When You Fail to Follow Your Own Advice

I’ve written for this blog for a few years, and in that time, I’ve given a lot of advice for what I think are good strategies for keeping one’s anxiety under control. For that reason, It would be easy for anyone reading this to label me an “expert,” even though I don’t have the academic credentials to be labeled as such.

Even setting that aside, I hesitate to call myself an “expert” for a much simpler reason: a lot of the advice I’ve given in the past I have trouble doing myself. It isn’t that I don’t try – I always do try to stick to my own advice and beliefs – but I fail a lot more than I’d like to admit.

How I’ve Failed to Follow My Own Advice

What made me want to write this came from my reflections on my recent eating habits. In the past, I’ve posted about how to control stress eating, and recently, for whatever reason, I’ve succumbed to that a lot. For instance, I keep eating a lot of candy late at night after I’ve decided to stop eating for the day. It’s been very hard for me to stop myself from doing that.

It makes me feel like a hypocrite. Like, what business do I have giving anyone advice, especially on a subject as heavy as mental health, if I am unable to stick to my own advice?

How to Come to Terms with Failure to Follow Your Own Advice

I try to tell myself that being a human being is much different than being a machine. What I mean is this: if a machine malfunctions, you find what causes the malfunction, fix it, and that’s it. It’s a simple process. The human brain, despite being told again and again that it’s like a machine or a computer, is nowhere near that simple. Very rarely are there simple solutions, and the problems the human brain must come to terms with are infinitely more complex.

Improving one’s mental health is not a straight A to B process. You may have a solution, but that doesn’t mean that your problems will magically disappear overnight. You’re going to relapse, and that’s okay. As basic as this may sound, having a plan in place and giving it your all to try and put it into practice is the best plan.