Dr. Todd Rose

This sort of personal success, I think, is the most important illusion we've ever found because it completely corrupts your own life.

It leads to misery, right?

And it's the one illusion that only you can solve.

You have the power right now to solve that one, right?

You don't need anyone's permission to start making different choices about the life you live.

The group doesn't even believe the thing that you're about to conform to.

And so when you do it, and enough of us do it, we literally destroy the very group that we care about.

Ask yourself, how would you behave if you knew for sure

that this thing was an illusion.

If you knew for sure your group didn't believe the thing that this fringe is just shouting at you.

Because this is how we live our lives and the illusion that's like darkening our doorstep here.

Because...

If you look at the research on what happens when we self-silence, so let's look at the downside of it and then look at the upside of being authentic.

The downside of self-silencing is shocking, okay?

So research that followed longitudinally people who were self-silencing and people who weren't.

Self-silencers actually have dramatically higher rates of cardiovascular disease.

strokes, high cholesterol, everything.

And there's a mechanism for it, which is basically when you're self silencer or misrepresenting your views,

you get this cognitive dissonance, you know, this kind of like, I know I'm not being honest.

Cortisol levels elevate and they stay elevated.