With the exception of love, it has never been written more about a subject than words, because words and silence always seek balance. A Chinese proverb says, “Don’t open your lips if you’re not sure what to say. “will improve silence. “
It’s happened to almost all of us – we know the exact moment a conversation should end, and yet we carry on and ultimately everything ends badly. We want to say so many things without thinking about the consequences, without realizing that sometimes it is better to be silent.
- If.
- Before we speak.
- We were aware that when we speak and issue judgments and opinions.
- We revealed the deepest side of our personality and judged.
- We probably would not allow our language to be faster than our thoughts.
“It takes two years to learn to speak and a life to learn to be silent. Ernest Hemmingway-
Between friends, family and people we love, it’s common not to pay attention to the way we talk and not let go of what we think.
The words we speak to our loved ones are sometimes sharper than any knife, creating walls that are very difficult to break down and hurt the people we really love and appreciate.
Although the desire to speak often prevails, it is important to weigh the words, tell us what we want to tell the other person, weigh the consequences of our opinions and always resort to courtesy and kindness.
“The wounds of the tongue are deeper and more incurable than those of a knife. -Arabic proverb-
It is not always a question of always shutting up and hiding what we think, because we cannot forget that what is not said in a concrete way is as if it does not exist. The words of encouragement, the words that come out of our hearts to reach someone else, are the ones that matter greatly.
Saying what is necessary, knowing how to listen, not talking, because talking too much, without thinking and without control, can lead us to say things that can hurt another person.
Researchers at Harvard University in the United States conducted research on brain activity in a series of tests that analyzed the honesty of a group of people and found that honesty depends more on the absence of temptations than on active resistance to them.
In neurological terms, the result is that the brain activity of honest people does not vary from 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 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and directed by Joshua Greene, professor of psychology at Harvard University’s School of Arts and Sciences.
Greene explains that according to these results, being honest depends not so much on willpower, but on spontaneous predisposition to honesty, which according to the researcher may not be true in all situations, but on the situation analyzed.
On the other hand, researchers from the Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain, and the University of Quebec in Montreal, Canada, conducted an experiment to find out why people lie or tell the truth in a given situation.
Until then, it was believed that people would always tell the truth if it suited them materially and would lie differently, but now, with the research done, it has become clear that people are telling the truth even if it involves a material cost. The question is: why?
There are different assumptions because on the one hand it is understood that people are sincere because they have internalized it and on the contrary makes them feel negative emotions such as guilt or shame to what we call pure aversion to lies. This aversion has to do with the aversion to creating dissonance between a person’s image of himself and the way he actually behaves.
Other motivations to be honest relate to altruism and adapting to what we think the other expects of us, that is, the desire not to frustrate the expectations of the other person.