This is an ABC podcast.

You're an animal lover, but you eat meat.

You generally care about your health, but you smoke.

You know you should pay your bills, but you splash out on a shopping spree instead.

To get yourself to override your first instinct and go against it takes a certain degree of mental gymnastics.

And the guilty, uneasy feeling you might get when you do is the result of something called cognitive dissonance. We don't like being in

sort of bad mood states, so we're motivated to resolve that tension by either changing our

attitudes or changing our behaviours. and that's the dissonance.

But cognitive dissonance doesn't just arise when we do something bad.

It takes a certain amount of dissonance to get yourself off to the gym when you'd rather be

lying in bed, for example.

This is All in the Mind.

I'm Sana Khadar, and today, producer Rose Kerr investigates the role of

cognitive dissonance in our lives, when it's good for us, and when it's causing us harm.

I'm Dr. Kim Cordwell.

I'm a lecturer at Charles Darwin University in the Faculty of Health.

I'm also chair of a research group called Bad Behavioural Addictions, Alcohol and Drugs.

Kim, to start off with, what is cognitive dissonance?

Cognitive dissonance is a experience where essentially our beliefs conflict with our actions.

So a set of beliefs we have or a held belief is in contrast with something we're doing.

And this generates what we call an aphersive effective state, affective state.

So a kind of negative emotional feeling that we're then

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