I've always noticed that when I'm giving advice to someone or trying to help out, it always feels their problem is easier than whatever problem I have. As someone with some anxiety around things like calling some company to get something done or asking a random stranger for some help in a store, I would gladly do it if it was to help someone else (family member or friend). But when it's for me I find it harder.
I wonder how much psychologically we can be more confident and less anxious when we're doing something for others vs ourselves..
People in the ADHD community are outspoken about a tangential concept: cleaning. Cleaning your friends place is a fun, novel, non-emotional activity. Cleaning your own space is a mental slog, boring and often painful due to having to rid yourself of mementos.
In that case, my theory is that you get to shed your learned helplessness about how things look. I suspect it’s similar with giving advice.
This is ozempic territory: a technical solution to your own shortcomings is most effective.
I have solved all my issues with doing house chores with wireless headphones, tablet, and youtube @ 2x speed. Sure, it means that I can't load my dishwasher until I find something half-decent to listen/watch but once I do find it, I have 10-50 minutes of just pure closing. Dishwasher loaded, countertops empty, new load of laundry, dry clothes in the closet, gym bag packed, trash taken out. Frankly, kinda enjoy it now.
This is me. Finally buying some bluetooth headphones 15 years ago changed my life. I finally became a person who cooks every meal, cleans everything, does chores, and exercises daily, even pushes around the house.
I like listening to debates since they are the most stimulating. So long as I can find a good one, I’m about to make dinner and unload the dishwasher.
An audiobook that’s good enough can be so captivating that I run out of things to do while listening to it.
I have pretty extreme adhd which might be related. But I’m just glad I bought those headphones back then.
"other people's same problem easier" i see, but have never seen messiness as example at least in communities w adhd comorbid with depression. personally the concept of other people cleaning my private mess, even/especially if they are close family/friends is terrifying and already overloads my head and i can only project the same sentiment (and some extrapolation of my own experience helping friends/family with cleaning... it is super hard, we are talking about intruding on what the person values as trash or not trash, and that itself can be a source of great shame i.e. my mother who lived to much worse abject poverty than the children she helped raise with a better life. sorry for being dramatic about an otherwise straightforward point but yes in my experience that "cold" reduction of the problem into something actionable would be key, though people arrive there differently i noticed, e.g. me and my "armchair courage" that any unseen sideeffect is not my problem, for my mom (okay sometimes for me as well) it is about being able to forget that she has problems just by the appearance of having the luxury to give advice
A line I always remember (from Babylon 5) is: "When I clean my place, all I've done is clean my place. But when I help you clean your place, I'm _helping you_."
tl;dr you should ask your badass partner for strategic help when the entire galaxy is under threat, even if she seems busy.
Reverend Will Dexter: "You know before I got married Emily he
used to come by sometime to help me
clean out my apartment well I asked her
how come here so he could help clean up
my place when your place is just as bad
she said because cleaning up your place
helps me to forget what a mess I made a
mind and when I sweep my floor all I've
done is sweep my floor but when I help
you clean up your place I am helping you."
My girlfriend and I both have ADHD and are medicated. I will run laps around her tidying up her place, but struggle at my own place.. its so hard to understand
What's the opposite? Where solving your problems is easy and but solving your friend's problems are very difficult because your advice are never relevant?
This is something I've noticed as well. I've talked about this with my psychiatrist and she calls this brave, reassured version of ourself the "me-mentor" (jag-mentor in Swedish). Similar to our inner child, this is a core part of our who we are.
The idea, if I understood correctly, is to build this me-mentor more and let it help us feel more safe. Let it support our insecure parts/personas.
Somewhat related, a psychologist I talked to in the 2000s said she really liked the Patronus concept in the Harry Potter books. You imagine an entity that's fueled by your positive memories and emotions, and that protects you from certain anxieties and other stressors.
Things like that seem to be used in at least some schools of psychology.
It reminds me on something my psychologist told me, when trying to find this me-mentor, it can help to take inspiration from someone I find really safe with and trust a lot. Aka someone I have good memories with / of.
When trying to examine someone else's problems, you can see the problem itself. But what you aren't seeing is a pile of all the little habits, beliefs, behaviors, impulses and assorted mind defects that prevented them from solving it in the first place.
It takes intimate familiarity to know all of those things about someone.
If you were in their shoes, the problem might genuinely be trivial, for you. Because you're not that person, and that problem isn't your own failure mode - you would instead fail at a different "trivial" problem and in an entirely different way.
Or maybe you are flawed in the same way, but don't know it yet. You never quite know. Humans aren't any good at that whole "self-awareness" thing.
