y'. All. Like, that's what we need to survive adulthood. I mean, children need them. We teach them these skills and yet we struggle with them ourselves. We actually are really good at verbalizing them. A lot of times when I have conversation, oh yeah, yeah. I have these boundaries and I have these boards, and it's like, okay, now when push comes to shove and you need to actually hold court for them, do you do it? So what boundary would reduce this tension by 5%, 10%?
[00:13:18] We're not looking for perfection here. There is no perfection. We're just on this lovely little journey. We just need less contradiction in the what we're doing and the what we need internally and, and then third, make one integrity based decision a day. What do I mean when I say that?
[00:13:38] Nothing big. This is small. Like, be honest with yourself. Speak honestly to yourself.
[00:13:46] Take a beat. Rest when you need it. Don't push through.
[00:13:50] Say no.
[00:13:52] Somebody asks you something.
[00:13:53] No. And don't feel like you need this 5, 10 minute explanation on the other side.
[00:14:00] And when you say that you're gonna do something for you, follow through on that promise to yourself.
[00:14:07] This is how I teach the success cadence. I said it, I did it, I said it, I did it. Do the thing that you said you're gonna do for you. Because we're really good at doing it for everybody else.
[00:14:18] Self integrity restores trust.
[00:14:21] Trust restores energy.
[00:14:25] And when I think about resolving cognitive dissonance, there are parts of it that will make people uncomfortable because those people around you have become used to pushing you aside, putting things at your own expense to help other people feel comfortable. And when you stop doing that for a moment, people around you will be uncomfortable.
[00:14:52] Because when you stop betraying yourself, you stop being convenient.
[00:14:58] And that does not make you a difficult person. Even if somebody were to say that, it just makes you honest. And I think if we were all just a little bit more honest with ourselves and others, man, wouldn't the world just be a little bit of a happier place?
[00:15:14] So when we talk about burnout or the body shutting down or just like, like cognitive despair, it's not always about workload.
[00:15:27] Sometimes it's about living out of alignment with you, the internal version of you that exists today, not 10 years ago, for too long. And your body's always going to tell the truth. The body keeps score, y', all, even when your mind tries to rationalize it, even when you can push through because you are a superstar. And you got that. You got that in the bag. Cognitive dissonance is not weakness. It's not a flaw.
[00:15:57] It is feedback. And when you listen to it early enough, it becomes a map, a guide, a compass. And so my challenge to you is to pay attention to the subtle signs that your body will give you. Because when it starts to show up, the goal is, is to try to bring the whole thing back into alignment with what I'm doing out there in the real world as I'm going after the big things and what I'm doing on the inside to make sure that I am in alignment with me, the me I am today and the me I'm growing into tomorrow. Hope that landed with you all. I hope you have an amazing freaking day.
[00:16:42] Peace.
[00:16:43] Hey, thanks for listening to the Happy Stack podcast. If you enjoyed today's episode, be sure to subscribe. Subscribe, leave a review and share it with someone who could use a little extra happiness in their life. Let's keep stacking those wins together. See you next time.
