It's often challenging to change your habits. Even if you want to. One of the reasons why it's hard to be your own adviser is because you're too close to your own problems, and so your emotions are more likely to cloud your judgement.
So getting help from outsiders helps—it's actually much easier to identify the most rational option when you've got an outsider's vantage point. "When we are in a particular situation, we take lots of irrelevant factors into account," behavioral economist and best-selling author Dan Ariely told The Cut. "But when we’re external to it, we sometimes look at things more objectively."
Imagine, Ariely asked the participants of one of his studies, that your regular doctor has given you some serious diagnosis. Would you ask for a referral so you can get a second opinion? Most people, he discovered, say no — they don't want to offend their doctor, even if the health stakes at hand are high.
"But if we ask them if they would tell somebody else to go for a second opinion, they say, Of course, yes," Ariely continued, adding that the insight is applicable in a wide range of situations.
"When you're in love, you can't imagine the situation will ever change. So you keep on thinking to yourself, I will always feel this way," he explained.
"But when somebody else sees you from the outside, they can say, This is right, or This is wrong, or Don't do it, because they're not infatuated. They can see things from a more objective way."
The truth is that when we think about other people, and what might be right for them, it's a lot easier to see them as the big picture. And it's much harder to apply that big-picture perspective to ourselves.
It's a consequence of something psychologists call the fundamental attribution error; the idea that people explain their own actions by the circumstances, but judge others' behavior as clear signals of their character flaws.
So next time you're typing some advice on Twitter, pay closer attention to your own words. There's a good chance you're actually saying something you need to hear as well.