> When trying to examine someone else's problems, you can see the problem itself. But what you aren't seeing is a pile of all the little habits, beliefs, behaviors, impulses and assorted mind defects that prevented them from solving it in the first place.
This is accurate. The roadblocks to solving their problem are often several small things completely unrelated to the problem itself.
The opposite conclusion is that you are more risk-taking when it comes to dictating the actions of others, because neither their gains nor their losses directly accrue to you. But human beings feel loss aversion more keenly than they desire gain, so this biases the advice you would give others (but not yourself) riskier in general.
I think this is exactly it. It's easy to see that there's a chance to improve things while ignoring the ways it could make things worse when they won't affect you.
Should you quit the job you don't like? "Of course" the friend will say. But then you might just end up with a job you hate more that pays less, or even no job.
Whether the outside perspective is helpful probably depends on how much your own perception deviates from reality. Though people do have a tendency to prefer the status quo until things change, so maybe you should always prefer the "change" option when you aren't sure.
This phenomenon is called "Solomon’s Paradox" - People think more clearly about other people’s problems than their own. When facing their own issues, they reason less rationally.
Yet, a study from 2014 showed that seeing your own problem from an outsider view removes the gap between how wisely you think about yourself and how wisely you think about others.
I imagine it has to do with vulnerability. When you are asking for something or sharing something, being turned down feels personal. When doing it for someone else, it's no big deal if they say no.
> I've always noticed that when I'm giving advice to someone or trying to help out, it always feels their problem is easier than whatever problem I have.
One mundane reason is that you've probably already solved that problem for yourself.
Almost by definition, the big problems we have are in areas where we're less competent than others.
When someone asks for advice, I often find if I pay deep attention, that advice is aimed at myself as well. Listen to the advice you give, because often times, the advice giver should follow it as well.
Probably because our desire to help and not let down a person we care about gives us courage. That courage serves as motivation to go outside our comfort zone.
The problem with your problem is you have a desired outcome.
And the other is you are not required to do the heavy lifting.
One method is to find a way to bless "future me". Future me will thank current me sometime in the future and while current me won't enjoy future me's rewards directly, he will think kindly, instead of with contempt.
It's something I've been wondering about for a long long time. Thanks for bringing up the question. Sometimes my problem-of-the-day is not even that hard but I have near zero drive to finish it, but if anybody comes with an issue, I then feel motivated (up until I realize his/her issue was hard I guess).
I see three dimensions:
- natural pleasure of helping someone
- ignorance about the problem, making it seems easier
- a saturation aspect: my problem has probably something i've been dealing with for days, my brain is full of unanswered questions about it and has no more "space" for it
>I wonder how much psychologically we can be more confident and less anxious when we're doing something for others vs ourselves
Thank you for taking the time to type this up. I would be extremely interested in any sort of research around this and may add( maybe others face the same ) that's incredibly difficult to introspect yourself and solve problems for yourself as easily as you can for others.
This is a fascinating phenomenon, isn't it? I've heard it invoked as "it's always easier to clean someone else's room." And anxiety does seem to be the key. Very often the actual blocker isn't the difficulty of a task, but how we relate to it.
I find the same thing between doing something entrepreneurial vs. doing it for work. If my boss tells me to call a customer, I will have no problem doing it. Calling for my side hustle......way more anxiety.
I'm sure there's a proper name for what you described, but I call it Rip van Winkle syndrome. He helps everyone in the town with their needs, while allowing his own property to fall to ruin.
That's why it's good to have close friends so that we don't have to be perfect ourselves in all respects in our private lives... humans are a political animal after all
Since you asked me, you are using the same concept and now I need to help you solve your problem (which seem to be the one I also have..)
I think the solution must be we're primarily responsible for ourselves, and that unless we ask others for help all the time we need to figure things out. I also lately have been thinking from the perspective of the person I'm anxious to interact with, and feel that they may actually be happy to interact with me, receive some warm greeting and help out by answering my question or doing my task.
If you could do something for others but feel anxious doing it for yourself, it must be "in our head" and logically we should be able to get over that and choose to be brave. I think in really it's often missed how we can be brave doing the action if it was for someone else, and that the bravery may actually already be inside us.
One thing is also ability to have clearer start and end and boundaries, or some sort of mental boxing for the case at hand.
If you're visiting someone else, you arrive, and you leave. The helping them clean part has at least some sort of boundaries. Even if you don't finish, you have helped them along.
When you're at home, even if you start, if you leave it halfway, it will be your problem after you stop. And tomorrow still and so on. So it feels more daunting.
I wonder how much psychologically we can be more confident and less anxious when we're doing something for others vs ourselves..