3 reasons why sincerity benefits our physical and mental health

Being sincere is one of those attitudes that turn out to be highly valued socially. Since we are children we are taught to avoid lies, but we are also taught to lie as children. We learn that some lies can generate interesting benefits for us and, finally, we rarely get discovered, so they end up being a good option.

Being sincere is not committing “sincericide”, that is, going through life airing the truth without filters. In those cases the intention may not actually be to tell the truth, but rather to use it to carry out an act of aggressionvanity or simply to let out our anger, justified under the pretext of sincerity.

However, as a general rule, sincerity is not only a great virtue, but it also brings us great benefits. Relationships with others improve significantly when we are sincere. We also receive sincerity in return and leave no room for misunderstandings. But besides this, Being honest is also something that affects our health in a positive sense.. Below we give you three reasons that support this statement.

Being sincere increases your self-esteem

A study carried out by psychologist Robert S. Feldman, at the University of Massachusetts, revealed that the average at which people lie is one lie for every ten minutes of conversation. At the same time, he concluded that The main reason people lie is to appear nicer and/or more competent than they really are.. In other words, to arouse liking or admiration in others.

On this basis, other experts have indicated that These types of lies play the role of covering up the reality of some people.. The reason is that deep down their lives and ways of being are perceived as uninteresting and not worthy of being taken into account by others.

The curious thing about all this is that authenticity is one of the best valued and most admired traits. This means that The more sincere a person is, talking about themselves as they are, the greater the chance they have of arousing sympathy and admiration in others.. The final effect is that all of this contributes to increasing self-esteem and this feeds back into the cycle: greater sincerity, more acceptance, increased self-esteem.

Being honest reduces anxiety

The problem with telling a lie is that it introduces us to an endless cycle of falsehoods.. If you say you’re a rock star, you’re going to have to make up a hundred more lies to make it believable. For someone who lies, the worst that can happen is that they are caught in flagrante delicto.

That being the case, not only do you have to have a good imagination, but you probably also have to spend a lot of time trying to give coherence to your speech, so as not to be caught lying. You also need a good memory, so as not to fall into contradictions.

This, then, requires a strong emotional expenditure that, sooner rather than later, is expressed as stress and anxiety.. It is good that you maintain some alertness in your attention mechanisms so as not to get tangled and that increases the degree of tension.

When you are sincere, you should never carry such a weight. You don’t have to go around building explanations, or spending time embellishing your version with details that make it credible. This allows you to be more relaxed and act more naturally, which avoids a huge expenditure of emotional energy that you need for other 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 investigate the effects of being honest on health.

To do this, he got a group of 72 volunteers and divided them into two groups: one of them was instructed to be strictly sincere in all their conversations, while the other was not given any instructions. Those who had to be sincere were specified that they could not lie even about small or seemingly trivial matters. This exercise was to last five weeks.

During the time of the study, volunteers in both groups had their health monitored, while taking weekly polygraph tests. Once the experiment was finished, a clear difference was seen in the health condition of those who were sincere and those who lied..

The former presented a smaller number of headaches, sore throats, nausea and dizziness, while the latter maintained these types of symptoms without any variation.

The results encouraged the researcher so much that she decided to be completely honest the following winter.. She noticed that she needed fewer hours of sleep to feel satisfactory rest and that the colds, which always plagued her during cold seasons, simply disappeared.

You might be interested…