How to Stop Lying: Why It Happens and How to Change It
How to stop lying starts with working out what the lie is doing for you, because almost every lie solves a problem in the moment: avoiding anger, holding an image together, ending a conversation early. This page covers why people lie, how everyday lying differs from habitual and pathological lying, and a worksheet for practicing honesty and repairing a lie already told.
Reviewed byMichael Callans, MSWRelated tools & tests
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About this tool
How to stop lying is a question people usually arrive at after something broke, and the useful starting point is not a verdict about character. Almost every lie solves a problem in the moment: it avoids anger, protects an image, ends an uncomfortable conversation, buys time, or keeps someone from being hurt by information. That is why willpower on its own rarely works. If the lie is doing a job, removing it without addressing the job leaves you standing in the situation the lie was covering, which is exactly the moment the next one appears. The plan on this page works on the job rather than on the lie.
It also helps to know how common lying is, because people who lie habitually tend to believe they are uniquely dishonest. Bella DePaulo and colleagues ran diary studies published in 1996 in which participants recorded their social interactions and the lies they told, and found that lying was an everyday event, with participants telling roughly one or two lies a day on average, most of them small and either self-serving or kind. Kim Serota, Timothy Levine and Franklin Boster surveyed American adults in 2010 and found a skewed distribution: most people reported no lies at all on the day in question, while a minority accounted for a large share of all the lies reported.
The reasons sort into a handful of categories. Fear of consequences covers most of it: the lie postpones a punishment, an argument or a loss. Shame drives a different kind, where the truth is not dangerous so much as humiliating, and the lie protects the self rather than the situation. Conflict avoidance produces the lies that keep the peace, which often feel like kindness to the person telling them. Impression management covers the embellishments, the exaggerated credentials and the invented details that make a story land better. Emma Levine and Maurice Schweitzer found in 2014 that people who told a prosocial lie were judged more moral than people who told the truth, which is part of why the prosocial sort are so easy to justify.
Shame deserves its own line because it is the engine of the worst lies and of the ones hardest to stop. June Tangney and Ronda Dearing documented the difference between shame, which is about the self, and guilt, which is about the behavior: guilt tends to produce repair and shame tends to produce concealment, since a global verdict on a person offers nothing to act on. The practical consequence is that the more ashamed you feel about having lied, the more likely you are to lie again to cover it. Working on the shame is not a way of letting yourself off. It is a condition of being able to tell the truth. The How to Deal With Shame worksheet works on that layer directly.
Lying escalates, and there is some evidence about why. Neil Garrett and colleagues reported in Nature Neuroscience in 2016 that when people had repeated opportunities to be dishonest for their own benefit, their dishonesty grew over the session, and the amygdala response associated with each dishonest act diminished as it repeated. The behavioral version is familiar: the first lie is uncomfortable, the fifth is routine, and the scale drifts upward. There is also an administrative problem. Every lie has to be remembered and defended, so it spawns smaller lies to stay consistent, and the cost of coming clean rises with every week it stays in place.
Not all of this is the same phenomenon. Everyday lying is near-universal and mostly minor. Habitual lying is a default strategy rather than a choice made case by case, and it is often learned somewhere that honesty was punished, which is why it shows up so frequently in people who grew up walking on eggshells. Drew Curtis and Christian Hart have argued since 2020 that pathological lying is a distinct pattern worth recognizing: pervasive, long-running, often without clear external benefit, and causing real distress or impairment to the person doing it as well as to the people around them. Lying is also a feature of other difficulties, including addiction, gambling and eating problems, where the lies protect the behavior rather than the self-image. The Pathological Liar Test screen is a starting point for reflection, not a diagnosis.
The practice itself is small and repetitive. Start by catching the urge rather than the lie: there is usually a recognizable half-second where the easy answer is forming, often with a flush of heat or a tightening somewhere. Pause there and name silently what the lie would protect. Then try the smaller true statement instead of either the lie or the full confession, because most people fail at honesty by treating it as all-or-nothing. I do not want to talk about that is true. I made a mistake and I am fixing it is true. I am not ready to explain it yet is true. A short true answer is almost always available, and it is what builds the habit.
Then there is repair, which is a separate skill from honesty. The script is shorter than people expect: name what you lied about plainly, say what was true, say why without turning the explanation into a case for the defense, and say what you are doing differently. Leave out the part where you ask to be forgiven right away, because that puts the other person in charge of managing your discomfort about something you did. Trust is rebuilt by consistency over time rather than by the quality of the apology, so expect to be checked on and treat that as reasonable rather than insulting. Rebuilding Trust Worksheet is built for that process, and I-Statements Worksheet helps keep the conversation out of blame.
Two more things. Tell one person what you are working on, because a habit maintained in private is almost impossible to interrupt and the telling itself is a small act of honesty. And know when this is bigger than a worksheet. If the lying is pervasive, if it continues when there is nothing to gain, if it is protecting an addiction, or if it has already cost you relationships or work, that belongs with a licensed therapist, who can look at what the lies have been doing without the shame reaction that makes you edit the story. Lying to yourself about the extent of it is the most common obstacle. The sheet below is our own design, informed by the research above.
