You Want To Say Anything, But Know It’s Best To Shut Up

Besides love, no subject has been written as much as the word, because words and silence are always looking for the right balance. There is a Chinese proverb that says, “Don’t open your mouth if you’re not sure what you want to say will improve the silence.”

We have all experienced it, when we actually know exactly the moment when a conversation should be ended, but we still keep talking and in the end everything goes wrong. We want to say way too much without thinking about the consequences, without being aware that sometimes it’s better to simply keep quiet.

If we really realized that when we speak, make judgments and share our opinions, we are actually revealing the deepest parts of our own personality and judging ourselves, we would probably never allow our tongue to get ahead of our brains.

say too much

In addition to friends, family, and the people we love, we often don’t pay much attention to the way we talk and freely let others know what we think. And even if this may sound quite crude, the following is often true in situations like this: ‘where there is trust, there is also contempt.’

The words we speak to the people closest to us are sometimes sharper than a knife, creating walls that are hard to break and hurting the people we truly love and respect.

While we may sometimes feel the need to say something, it’s important to judge our words carefully and ask ourselves what we really want to say. We should always evaluate the consequences of our opinion and always fall back on politeness and kindness.

The art of speaking from wisdom and respect

It is not always a matter of being silent and hiding our thoughts, because we must not forget that the things that are not spoken verbally, practically do not exist. Words of encouragement, the words we say from our hearts to someone else, are the words that really matter.

Say only what is necessary, know how to listen, and don’t talk just to say something. Talking too much, without thinking or checking what is being said, can cause us to spout utter nonsense, or even things that could hurt someone else.

The importance of honesty

Scientists at Harvard University conducted a study to study brain activity while taking a series of tests looking at the honesty of a group of people. Thanks to this study, it was discovered that honesty depends more on the absence of temptations than on actively resisting them.

In neural terms, the results obtained from this study indicated that the brain activity of honest people does not change when faced with temptation (e.g., making money by cheating), while the brain activity of dishonest people does change in the face of temptation. face of temptation, even if this temptation is not yielded to.

This study was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Joshua Green, professor of psychology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University .

Green explains that, based on these results, it can be argued that honesty does not depend on one’s willpower, but rather on one’s aptitude for spontaneous sincerity. According to the researcher, this may not always be true in every situation, but it is true in the situation investigated in this study.

Reasons why we lie or tell the truth

In contrast, researchers at the Autonomous University of Madrid and the University of Quebec in Montreal conducted an experiment to find out the reasons why people either choose to lie or tell the truth.

Until then, it was always thought that as humans we only told the truth if we would benefit materially, and that we chose to lie if we didn’t. However, this research makes it clear that some people are telling the truth even when there is a material cost involved. The question is, however, why?

In this sense, we are faced with different scenarios, because on the one hand it is understood that people are sincere because they have assimilated this sincerity and because choosing to do the opposite creates negative feelings such as guilt or shame, to dislike lies. This aversion also has to do with the fact that we abhor creating disagreements between the image we have of ourselves and how we behave in reality.

On the other hand, some motivations for acting honestly have to do with altruism, saying and doing what we think others expect of us, that is, the urge not to disappoint someone else.