What are the truths about how lies really harm you? We’ve all told lies from time to time. But lying always has a profound effect. Here’s a look at 10 ways lies can hurt you.
10 Amazing Truths About How Lies Really Harm You
Most people don’t think about how lies really harm you. If getting away with lies gets you ahead, it’s hard to stop lying. Half-truths count as lies, just like big whoppers. Lying is negative. Telling the truth is positive. How badly do lies hurt? Check out the truths about how lies harm you.
1. The More You Lie, the Easier It Gets
Like a sled rocketing down an icy slope, repeated lies begin to spew out of your mouth without any effort. You’ve gotten away with it, suffered no ill consequences, and have no governor on your tongue to keep your lying at bay. After a brief time, it’s easier to lie than tell the truth.
2. The More You Lie, the Bigger the Lies You Tell
What begins as a small lie never stays that way. One lie begets a slew of offspring, sometimes related, often just hanging around like ill-tempered friends. Think of a lie as a snowball, first small and accumulating in size as it rolls downhill.
It’s also impossible to make a lie smaller once it’s begun to grow. Thus, the more lies you tell, the bigger they get.
3. How Lies Really Harm You: Lies Destroy Relationships
No relationship can flourish on a foundation of lies. How can you trust that person if you can’t rely upon a partner, loved one, close friend, or co-worker to tell the truth?
When you know someone is a liar, it creates a chasm across which you’re increasingly reluctant to travel. In the wake of lies, relationships founder and fail or become quashed before they have a chance to begin.
4. Lies Trigger the Release of Stress Hormones
A lie isn’t just words that come out of the mouth. Precipitating the verbalization of the lie is a build-up of stress hormones. You get excited, releasing cortisol and readying to combat the effects your lies might create.
Long-term spikes in cortisol are harmful to your health, making a perfect stage for developing severe medical conditions.
5. Lying Uses Copious Negative Physical and Mental Energy
When you lie, you must constantly think of how to spin it, where there’s a nugget that others may cling to, how much they’ll be able to buy before beginning to question the integrity, and how to keep others from finding out the truth.
In short, constructing this negative and elaborate form of communication takes tremendous physical and mental energy. That’s energy better spent doing positive things.
6. Constant Lying Builds a False Sense of Reality
It doesn’t take much time to begin believing your web of lies. The reality you inhabit is false. It just seems natural to you. The more you lie, the more out of touch with reality your life becomes.
You may not even recognize the truth anymore, let alone voice it – even to yourself.
7. How Lies Really Harm You: Lying Creates a Vicious Cycle
It’s often been said that once a lie is out of your mouth, there’s no putting it back. What’s also true is that lying sets into motion a vicious cycle. To exist, knowing that you’ve lied repeatedly, you must perpetuate the lie and rigidly adhere to it despite all proof to the contrary. Lying is a spiral that is impossible to escape from.
8. Lies are a Way to Avoid the Pain of Living
Many people tell lies to mask the pain they feel in their lives. They don’t like that they have no or few friends, so they create imaginary friendships and boast of their connections.
Pathological liars are all over social media and everyday fabricators who seek to maximize their made-up accomplishments to make themselves feel better and convince others of their superiority.
This doesn’t work overall, as constant lying indicates some severe deficit in the liar’s emotional well-being.
9. You Waste Time Covering Your Tracks
While there’s much good you could accomplish in life, when you habitually lie, you’ll miss opportunities because you spend so much time covering your tracks. This is time wasted, time you’ll never get back.
Covering the trail of lies you’ve told is also increasingly impossible. Eventually, the truth comes out. Dreading that eventuality won’t make it go away.
10. How Lies Really Harm You: Lies Extinguish Hope and Trust
The accumulation of negativity from lies has another life-altering effect: It destroys hope and trust. Not only is the liar incapable of trusting others or finding hope in any situation, but they have also drained all hope and trust in themself.
Life becomes bleak and dreary when all there is to look forward to is a never-ending litany of lies.
Change Your Behavior: Change Your Life
When you think of how lies harm you, altering your behavior and stopping lying makes sense. If lying is so natural that you do it without thinking or compulsively lie, consider getting help from a mental health professional. Counseling will help you learn to tell the truth. You will also be happier and better able to live a vibrant life.
