The hypothesis of the study was the exploration of the impact of students’ financial circumstances on their health. Ethical considerations were observed during the research as it applied correlational design (Kimmel, 2007). A group of 89 British students and 98 Finnish students filled in a survey that evaluated their financial anxieties, emotional and bodily health, and sense of control (Jessop, Herberts & Solomon, 2005). The results showed that British students had better levels of apprehension than Finnish students, but they also had worse emotional and physical health. The strength of the study is that the hypothesis where greater financial concern generally meant poorer health was supported. The limitation of this study is the absence of evidence that students’ smoking or drinking behavior intervened in the relationship between financial concern and health. It is implicated that students’ financial circumstances might have serious consequences for their health and the latest changes in government finance policies for students could have a bad influence on student health (Turner & Hurley, 2002).
Cognitive Dissonance
An example of cognitive dissonance in my life is procrastination. The more challenging, pointless, unclear, and unstructured an assignment is, the more likely I am to procrastinate with it. The more aversive a task is to me, the more I will repel it, and the more likely I am to procrastinate. As a procrastinator, most of the time I want to remove the bad frame of mind or feelings, so they give in to the good mood. They give up on the desire to leave the task to another time, and then, not being confronted by the unwanted task, I feel better. By making tasks less problematic, worthless, indefinite, and unstructured, I can decay what I have to do to be more desired to me. When I find myself putting off tasks and being lazy, I use my procrastination as a prompt to inspect the features of the assignment and think about what I should adjust.
When I procrastinate I entertain myself, and think about other things, give a lower profile to the importance of what I have to do, or look for the facts that back up my procrastination. One of the ways I use to decrease the dissonance is restraining how much time I devote to a chore. It actually makes the task extra pleasurable, more organized, and less unsatisfying and challenging. On top of that, there are some good efficiency profits to the idea as well. When I limit how much time I devote to something as a replacement for throwing more time at the task, I force myself to put forth more vigor over less time to get it done, which makes me a lot more prolific.
When I engage myself in some unhealthy behaviors, I reduce dissonance by telling myself that it is not really that bad. I’m calming myself down with the fact that a lot of people are doing the same thing and they are still living in peace with themselves and do not suffer from self-flagellation.