Dwelling in Dissonance
A useful mental skill.
There’s a tension to one’s thoughts that precedes a large change in one’s mind, a disharmony like conflicting notes torn from too-taught piano wires. A sense of wrongness, of discomfort and friction, a creeping itch in the brain that demands to be appeased.
This sensation is called dissonance.
Human brains try quite hard - often without our conscious awareness - to avoid the sensation of dissonance. There are even instances in history where the tendency to shy away from dissonance has been weaponized against people: in prisoner of war camps, in cults, in pyramid schemes.
But dissonance itself, like many forms of discomfort, isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s just the sensation we get when our brains are processing conflicting ideas. And like a mosquito bite, sometimes the best thing to do is not scratch at it.
Sometimes, you want to sit with the dissonance in your mind, and let it play out.
Sometimes, you want to dwell in your dissonance.
A Practical Skill
Our thoughts often crowd out their opposites.
If we see something red - say, a stop sign - we don’t think to ourselves, “oh, this is red, but it might also be green” and then sit there for a while ruminating on how colors work.
If we perceive something scary - say, a horror movie monster - we don’t think, “this monster is scary, but it might also be misunderstood and therefore not-scary, and we should think this through before we run from it.”
If we think we’re ugly, we don’t follow that thought up with “but also I’m beautiful.”
When we think a thing, we’re not doing some kind of complicated quantum superposition nonsense, where the cat is both alive and dead until we open the box and the state collapses. We just think our thoughts, and that’s that.
Sometimes, however, we want to change our thoughts. Maybe they aren’t true, maybe they’re causing us a lot of anxiety, maybe we what we really want is to change ourselves but changing our thoughts is the first step. No matter the reason, changing one’s thoughts is useful, and more or less the basis of cognitive behavioral therapy, a type of psychological treatment.
So how does one change one’s thoughts?
Contrary to many physical efforts, ‘trying really hard’ is not a viable strategy. Our brains don’t work that way; you can try all you want to avoid thinking of a pink elephant and it’ll only make you think of a pink elephant more.
“Do or do not, there is no try,” says Yoda, but in this case neither doing nor trying are useful. How does one steer one’s thoughts? They aren’t consciously chosen; that’s sort of the whole problem.
There’s a need to tackle the problem from another angle.
Let’s say that you’re currently thinking thought A, and you want to be thinking thought B instead. Rather than attempting to replace A with B (doomed to failure), instead try to think A and B at the same time.
An exercise for the reader: try to hold the two thoughts
“I am ugly” and
“I am beautiful”
together in your mind.
It’s difficult - this doesn’t come easy. My eyes tend to cross a little whenever I try it. One of those thoughts may feel more right or congruent than the other. That’s okay. It isn’t a competition. Simply allow both thoughts to exist inside your mind, without competing or overwriting or destroying each other. Neither has to be true or false.
What you’ll find (even though it may take a bit of effort) is that your brain is perfectly capable of containing multiple thoughts that contradict one another. You’ll feel some dissonance, some discomfort - but nothing breaks. You don’t become psychotic or insane.
You have enough space in your head for both thoughts. Let them both exist.
In the long run, we often do want one of these thoughts to win out over the other, often the one that’s currently losing.
We want to replace an angry or anxious or sad thought with one that’s patient or calm or happy.
But in order to do that, we first have to be able to think the other thought, not as a replacement, but as a gentle alternative. We don’t have to accept or believe an idea to dwell on the dissonance it creates within ourselves, and dwelling on that dissonance can be a first step towards creating new patterns and new beliefs.
Holding these contradicting thoughts in our minds is a way of easing into new ideas that go against our deep-seated beliefs. It’s a way to carve a new path out of the rut a brain can get into.
It can be uncomfortable, to dwell in dissonance. But growth is often uncomfortable. Change is often uncomfortable.
Dwelling in dissonance isn’t the answer to everything. But it is a tool in the toolbox, one I’ve found quite powerful. Because once you have an idea in your head, even if it contradicts something else already there, it opens up a new path for your thoughts to take.
It’s a path less traveled by -