Why is it easier to see and solve other people’s problems than your own?
You can be the person who gives excellent advice to others, always offers his help, and finds a way out for others, even from the most difficult situations. But such abilities do not guarantee that you can do the same for yourself. As soon as you face the same problems as those you helped, you start making the wrong decisions or doing nothing.
This is a common pattern of behavior. You show your best side by remaining as reasonable and rational as possible when solving other people’s problems. But, finding yourself in the epicenter of events and realizing that you are in a similar situation, you immediately lose the ability to think sensibly.
We have collected several reasons why is it easier to see and solve other people’s problems than your own.
1. You feel useful
When you help someone else with their problems, you feel useful, which you can’t say when you’re busy with your life. The feeling that a person needs you and your support, like a drug, allows you to feel important, raises your self-esteem, forms your positive image in the people around you. That’s why you can so often offer your participation in solving any problems of others.
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2. You are not afraid of negative consequences
Helping someone else, you worry much less about possible negative consequences. You know: in the end, it’s not your problem, and you didn’t have to solve it. You just supported a person, but all the responsibility for the result still lies with him. It is unlikely that he will blame you because something did not work out for you.
Even if you get a reproach in your address, it will not upset you much because the problem itself did not concern you. And this means that in any case, you will continue to live the same way as before, while the person you tried to help will continue to clean up the consequences of wrong actions.
When you solve a problem that has arisen for yourself, your approach changes, you understand: in case of failure, you will have to invest even more time and effort to improve your life. The fear of negative consequences makes you hesitate and sometimes even refuse any active actions.
3. You evaluate the situation from the point of view of logic, not feelings
It is much easier to talk about other people’s problems than to talk about your own. When you need to help another person out of a difficult situation, you keep a cool mind, build a plan of action and soberly assess all its pros and cons. Thus, you go through all possible scenarios and find the optimal solution to the problem.
You react quite differently if a problem occurs in your life. When it comes to you and your well-being, you are overwhelmed by strong emotions, such as fear, aggression, anger, resentment. Under their influence, it is extremely difficult to force yourself to think and act rationally. The situation itself seems to you from a completely different angle, and instead of approaching the problem calmly and judiciously, you do stupid things based on momentary impulses.
Of course, when you help a loved one improve his life, you also experience emotions, for example, sympathy or anger for him, but they are not so strong as to deprive you of the opportunity to think sensibly.
4. You help other people with advice, not actions
Often, other people’s problems can be solved by just offering a person your advice. In many cases, no physical effort is even required from you. You tell other people what to do in a particular situation while not risking anything and not moving from the spot.
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You are unlikely to be able to solve your problems in this way — after all, no one but yourself will spend their resources on correcting your life. You’ll have to get up and get involved in the work; you won’t change anything with smart thoughts alone.
5. You don’t notice your problems
Other people’s problems are usually much more obvious than your own. Moreover, often you don’t even realize that something is going wrong in your life. Of course, until things get too bad or someone from the outside draws your attention to it. You concentrate on what is happening around you, offer other people your help, and at the same time, your life requires direct participation from you.
6. You see other people’s problems without knowing all the nuances
It’s easy to solve other people’s problems when you don’t see the situation from all sides and don’t know all its subtleties. No matter how much you sympathize with a person, you will never be able to understand what he is going through. You are deprived of the opportunity to take his place and assess the situation from his position. That’s why your advice seems so obvious to you, and those who are in the center of situations have mixed feelings.
As soon as they start advising you the same things as you do to other people, you get angry. It seems that your situation is very different from those in which others have been. This is not the case — everyone faces the same problems. They are only perceived differently because of their experiences, character, and circumstances.
7. You evaluate your own and other people’s problems differently
Your problems always seem more significant, serious, and scary than others’. That’s why it’s so much easier for you to help someone else than to take up the adjustment of your own life. You give an easier assessment of the problems of the people around you, believing that they exaggerate too much with the scale of a possible catastrophe. Although the same event, which you did not take seriously according to another person’s stories, can put you into a stupor as soon as its consequences somehow affect you.
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