“So just do it” is a glaring one for me.
Simply because it is disregarding someone else’s thought processes and how their mind works. Where simply ‘just do it’ is not as easily and readily accomplished. This kind of advice is always uttered when one person is going on about how they’re tired of something and want to do something else. So this gets mentioned.
It could be a lot of reasons as to why, even if it is down to the obvious reasons. My valid reason a lot of the time is that I just don’t have the energy or will to just magically get myself to do something.
“It is what it is”
I respectfully disagree. there are things out of your control you must accept. if you do not, it will only stress your mind and body out.
focus on the things that you can, like keeping your family intact and having a good support group. good luck!
Don’t get mad! It doesn’t help anything.
Me - “Doctor, it hurts when I do X.” X is a perfectly normal activity like walking, raising arm over head, etc
Doctor - “Then maybe you shouldn’t do X?”
Did you get your doctor on Stackoverflow?
S/He’s right though?
“S/He’s” takes 8 button presses to type on my keyboard. “They’re” takes 7.
Why did you decide not to use the formal term for a person of unknown gender in the third person? Why did you put in the extra effort to be less formal?
Yes, obviously I should not have walked as that was causing pain in my hip, like something scraping…
“Choose to be happy” This is advice I’ve heard from people on Reddit who have overcome their depression and say it’s a choice. No, Happy, it is not.
“I was lucky and my brain chemistry corrected itself, so all you need to do is stop being unlucky and be lucky like me!”
While we’re at it, if you can’t reach the top shelf, just grow taller. That’s what I did.
There’s a major push coming to ban depression meds. I had long, drawn-out conversations with people who genuinely think exercise will fix things.
Yeah, for people without clinical depression, maybe.
I loved the thanksimcured subreddit because they just mock this kind of thing.
Depression is a recurring thing, it comes back at anytime and it will level you when it does. What people who ever claim to have “defeated” depression or “overcome it” are simply confusing depression with general sadness. General sadness can easily be overcome because it isn’t as much of a weight on you as depression is.
But then you say something like that and some asshole comes right up to you saying shit like “now you’re just gatekeeping what a mental illness is!”.
Fucking Reddit dumbasses are a piece of work.
Maybe a bit of a stretch, but I try my best to interpret things in the best possible way (sometimes to the point of naivety). In a way, I think of it as “choosing to be happy”, in the sense that if someone says or does something that could upset me, I try to look for a way to interpret their actions as something that doesn’t upset me.
Of course, this doesn’t always apply, but I’ve experienced that it makes life a lot better. A lot of unpleasant things can be attributed to mistakes or misunderstandings, which are a lot easier to not get upset about than people being intentionally mean.
The only actual advice I can think of that relates is refusing to be involved with people who make you unhappy (which I realize so much of requires choice and resources to island yourself off in this way).
Its still something to keep in mind, if you can insulate yourself from people you’ve noticr make you unhappy and overstimulated, that is a very different state of being even saying nothing about whatever “happiness” is.
If I had to choose between happiness or freedom from pain, I would choose the latter every time. Happiness can be stumbled upon or negotiated or gradually arriver at, pain needs to be alleviated or it cancels out everything else
I try really hard to not downplay the environmental effects that played into my depression journey when I give advice for this exact reason. You’re right, it’s not easy to fundamentally change the way you think to such a degree that your hormones change. It’s possible though. But it’s probably gonna need a disruption in your environment that you may or may not be able to facilitate. I got lucky, and my disruption happened to me so my journey was helped a lot
Tell someone “don’t get upset” and they’re gonna lose their shit
Tell them “don’t panic” and they’ll listen most of the time.
“Promise me you won’t be upset.”
I am not promising shit until you tell me what we’re talking about. In fact, you just got me upset.
However, “don’t panic” wouldn’t get a better reaction from me. If you want me to not panic, tell me you’ve already dealt with it and there’s nothing for me to do, or at the very least describe your plan. I’ll decide whether panic is warranted after I hear your solution.
Another bad one:
“We need to talk when you get here.”
If we’re not going to talk about it now, why not wait to bring it up until I’m there?
It’s those times where I shorten my response to something like “thanks I’ll keep that in mind” or “I appreciate you trying to help” and then brush it off/not follow that advice, because it usually comes from people who at least sort of care but have no idea what to say or how to fix the situation.
If someone genuinely wants to invest in helping your situation they’ll ask and be open. For me most of the time my answer is “you being there is enough” and when I tell them I don’t expect them to have answers to my problems they relax too.
If it’s randos trying to be argumentative or dismissive then they can go sit naked on a cactus. /tangent
TL;DR: You’re right, but it’s an onslaught and you deserve peace of mind. You aren’t obligated to defend yourself to them.
Just get over it!
Move on!Because both pieces of advice are intended to play out on the advisor’s terms!
So if you were to follow their advice with, “Cool. Get the fuck out of my life!”, they’ll be, “No! NoT tHaT wAy!!!”“Don’t worry, everything happens for a reason.”
That “reason” could be shitty decisions, power beyond your control, or sheer bad luck. But we all know it’s just thinly-veiled religious indoctrination.
