The consistency of inconsistency
This past weekend my husband and I drove about an hour away to have dinner with some friends. On the first half of the drive, which is a two-lane, winding road, we were behind a driver who was wildly inconsistent with their speed.
The speed limit on that road is 45 mph, and one moment the driver ahead of us would be going 25, and then for no reason suddenly they’d be going 60.
My husband and I started making guesses—are they on drugs? Are they multitasking? Are they having a medical emergency? Are they messing with us? Did they miss the day at driver’s ed that was about keeping a consistent speed??
Since we had many miles behind this car with no chance of passing, I had lots of time to pay attention to the tension that would arise in my body unless I consciously reminded myself to relax.
As I inwardly coached myself to loosen my grip on the steering wheel and soften my shoulders so I could breathe full breaths in and out, my mind wandered to the topic of cognitive dissonance. (Yes, it really did.)
Cognitive dissonance refers to the mental toll that the perception of contradictory information takes.
Whether or not you know it by this name, one form of cognitive dissonance you may be familiar with is when your behavior doesn’t align with your values.
For example, when a person says they value health but smoke cigarettes even though they know how bad for them they are. That dissonance creates an internal discomfort on an ongoing basis that takes mental energy to manage.
The type of cognitive dissonance I was thinking about while behind the inconsistent driver, though, was the kind where something you experience in your environment doesn’t match up with your experience or commonly held and conditioned beliefs.
For example, let’s say you’re a champion soccer player. You would expect that if you made a game winning shot at an away game, the crowd would boo, right? It might not feel great, but it would make sense. Just as it would make sense that if you made the same goal on your home field the stands would erupt in cheers.
But what if you make a game winning goal on your home field and the crowd starts booing? That would elicit cognitive dissonance for you. The situation doesn’t match what you’ve been conditioned to expect.
What does all of this have to do with an inconsistent driver?
First let me tell you one more thing: The very next day after being stuck behind that driver, my husband and I rode our motorcycles down that very same windy road…and I noticed I wasn’t keeping a very consistent speed.
In my defense, I wasn’t as egregiously erratic as our buddy from the night before, but I was having trouble with my throttle hand going numb and tingly, which made it hard to manage my throttle as accurately as I’d like.
Which:
Is a gentle reminder from the universe that the things that most annoy us about other people are often things that we ourselves also do—which is a wonderful invitation for a chuckle and some empathy all around. And,
Is just one of a million examples of ways that inconsistency—whether in speed, mood, attention, behavior, or you name it—is so very human.
Which brings me back to cognitive dissonance.
If you’ve been on the receiving end of someone else’s inconsistency—them saying they value something but behaving as if they don’t, or them saying one thing but their body language and facial expression saying something else—it will stir up cognitive dissonance for you.
Your brain doesn’t like that. It will work overtime to try to change something in order to create consistency. And all that extra mind churning also taxes your nervous system. Which is part of why cognitive dissonance isn’t just white-knuckle annoying, but also exhausting--even when it's something as benign as a car going 25 when the speed limit is 45.
Brains love consistency. They love when pictures match up, when values and behavior don’t contradict one another, when purpose and action align.
So if you’ve been feeling extra worn out recently, check under the hood and see if you’ve been living with some cognitive dissonance—either from yourself or from your environment.
If so, give yourself some empathy, and then rather than trying to figure out the dissonance at the level of your unconscious (which is very taxing), make it conscious and see if there's something you have control over that you can change to find more alignment.
And—here’s my PSA for the week—if, whether intentionally or not, you’ve been causing cognitive dissonance for someone else, again, give yourself a break because we all do it at some point or the other.
But then do please give the other person’s brain the gift of cognitive resonance. Tell them they’re not wrong if they feel like what you’ve been saying and doing don’t match, or if you’ve been acting in a way that contradicts how you’ve been around them before.
You don’t even have to be able to change things to make them consistent in order to make it feel better for the other person—just name that you know it’s happening.
Here’s to consistency and your less-taxed brain!
Want a deeper dive around all things relational? Check out Yours Truly.