3 Things Quick Fix Advice Forgets
Having spent three decades in mental health, working with complex trauma and chronic mental illness, I can understand why practitioners and individuals alike become frustrated with the 5 step fixes and 10 breathing exercises type of of material, often portrayed as solutions to mental health problems.
It’s not necessarily because the information or guidance is wrong. It’s likely that it is coming from a place of wanting to offer some helpful support. But the reductionism of complex situations, and sometimes the unintended inferred minimisation of something serious, is what I think inspires reactivity.
Yet, there is a huge market and strong engagement with this kind of advice. Perhaps we need to be asking, why are people seeking quick advice for complex problems?
Our world is full of influence and attention. Either people trying to create it or trying to seek it. Never before have we had so much thrown at us throughout the day, everywhere we go, in everything that we do. You pull up at the traffic lights, there’s a car with an advert on it. You attend the doctors, there’s a TV screen of advise. You open any page online, there’s an activating hook. Even our posts on social media can be seen as adverts of who we are and what we’re offering. It’s relentless.
Saturation can lead to avoidance. If our brains are dealing with too much, our cognitive and emotional bandwidth is stretched beyond capacity. We then can naturally incline towards seemingly simple, quick, easy fixes. This can help us feel like we’re at least doing something, boost our confidence, and maybe distract us slightly from the feeling of not being good enough.
It’s not that a breathing exercise can’t help in calming you. It’s not that it can’t support regulation. It’s being able to finesse those moments where you require more than a breath. Sometimes it’s a readjustment of the internal narrative that’s needed. Offering yourself some compassion for what you’ve been through. Some tempering of frustration that could affect you or others adversely. At times, it’s about talking the issue through.
Knowing when to access and use these higher-level emotional skills require a certain amount of energy. Sometimes the breath can be the shortcut to them. Sometimes we need to spend a bit more time and work through things for more than just one breath.
Our work in the health industry is in helping people understand why they’re at saturation point and looking at what they can do about that attention fatigue. Why they seek simplicity. Is it because they’re avoiding dealing with bigger issues because they feel overwhelming? Is there too much going on in the world around them? Is it that they’ve been fighting something for years and don’t feel like they’ve been getting anywhere?
I don’t think we need to do away with the 7 Steps to Success. There will always be a place for it, and it will have relevance for some people at certain times. But what we might consider promoting more is a willingness to embrace and support the complexity that shapes and affects our mental health and wellbeing.
Is our “super-power” helping people learn how to ask more questions? Could more considered reflection be the antidote to the quick-fix, easily consumed information?
Guiding people to develop their ability to know who they are, understand what has influenced them, and see how this shows up in their inner world and relationships can encourage the confidence to discern and choose whether something is a fit or not. This has very much been at the root of my work in creating and writing The Adaptable Sustainable Psychology collection.
A series of four interactive, psychology-based self-help books, designed for professionals and clients, to explore ways that help illuminate who we are, and guide us into compassionately acknowledging our own tendencies, with a view to helping us cut through the simplicity that can distract from the underlying issues requiring support.
Maybe it’s not just about making our information consumable, but standing behind the complexity and advocating for it, alongside providing the tools to work with it.
The answer depends on the question being asked. If we can help people evolve what they’re asking, we might see some interesting shifts.
So, what are the 3 things that quick fix advice forgets?
1.) You’re unique. How you move through the world, your experiences, and your personality can all impact how advice works or doesn’t work for you.
2.) Not every situation requires the same response. Sometimes part of supporting our mental health is working out what the tool is for now, and what tactic to leave for another day.
3.) You know yourself better than anyone. Building trust in your intuition, refining the knowledge you have about yourself, and believing in your own capacity to find ways to cope can support your mental wellbeing over time.