“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.
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.
It still doesn’t work as advice for everyone, because some people have chemical imbalances that keep it from working no matter how long they try. For them, it won’t actually change how they think or feel, it is just practice for pretending it worked.
It can work for most people whole still being bad advice for some people. Heck, I have given up on trying to remember people’s names when I first meet them because decades of trying didn’t work since ADHD is a disorder. I’m acknowledging my limitations.