This advice isn’t for you

Place windows on the south side of your home to let in the maximum amount of light! Except if you live in a hot climate, in which case, don’t. Or if you live in the southern hemisphere, where the north side is the bright side. (Image by Shutterly Fabulous)

Or maybe it is. How can you know for sure?

Increasingly, I’m noticing that a key role that I have in my clients’ lives is to be a filter.

Based on knowing them, their strengths, and their desired outcomes, I’m helping them to figure out which voices to listen to, what frameworks apply to them, and which advice to take.

Nowadays, so much advice is circumstantial, and often a reaction to previous advice that we, as a culture, have accepted as truth. If you are missing that context, you could end up adopting advice that is the exact opposite of helpful for you — and feeling inadequate because you can’t figure out why it’s not working for you.

Let’s take, for example, that classic aphorism: “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” Thanks, Benjamin Franklin! This advice works well for me, predisposed to be an early riser during this phase of my life.

But what about if you have a mental illness, physical disability, irregular biological clock, or job as a night nurse? If the advice is simply inapplicable to you, you will dismiss it without a second thought. But if the advice pokes at your insecurity about not being able to get yourself out of bed when you’re feeling awful — or even if you just happen to be a seventeen-year-old whose circadian rhythms have shifted later due to adolescence — this supposed wisdom does not serve you. It might even harm you, causing you to lose out on sleep because you try to do the “early to rise” part without being early to bed, or compounding feelings of failure and reinforcing your self-concept as a lazy layabout.

If that sounds silly, consider what this type of advice is meant to do in the first place. Presumably, Mr. Franklin was seeking to motivate and inspire a sense of industry and productivity that would, over time, lead to the promised end result (healthy, wealthy, and wise). Or maybe he was just trying to make it easier to sell an early bedtime to generations of children.

Therefore, for the advice to be considered successful and useful, it ought to make a person feel good and motivate them it when they hear it, follow it, or engage with it in any way. It should inspire them to adopt or continue these supposedly helpful sleep habits. If it doesn’t do that — if it makes a person feel hopeless and worthless — it’s not the right advice for them (or at least, it’s not the right time).

My Ben Franklin example — a line that some guy wrote almost 300 years ago making a modern-day person fall to pieces — might seem extreme, but many of us do get hung up on things that we think we’re supposed to be doing based on what “everyone” says. How many Americans have ended up in financial ruin after financing a college education and/or a home they couldn’t afford? How many mothers have been shamed for not breastfeeding their babies — or for breastfeeding them for too long?

What do we know about what someone else needs or should do? I can’t say what’s right for anyone else, but obviously I keep saying stuff every day over here. That’s because I feel strongly that so much of what we take to be objectively true is not, and I want to speak up when I see that gap.

But if what I share makes you feel bad — not in the “I’m being confronted with a new idea and it’s uncomfortable,” kind of way, but in the “This is making me lose faith in myself and in humanity,” kind of way, skip it. That’s not my intent, and my advice or ideas must not be for you.

On the other hand, if I can help you to feel better about yourself and make your dreams seem more achievable, good. That’s what I’m here for. Hopefully, not to distort reality, but to illuminate new ways of looking at it.