Wanting To Say So Many Things And Knowing Better Not To Say Anything

With the exception of love, there has never been so much written about a subject as about words, because words and silence always seek a balance. A Chinese proverb says, “Don’t open your lips if you’re not sure what you have to say will improve the silence.”

It’s happened to almost all of us: we know the exact moment when a conversation is supposed to end, and yet we keep going, and in the end it all ends badly. We want to say so many things without thinking about the consequences, without being aware that sometimes it is better to be silent.

If, before speaking, we were aware that when we speak and issue judgments and opinions, we reveal the deeper side of our personalities and judge ourselves, we would probably not allow our tongues to be faster than our thoughts.

talk too much

Among friends, among family members and among people we love, it is common not to take care in the way we speak and let out what we think.

The words we speak to those closest to us are sometimes sharper than any knife, create walls that are very difficult to break down, and hurt the people we truly love and appreciate.

Although the urge to speak often wins out, it is important to weigh the words, tell ourselves what we want to say to the other person, weigh the consequences of our opinions, and always resort to courtesy and kindness.

The art of speaking with wisdom and respect

It is not a question of always being silent and hiding what we think, because we cannot forget that what is not said in a concrete way is as if it did not exist. The words of encouragement, those that come out of our hearts to reach another person, these are the ones that are of great importance.

Speaking what is necessary, knowing how to listen, not just talking, because talking too much, without thinking and without control, can lead us to say things that can hurt the other person.

The importance of honesty

Researchers at Harvard University in the United States conducted research on brain activity during a series of tests that analyzed the honesty of a group of people. They found that honesty depends more on the absence of temptations than on active resistance to them.

In neurological terms, the result obtained means that the brain activity of people who are honest does not vary in the face of temptation (making money by cheating), while the brain activity of dishonest people changes in the face of temptation, even if they do not give in to it.

The research was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and was directed by Joshua Greene, a professor of psychology at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University.

Greene explains that according to these results, being honest does not depend so much on willpower, but on being predisposed to honesty in a spontaneous way. According to the researcher, this may not be true in all situations, but in the situation analyzed.

The reasons that lead us to lie or tell the truth

On the other hand, researchers from the Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain, and the University of Quebec in Montreal, Canada, carried out an experiment to find out the reasons why people lie or tell the truth in a given situation.

Until that time, it was believed that people always tell the truth if it suits them materially, and lie otherwise. But now, with the research carried out, it is clear that people are telling the truth even if it entails a material cost. The question is: why?

There are different hypotheses because, on the one hand, it is understood that people are sincere because they have this internalized and the opposite makes them feel negative emotions, such as guilt or shame, which we know as pure aversion to lying. This aversion has to do with the aversion to creating a dissonance between the image a person has of himself and the way he actually behaves.

Other motivations for being honest are related to altruism and conforming to what we think the other expects us to say, that is, the desire not to frustrate the other person’s expectations.