Photo by ali syaaban on Unsplash

Cognitive resonance — Have you been in touch with your thoughts lately?

Andrei Stroescu
Sep 8, 2018 · 3 min read

When I sleep and dream, things happen in my mind that guide me back when I wake up. Things that reinforce who I am, or who I think I am.

If I can maintain a healthy set of habits, the cognitive dissonance between my less than healthy/sustainable life style can keep me afloat short term when I start drifting away. The bad part starts when that cognitive dissonance melts away into the new ‘me’. Then it’s a world of hurt to get back on track, because the cognitive dissonance, or better termed here the ‘cognitive inertia’ is a double force acting on me to remain the same.

I’ve seen often in my every day reading that to being able to change habits is probably the most important meta-habit.

The fact that I woke up shortly after midnight is the cognitive inertia that I have, but for the better. Because who I am is screaming at me that I’m not doing more to code better. Inner me is also cajoling me into learning German on the weekends and evenings, and every time I don’t do that, I go to sleep a bit more anxious.

I have to thank my subconscious mind. It’s keeping me afloat, it’s like a trusted friend that you instructed very clearly to be ruthless about what you have to do, when and how to do it, in the likely case it happens that you lose yourself in the big world out there.

For example, because I read on many topics, I have to write back to make sense of my newly found world. It’s a conversation. We have only so much buffer for processing information. As for me, I need to write in order to maintain, declutter and organize my memory, my sense of self. It’s a mental minimalism that keeps you going, refining who you are, what you can do and why you do it. Writing this, I can remember who I am, re-aligning myself to who I think I am. Closing the loop.

The personal observations we sometimes make, can only get better and more helpful if and only if we cherish them and revisit them often. For that, they have to be stored, as our mind is racing in the background, helping us achieving our goals, both surviving and thriving in our imagined self-actualization. That said, by withering away our thoughts by not curating them actively, we become not only ignorant, but self-ignorant.

We ignore ourselves in the loneliness of society at large, in the mindless herd behavior of the innocently blissful many that may one day realize that the present is only but a mirror of past experiences. And if that mirror does not guide us and lead us with its years gone experience, we are doomed to a kind of strange but familiar Groundhog Day.

That day, might be one too late.

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