It also tries to remove accountability from people who really do not care to pay attention to what they’re doing. They’ll be in shit and they’ll think “ahh this is what God might have had planned for me” and instead of trying to fight to survive, they just succumb to it with that belief.
Religion is just bad to believe in.
The one that’s even worse is “God never gives you more than you can handle.” Tell that to a bajillion dead people.
Go to bed early so you can get a good night’s sleep. I have heard this so many times, and I’m convinced it was the cause of many sleepless nights. It’s probably great advice for people with a normal circadian rhythm, but it’s useless for those with a non-standard chronotype. That shit is baked into your DNA, and medicine currently has no idea how to change it. Especially since it’s so much easier just to blame the night owl.
Lord, how I couldn’t agree more. There are so many conflicting studies about how humans sleep because there’s a fuckin lot of us and we each sleep a bit different. I, for example, can take a 30 minute nap and hit one REM cycle and then go at 100% for 4 hours. My partner needs to hit at least 3 REM cycles across 9 hours in order to feel okay for even one second of their day.
A regular sleep rhythm makes all the difference. Doesn’t matter when you go to bed as long as it’s around the same time.
Morning people are in a fucking religious cult. They believe anyone who doesn’t want to wake up as early as them is defective.
My old boss used to say: “there is never a good time. Do it anyway”
This was often about taking your holidays, visiting your parents, testing a theory, building a PoC, etc. Analysis paralysis kills success.
this is amazing advice, your old boss was right
“Calm down” when I am in rage. Works 100% of never.
“Just be yourself” without clarification.
There’s something to it, but too often it is interpreted as “no need for introspection or improvement”
IDK, I think “just do it” is actually pretty reasonable advice, for the most part.
Obviously, it depends — everything depends — but I feel like it applies to many aspects of life.
Sometimes you’re scared or anxious about something needlessly, and it really is best to just go for it and figure it out later, no matter how much your brain tells you it’s terrible and not worth it.
As someone who struggles with anxiety paralysis on certain tasks, “just do it” is extremely helpful.
THANK YOU!!! I replied to someone that replied to my comment trying to explain exactly that…
it’s good advice, until someone’s asking “how?” then saying “you just do it” becomes useless as tits on a tomcat. cause I DON"T FUCKIGN KNOW WHAT “IT” YOU"RE REFERRING TO! THAT"S WHY I ASKED
All advice is good advice in a certain situation. “Trust your gut”/“be skeptical”, “be careful”/“go for it!” all of these can be good or terrible advice for different people at different times.
The problem with “just do it” is it’s often literally the first thing that everyone tries. If I want to do my homework or cook a healthy meal, it’d be pretty weird if I started off by trying to not do it. So, often when it’s given as advice it feels very insulting, because it feels like your being literally told “have you considered doing the thing your trying to do?”
It can be shorthand for much better advice - “don’t think about the consequences or costs, just focus on this moment and the first step you need to take” or whatever, but when delivered to someone who is literally struggling to do something it often adds nothing. “be careful” is good advice if someone’s carelessly approaching a dangerous, delicate task, but is shitty, vacuous advice if someone is already being very careful. So telling someone to “just do it” suggests you think that they weren’t previously attempting to do it, and that can give offense.
Yeah this thread just feels like an axe grinding session where people are taking a situation where someone gave them advice that maybe wasn’t applicable or good in that context and now they think it’s just useless at all times. That’s fine I get it vent away, but yeah lol
For me as someone with ADHD and Autism i could list so many. But the most useless defenetly are:
“Just use a planner”
“You can learn to reign it in, others have learned to do so too!”
“Dont throw such a fit over something that small! I only changed your routine/moved around your entire order”
“You just need to focus more!”
“Pull yourself up by the bootstraps!”
In the replies there willl be a lot of examples of advice that actually does work forna lot of people, but not everyone. They are valid examples of bad advice at the personal level because it doesn’t work for them, but the advice itself is not bad advice in general. A lot of people do hold themselves back by not trying or do wallow in self pity (not clinically depressed) and most people can overcome those thing by just doing something, but not everyone can.
Like I have ADHD and I have tried enough memory tricks and failed at them to know adding more things to remember is counter prodictive for me, and that scheduling tasks only works up to a certain number of tasks in a time frame before being overwhelmed.
But there is one piece of advice that is actually the opposite of what the saying literally means and where the phrase came from. “Pulling yourself up by the bootstraps” was an example of doing something that is literally impossible. It was used as an example of how impossible the thing that was being asked of people was. Now it is twisted to mean that success is possible if you try hard enough, which is the opposite of what it means. It is literally the worst advice because it is saying "do the literal impossible thing’. .
Thank you.
Like “choose to be happy” isn’t a magical mantra but something you need to work on in order to change the way you reflexively think.
“Be yourself” is essential advice for people trying to have a mask on 24/7.
And I’ve mostly given up replying to such threads because they’re usually an excuse to wallow and complain that they’ve tried everything.
I don’t have a magic potion that makes things better overnight, but I do have techniques that I have found valuable in improving my own mental health, but by bit, over several years.
