“What happens in our brain is every time we lie, our body is preparing us for this fight or flight response because it's going into stress because it's not a normal behaviour for us." This means that depending on the nature of the lie, that behaviour can actually do some serious damage over time.
Lying Changes the Brain
Nature Neuroscience reported a study of the amygdala, the part of the brain dealing with emotional responses. The researchers said the amygdala shows up less and less, as we lie more and more. Essentially, our guilt feelings tend to weaken and shrink.
Getting caught in a lie often destroys relationships. Lying has consequences. When someone finds out you have lied, it affects how that person deals with you forever. If your spouse lies, you may be able to work it out in therapy, but an employer is not likely to forgive.
Lying can trigger an increased heart rate, high blood pressure and elevated levels of stress hormones in the blood, psychologists have found. Over time, that can take a significant toll on mental and physical health.
A constant stream of lies becomes so mentally taxing that your brain gives up. “It's called cognitive load,” Konnikova writes, meaning that “our limited cognitive resources are overburdened.” Lie detection is difficult work, and your brain can only handle so much.
According to a 2015 review article, constant lying is associated with an array of negative health outcomes including high blood pressure, increased heart rate, vasoconstriction, and elevated stress hormones in the blood.
[color-box] Natural and logical Consequences for lying: What stems naturally from a child lying is that it erodes trust between parent and child. Therefore, this can be easily explained to a child. To extend it further, a logical consequence would be removing freedoms that could erode trust further.
Impact of Deception on a Relationship
The more lies they tell, the less you trust them or have faith in their honesty. Diminished compassion and empathy: Lying makes it harder to detect someone's emotions, which in turn, can diminish the compassion and empathy you feel toward that person.
While some people who lie want to protect the feelings of others and spare someone else pain or hurt, many people lie to protect their own feelings, self-esteem, self-confidence, or other personal emotion.
The psychology of lying can be a complicated concept because people lie for different reasons. Some people lie in an attempt to avoid punishment, while others might lie to avoid hurting someone else's feelings. Some people might simply lie out of impulse. In some situations we might lie for a combination of reasons.
Some researchers estimate that the average person tells around 1-2 lies per day. However, other studies have found much higher numbers - some suggest that people tell closer to 10-15 lies per day on average.
They alter our reality, reframing it through the agenda of the person who doesn't want the truth to come out. Being lied to makes you feel insecure – your version of the truth is discredited. It also makes you feel unimportant – the person lying to you didn't value you enough to tell the truth.
Previous studies have demonstrated that lying can undermine memory and that its memory-undermining effects could be modulated by the cognitive resources required to tell lies.
Kerner says it makes perfect sense because lying is stressful. "If I'm telling lies, especially major lies, that's going to create a lot of internal stress which can manifest itself in a whole host of medical problems." But it's not just major lies that can make you sick.
Understanding what causes the lying is the only way to change a pathological liar's behavior. Treatment, which can include psychotherapy, medication, or both, will depend on whether or not the pathological lying is a symptom of an underlying psychiatric condition.
It may even be necessary to lie sometimes to avoid hurting your partner's feelings. “Lying is quite common in relationships,” says Manhattan-based licensed clinical psychologist Joseph Cilona, PsyD. However, that doesn't mean some of those whoppers can't be damaging. It all depends on the lie and why you're telling it.
Every relationship is built on mutual trust, whether that relationship it is romantic or not. Lying quickly erodes that trust, hurting both parties in the process. Whether it is keeping secrets or telling a little white lie, lying destroys one of the fundamental pillars of a healthy relationship — trust.
Lying motivates people to rationalize and justify their lies to themselves, so that they may continue to see themselves as good. When people morally disengage from the situation by rationalizing their behavior, they set themselves up to lie more in the future because they have already found a way to justify dishonesty.
Lying. Dishonesty degrades the foundation of all relationships, mutual trust. Philosopher Immanuel Kant believed if everyone lied, nobody would believe anything they were told! Lying is toxic since it is self-defeating. Striving for truth in our relationships with others shows we care about their desires and choices.
However, there are other lies that can create harm, leading to distress. These types of lies can include making false reports, denying something occurred, or creating a fabrication that isnt based on anything real.
They will avoid using pronouns like "I," "mine" and "myself." They may use oddly phrased statements in the third person. For example, they may say, "You don't bill hours that you didn't work," instead of saying, "I don't bill hours I didn't work." Or they'll say, "The vase got broken," instead of "I broke the vase."