Each site filmed on their agency grounds so the location would be recognizable to the youth and their peers who would later receive the adapted curricula. Resilience refers to those who experience challenging conditions without showing profound negative consequences (Greene, 2002). The youth involved in this project are valued for their life experience, coping, and perspective despite their previous choices and consequences related to substances. For people with substance abuse, they have to push past constant dissonance because they know there is dangerous stuff happening. The person in recovery who sees things for what they are is able to work towards healing. However, behind this facade of professional success, Longstaff faced a profound personal struggle.
How Trauma, Stress, and Cognitive Dissonances Can Lead to Drug Use
It’s important to note that you don’t consciously decide the best way to handle feelings caused by cognitive dissonance. Another effect is having a greater need for clarity to help resolve the discomfort. We may endlessly watch the news and spend time on social media in an effort to seek clarity that frequently only serves to add more noise to already conflicting pieces of information. Cognitive dissonance occurs when a person holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values; or participates in an action that goes against one of these three. It is the mental conflict that occurs when our thoughts and our behaviours don’t fit together.
Causes of Cognitive Dissonance: Understanding the Triggers
Because it is something a person feels internally, it is not possible to physically observe dissonance. As such, no set of external signs can reliably indicate a person is experiencing cognitive dissonance. In CBT for addictive behaviours cognitive strategies are supported by several behavioural strategies such as coping skills. With regard to addictive behaviours Cognitive Therapy emphasizes psychoeducation and relapse prevention. Therefore, many of the techniques discussed under relapse prevention that aim at modification of dysfunctional beliefs related to outcomes of substance use, coping or self-efficacy are relevant cognitive dissonance and addiction and overlapping.
- This approach works by encouraging people to say things or role-play behaviors that contradict their beliefs about food and body image.
- The approach also focuses on assisting patients in shifting or reframing thoughts to be more rational and positive.
- Ever been in a situation where you feel unhappy in a relationship yet stick around?
Self-Talk Therapy: Harnessing the Power of Internal Dialogue for Mental…
If they experience a relapse in their addiction recovery, they might not go back to treatment because they feel it will just happen again. Ever been in a situation where you feel unhappy in a relationship yet stick around? You might justify it by focusing on the good times or insisting that things will get better. This internal struggle can be exhausting, and it highlights how cognitive dissonance constantly influences our decisions. The qualitative analysis began with open coding of focus group transcriptions in which two researchers independently assigned codes to statements related to the research questions.
DRUGS OF ABUSE AND THE DEVELOPING BRAIN
The difficulty of sustaining competing thoughts generates a need to resolve them, one way or another. The inability to resolve competing thoughts leads to a buildup of stressful energy. This energy must be displaced, either by resolving the conflict, or by channeling the stressful energy into distracting activities such as eating, exercising, pornography, chores, gambling, and indulging in mind-altering substances.
- Those struggling with this distortion will only base their conclusions on a single incident.
- The distribution of basic information such as gender, age, and frequency of use of the questionnaire is consistent with the actual structure of Chinese pan-entertainment mobile live broadcast platform users, so it deserves further statistical analysis.
- A therapist trained in CBT techniques can teach you to use willpower and logical thinking to work through distorted justifications and deconstruct all the mechanisms you put in place to validate your drinking or drug habit.
- It occurs when individuals hold opposing beliefs and experience psychological stress as a result.
- It was proven that individuals tend to look for some sort of stability and dependability with their attitudes, perceptions, and thoughts.
How to Fight Cognitive Distortions in Addiction Recovery
As opposed to a cognitive deficit or weakness, implicit processes may directly interfere with metacognitive awareness of reasoning and decision-making about drugs and alcohol. The rational mind relies on heuristics and other mental short cuts (e.g., attributions, appraisals, schemata) representing implicitly activated information processing to avoid the need to relearn previously acquired knowledge. However, these automatic processes foster an irrational persistence of belief – e.g., positive expectancies regarding continued substance use – that contributes to the maintenance of addiction. A recent paper provides a Sober living house detailed review and commentary regarding automatically triggered thoughts in addiction, and how they may, furthermore, interact with explicit cognitive processes to intensify cue-reactive responding based on Elaborated Intrusion Theory 36.
Well, the first thing to say is that we will have been experiencing cognitive dissonance in the pre-Covid world and will absolutely experience it after. It is a reality of everyday life which is why we wanted to specifically focus on it in this podcast series. Understanding it now will put you in very good stead for being able to work with it in healthier ways for the rest of your life. The concept of cognitive dissonance was put forward by the social psychologist Leon Festinger in 1957. His theory proposed that we have an inner drive to be in a state of harmony which we strive to achieve and maintain by aligning our attitudes, values, thoughts and behaviours.
Cognitive Dissonance: Why We Struggle With Change and Justify Contradictions
Third, the role of self-efficacy has been widely studied in the field of psychology, particularly in the areas of motivation, achievement, and mental health. Bandura 45 first introduced the concept of self-efficacy and defined it as “people’s beliefs about their capabilities to produce designated levels of performance that exercise control over events that affect their lives”. Self-efficacy has been found to play a critical role in determining https://ecosoberhouse.com/ an individual’s behavior, attitudes, and decisions, particularly in the face of challenges and stress 98.
