3 Reasons Why Being Sincere Improves Health
Being sincere is one of the attitudes that is highly valued socially. Since childhood, we are taught to avoid lies, but we are also taught to lie.
We learn that certain lies can bring us interesting benefits and especially that we are rarely discovered. So they are a good option.
To be sincere does not mean to commit “sincerity”, that is to say to say only truths without any filter.
In this case, the intention is not really to tell the truth, but rather to use it to make it an act of aggression, of vanity or simply to bring out anger, justified by this pretext of truth.
However, in general sincerity is not only a great quality, it is also something that brings benefits to us.
Our relationships with others improve dramatically when we are sincere. We also receive sincerity in return and we prevent misunderstandings.
But in addition, being sincere is also something that has a positive impact on our health. We will give you three examples in this article.
Being sincere increases your self-esteem
A study by psychologist Robert S. Feldman at the University of Massachusetts found that people were lying about every 10 minutes of a conversation.
He also concluded that the main reason people lie is because they want to appear nicer and / or knowledgeable than they actually are. In other words, to awaken recognition or admiration in others.
Based on this basis, other experts have indicated that these types of lies have the role of concealing the reality of some people.
The reason for this is that they perceive their life and their way of being as uninteresting and unworthy of consideration by others.
What’s curious is that authenticity is one of the most valued and admired personality traits.
This means that the more sincere a person is when talking about himself, the more possibilities he has to arouse sympathy and admiration in others. The end effect is that all of this helps increase self-esteem and positively feeds the cycle: more sincerity, more acceptance, and increased self-esteem.
Being sincere reduce anxiety
The problem with lying is that it puts us in a vicious circle. If you say you are a rock star, you are going to have to invent hundreds of lies for it to be believable.
For someone who lies, the worst that can happen is that they are discovered in the act of lying.
So, we must not only benefit from a good imagination, but we must also spend a lot of time bringing coherence to our speech, so as not to be discovered. You also need a good memory, so as not to fall into contradictions.
It therefore requires heavy emotional expenditure which, sooner or later, expresses itself as stress and anxiety.
It is good to keep the attention mechanisms on alert so as not to get tangled up in the brushes and increase the degree of tension.
When you are sincere, you should never carry extra weight on your shoulders.
You should not spend your life constructing explanations, nor should you use your time to decorate your version of reality with details that would make it believable.
It allows you to be more relaxed and to act more naturally, which saves you from spending huge amounts of emotional energy that you need for more important things.
A study on sincerity and health
Dr. Anita E. Kelly, professor of psychology at the University of Notre Dame and director of the Templeton Foundation, conducted a study to learn about the effects of sincerity on health.
To do this, she gathered 72 volunteers and divided them into two groups. To one, she instructed to be completely sincere in all of their conversations; to the other, she gave no directions.
To those who needed to be sincere, she made it clear to them that they could not lie, even on matters that apparently did not seem important at all. This exercise was to last five weeks.
During the time of the study, volunteers from both groups were subjected to health monitoring and a lie detector test.
Once the experiment was over, a clear difference in health was seen between those who were sincere and those who were lying.
The former suffered less from headaches, sore throats, nausea, and the latter continued to suffer from them as before.
The results convinced the researcher so much that she decided to be completely honest the following winter.
She noticed that she needed less sleep to get a satisfying rest and that the colds, which routinely plagued her during cold spells, simply disappeared.
