It’s never easy telling the hard truth to someone. Nowadays, people everywhere are so concerned with hurting each other’s feelings that they’d rather lie to someone than hurt their feelings. While some may realize it or not, lying may hurt themselves more than the person they are lying to. Lying to someone may bring emotional pain and heartbreak, but the liar is subject to physical and mental harm from simply gathering up the courage to lie. In more cases than not, lying causes more self-harm than second hand harm. It is proven to be bad for you and it certainly has many other consequences but due to the unavoidable consequences of lying, it is not okay to lie in any problematic situation unless it is life or death.

Lying to someone seems so easy and stress free to some people, but whether you realize it or not, when you tell a lie you are causing harm to yourself. This harm can be both mental and physical. Anita Kelly from the University of Notre Dame in Indiana conducted a study of 110 adults where she asked half of them to stop lying. This means no false statements of any sort. The other half weren’t given any specific instructions about lying, but were asked at the end of each week how many times they lied. In addition to taking a weekly lie-detector test, participants filled out questionnaires about their physical and mental health, as well as the quality of their relationships. As a result she said that, “When they told more lies, their health went down. And when they told the truth, it improved”. She also found that by telling fewer lies each week resulted in the patients reporting fewer physical complaints at the end of each week. This experiment concluded that lying does in fact directly affect your health in a negative manner. In an article titled How Lying Affects Your Health written by Angela Haupt, she talks more about the insight of events that occur when one lies. She says that, “lying is thought to trigger the release of stress hormones, increasing heart rate and blood pressure. Stress reduces your body’s number of infection-fighting white blood cells, and over the years, could contribute to lower-back pain, tension headaches, a rapid heartbeat, menstrual problems, and even infertility”. Haupt is saying that lying causes the body stress and clearly stress is never good for anyone. Stress is something that can take a toll on your mental and physical health. The immediate impact might not be so large or eventful but it is the long-term affects that sneak up on people. According to WebMD.com, “Forty-three percent of all adults suffer adverse health effects from stress” and “seventy-five percent to 90% of all doctor’s office visits are for stress-related ailments and complaints”. In other words, the stress that you can put on yourself from lying can be the reason or at least part of the reason for an adverse health effect and/or a trip to the doctor’s office. Lying has unavoidable consequences when it comes to your health but these are easily avoidable if you just don’t lie. Lying clearly isn’t good for your health and this is a big enough reason as to why lying isn’t acceptable in any problematic situation (Unless it is life or death) because by lying you’re probably causing more harm to yourself than the problematic situation itself.

Sometimes it seems so easy to lie. It becomes so natural and acceptable to the point where people are doing it subconsciously. While this may be something that people think is okay, it certainly isn’t in almost any situation. Lying is bad for your health but if there is an opportunity to keep someone alive in a life or death situation then it becomes acceptable. This meaning that it is okay to lie only if it prevents the death of you or others. By this I don’t mean that it is okay to lie if a lie is less harmful than the truth, I am specifically talking about a life or death situation. The best example I can think of would be if a Nazi officer were to ask a family hiding a Jewish person as to if they have any Jews or know where they can find any during the times of Hitler and the rise of the Nazi Party. This is a perfect example where lying would be acceptable. By lying, there is an avoidance of death to someone and therefore it is perfectly acceptable to lie in that situation. This is the only scenario as to where lying becomes acceptable. In any situation, it is important to avoid death because you only get one chance at life. The value of someone’s life will always trump the consequences of lying, therefore creating an exception to the principle.

It is important to understand that lying in a general setting is never acceptable. By lying someone causes more than just physical and mental health problems for themselves. The consequences of lying range from small to large but in each and every one of those cases lying hurts more in the long run. Through clinical studies and research, these health effects have been tested and proven, and therefore are real consequences of such actions. The health affects of lying should be enough to make people realize that lying isn’t good for you and it shouldn’t be acceptable in almost any scenario. Due to the unavoidable side effects of lying, it is never acceptable to lie unless in a life or death situation. At the end of the day the only thing that matters is your health and that you make it through the day capable of waking up for the next.