Why don’t we take our own advice?
Oliver Burkeman
“Why is it so hard to take your own advice?” the psychology
writer Melissa Dahl asked in a New York magazine essay
some months ago, and the question’s been bugging me
ever since. I have the arrogance to imagine that if you
followed some of the suggestions made each week in
this column, you might be a little happier or more
productive, with a little less relationship drama, a little
more inner calm. (From my email inbox, I know this
happens at least occasionally.) But were you to infer from
this that I follow such advice flawlessly myself, you’d be
mistaken. When friends mention their difficulties with
partners or bosses, Dahl wrote, she always tells them to
talk to the person involved. Just say something! “And
probably, this is good advice,” she mused. “I wouldn’t
know, as it’s something I rarely do myself.” I can
understand. I suspect most of us can. As the old wisecrack
has it: “Take my advice – I’m not using it.”
The cynical take on this is that we ignore our own advice
because it’s rubbish: we give it to seem wise, when in
fact it’s nonsense. (All advice to “try harder” or “snap out
of it” or “look on the bright side” fall into this category: if
the recipient could do so, he or she already would have,
without your so-called help.)
But a more interesting notion is that the advice is often
good – yet something prevents us applying it to ourselves.
One such obstacle is simply too much information: inside
our own heads, we have access to all manner of details,
making us believe that this relationship problem, this job
dilemma, is special, so the advice doesn’t apply. Dahl
cites work by the psychologist Dan Ariely, showing that
when a friend gets a serious medical diagnosis, most
people would urge them to get a second opinion. But
were it to happen to themselves, they’d be more likely
not to do so, for fear of offending their doctor. The fear of
offence is something you’d think of only in your own case
– and it’s totally unhelpful.
But there’s another big reason I don’t follow my own advice:
the huge gulf between grasping something intellectually
and really feeling it in your bones. For example, it was
years ago that I first encountered the insight that anxiety
and insecurity aren’t reduced by trying to exert more
control over the world; in fact, that usually makes them
worse. I know this. But apparently I have to keep learning
it, over and over. Its correctness isn’t sufficient for it to get
into my brain once and for all; that takes repeated
experience. As a result, I continue to “suddenly realise”
things I already wrote an entire book about.
If nothing else, this should be a caution against getting
too frustrated with that one friend of yours who keeps
getting into the same kind of pickle, time and again, deaf
to the obviously good advice that everyone keeps offering.
You know the type. We’ve all got a friend like that. The scary thought is that, for some of your friends, it’s probably
you.
Adapted from http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/sep/11/
taking-your-own-advice-oliver-burkeman. Accessed on: 22 out. 2015.
Glossary
advice: conselho; to bug: incomodar; to infer: concluir;
flawlessly: perfeitamente; to muse: meditar; wisecrack:
espertinho; cynical: cínico, pessimista; rubbish:
besteira; to urge: insistir; gulf: distância; exert: exercer;
pickle: encrenca
In the second paragraph, in the sentence “we give it
to seem wise, when in fact it's nonsense", the conjunction
“
when" introduces an idea of
