Beliefs Built To Survive

Survival is the primary programming of humans, consciously and unconsciously guiding the majority of our actions. Our brains subconsciously like to keep consistency between our knowledge, beliefs, and feelings to survive and protect us. Our actions then follow those thoughts.

When our thoughts, feelings, and actions are all aligned we feel safe and secure.

We want our thoughts to match our actions. We want our beliefs to be similar and make sense with each other. Rarely do people believe two opposites are true naturally.

We want our own actions to be inline with our beliefs. Even if our actions change.

Consistency is protection. And we expect the same of the people around us.

Bottom line: when everything goes hand in hand, we feel the highest sense of security.

The instinct to uphold and maintain our beliefs is strong. Equally, we are more likely to perceive what we already believe from the environment around us. That is part of the reason we all experience situations differently.

Zoom out even further and we want consistency in our beliefs throughout our lives, too. We usually keep our beliefs unless we intentionally change them for our own benefit. This consistency and affirmation of our own knowledge biologically increases our chance of safety.

Did you know that all of of a butterfly’s organs and all senses dissolve from when it’s a caterpillar, but it still remembers what is toxic to ingest? To survive.

So more often than not, we stand strong on what we know, what we’ve done, and what we’ve experienced.

New information, actions, or experiences that challenge our existing knowledge and values tend to cause stress, pain, and uncertainty. It goes against our security system and causes us discomfort. The term for the conflict is cognitive dissonance. When there is a misalignment, it goes against our very own security system, our conscious mind.

When anything does not match up in our mind, we experience discomfort. We humans automatically take every action to remove the discomfort. Consciously or unconsciously, we disregard new information, reject people, tell ourselves stories about why they don’t match, disbelieve of evidence, and so on. If it happens unconsciously, we may just simply not even perceive the new information or we may justify the difference.

We do it to survive.

Cognitive dissonance overall is an excellent mechanism but where it often comes up in today’s day and age is not life threatening. We are here to not just survive but thrive! There is a lot of potential harm in not being able to recognize your own cognitive dissonance. We could limit our own knowledge, passing up on areas of improvement or, worse, damaging relationships. Seems severe, but to the name of a few, we could simply not listening to people we have relationships with, or trivializing people or blaming someone else for our lack of alignment.

To grow and not just survive but thrive, we must be able to accept reality with awareness.

First is acknowledgment of innate cognitive dissonance. Education of the concept.

Second is the mindfulness to recognize when we are facing discomfort from beliefs, actions, emotions, etc not adding up.

Third is to question ourselves compassionately and flexibly. Identify our values, morals and goals and distinguish what doesn’t align and why. Perhaps develop new beliefs or new actions or both!

Fourth is to see the importance. It is possible that what we are exploring isn’t as important as we thought or felt at the beginning. For example, there might be times where you find someone else’s belief upsetting right when the conversation comes up because it really doesn’t align with yours. However, when you step back, you see it’s okay that you both believe differently.

Five is examining the actual value of the discomfort, and why we do that behavior. We might not enjoy doing the dishes, but if our partner needs a break in their typical tasks, there’s value behind your discomfort.

People develop knowledge by building on what they already know, but since new information or actions can naturally differ from each other, there will typically be a slight conflict when learning or trying something new.

Survival and evolution do not always go hand in hand.

To develop, we must reevaluate our existing beliefs, add new beliefs, or we can change our actions.

After all, to grow, we must release the past and take this current moment for all that it is.