How many times have we gone out with our friends when we’d rather stay home and watch Netflix? Or pretended we liked the newest hit on the radio when it really wasn’t our favorite? We all know that we should to be true to ourselves rather than to pretend to be someone else, but now there’s scientific proof that “faking it” actually makes you feel terrible.
According to NY Mag, a recent study shows that when we’re not true to ourselves or behave in an inauthentic way, we feel like we’re acting immorally. Consequently, we feel bad about ourselves and our fake behavior.
In the study, researchers lead by Francesca Gino asked participants to recall a time that they felt like they were being fake. They then rated how “dirty” or “impure” they felt about that incident on 7-point scale. Then participants recounted a time that they felt like they acted authentically. Results showed that participants felt significantly “less dirty” when recalling those times… aka, you feel ten times better when you’re true to yourself. We could have told you that!
These results go alongside those found by Gino in a previous study about networking. In that experiment, she found that “so many people despise professional networking [because] it makes us feel inauthentic, and, therefore, literally gross.”
It might sound cliché, but Gino and her research partners concluded that it’s always better to be true to yourself, no matter what the situation. Since science says so, we should just stick to being ourselves.