References
- DePaulo BM, Kashy DA, Kirkendol SE, Wyer MM, Epstein JA. Lying in everyday life. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 1996;70(5):979-995. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.70.5.979
- Serota KB, Levine TR, Boster FJ. The prevalence of lying in America: three studies of self-reported lies. Human Communication Research. 2010;36(1):2-25. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2958.2009.01366.x
- Levine EE, Schweitzer ME. Are liars ethical? On the tension between benevolence and honesty. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. 2014;53:107-117. doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2014.03.005
- Garrett N, Lazzaro SC, Ariely D, Sharot T. The brain adapts to dishonesty. Nature Neuroscience. 2016;19(12):1727-1732. doi:10.1038/nn.4426
- Curtis DA, Hart CL. Pathological lying: theoretical and empirical support for a diagnostic entity. Psychiatric Research and Clinical Practice. 2020;2(2):62-69. doi:10.1176/appi.prcp.20190046
- Hart CL, Curtis DA. Big Liars: What Psychological Science Tells Us About Lying and How You Can Avoid Being Duped. American Psychological Association; 2023.
- Tangney JP, Dearing RL. Shame and Guilt. Guilford Press; 2002.
Cite this source
Psychology.com. (2026, November 6). How to Stop Lying. Psychology.com. https://psychology.com/tools/how-to-stop-lying
How to Stop Lying FAQ
Why do I lie when there is no reason to?
Lies that look pointless from the outside are usually doing something that is hard to see: smoothing a moment, holding an image together, or avoiding a flicker of exposure that lasts half a second. For people who learned early that honesty brought trouble, lying also becomes the default rather than a decision, which is why it fires on questions where the truth would cost nothing. There is also drift. Neil Garrett and colleagues found that dishonesty escalated with repetition while the brain's response to each act diminished, so lies that start as useful become automatic. The pause in the worksheet is aimed at exactly that automatic moment.
How do I stop lying to my partner?
Start with the lies you are currently maintaining rather than the ones in the past, because an active lie generates new ones every week to stay consistent. Choose one, repair it plainly, and expect the conversation to be bad before it gets better. Then make the daily practice small: catch the urge, say the shortest true thing available, and tolerate the discomfort instead of smoothing it. Trust comes back through consistency over months rather than through the quality of an apology, so accept being checked on without treating it as an insult. If the lies concern money, drinking or another person, this usually needs a therapist involved.
What is compulsive or pathological lying?
Drew Curtis and Christian Hart have argued since 2020 that pathological lying is a recognizable pattern rather than just a lot of ordinary lying: pervasive and long-running, often with no clear benefit to the person telling the lies, and causing genuine distress or impairment to them as well as to others. It is not currently a standalone diagnosis in the main classification systems. Habitual lying is more common and sits lower on the same spectrum, where lying has become the default response rather than a weighed decision. Either way the useful question is what the lies are protecting, which is something a therapist can work on without the shame that makes self-assessment unreliable.
How do I stop lying to myself?
Self-deception is harder to catch than lying to other people, because there is nobody present to notice the gap. The most reliable method is to make the claim checkable: write down what you believe about the situation, then write what someone with access to your calendar, your bank statements or your messages would say. The gap between those two is the material. Specific numbers and dates work better than impressions, which is why the first section of the worksheet asks for actual examples. Where self-deception is protecting drinking, spending, gambling or an affair, outside help is not optional, since the thing being protected is also the thing editing the account.
Should I confess every lie I have ever told?
No, and treating confession as the goal often does more damage than good. The test is whether the other person needs the information to make decisions about their own life, which includes anything about money, health, fidelity or something they are currently relying on. Dumping a complete history of small lies is usually about relieving your own discomfort, and it transfers the weight onto someone who did not ask for it. Repair the lies that are still operating, change the behavior, and take the rest to a therapist or someone neutral. What rebuilds trust is a run of months where nothing new surfaces.
Does feeling guilty about lying help me stop?
Guilt helps and shame usually does not, which is a distinction worth holding onto. June Tangney and Ronda Dearing documented that guilt, which is about the behavior, tends to produce repair and changed conduct, while shame, which is a verdict on the self, tends to produce concealment and defensiveness. That means the more ashamed you feel about having lied, the more likely the next lie becomes, because concealment is the natural exit from shame. Aiming for guilt rather than shame sounds like a word game and is not: it means describing what you did rather than what you are, which keeps a next action available.
Is anything I type on this worksheet saved?
No. Everything you type stays in your browser. Nothing is uploaded to us, nothing is stored on our side, and the PDF is generated on your own device, so the only copy is the one you save or print. That matters a great deal here, because the first section asks you to write down specific lies and who you told them to. It also means closing the tab deletes your entries, so download the PDF only if you are sure where it will sit, and consider leaving it undownloaded if other people use your device.