Wellness 2.0: Be Yourself

What It Covers

Social scientist Erica Bailey explores the psychology of authenticity, examining how misalignment between inner feelings and outer behavior creates stress, while living authentically improves well-being, relationships, and workplace performance through specific research-backed strategies.

Key Questions Answered

• •Emotional labor costs: Service workers, nurses, and customer-facing employees who suppress genuine emotions to maintain professional personas experience psychological exhaustion, anxiety, and depression from constantly managing impressions that conflict with internal states, requiring active mental effort to sustain inauthentic presentations.
• •Identity segmentation risks: Research shows people who maintain highly separated work and personal identities are more likely to engage in unethical workplace behavior because they can rationalize immoral actions as not diagnostic of their core self, creating psychological permission for misconduct through compartmentalization.
• •Social media authenticity: Study of 10,000 Facebook users reveals that distance between self-rated personality and online persona correlates inversely with subjective well-being, meaning users whose profiles closely match their actual personality traits report significantly higher life satisfaction than those presenting idealized versions.
• •Values-based presence: Reminding yourself of core values before presentations or meetings helps you come across as more authentic to audiences by grounding communication in genuine motivations rather than performance anxiety, as demonstrated in research by psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Paul Ingram.