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Being able to view things with a sense of perspective is an important and invaluable capacity. It can help to generate empathy, engender a sense of gratitude or self-confidence, reduce stress and anxiety, and can make seemingly insurmountable obstacles feel less daunting. But it can also have a dark side. Like all skills and tools it can be used to create problems rather than solve them.
Placing our own struggles in context with similar struggles faced by others can not only enable us discover other potential methods or outcomes we might find useful but it can also help us to avoid falling into the trap of feeling hyperbolic amounts of martyrdom over our lot in life. Being told there were starving children in Africa might not have always made us more eager to finish all the food on our plates but it did plant the seed of a notion there were other people in the world who faced more grave difficulties.
We are always most aware of our own challenges, it is a natural result of the fact we lively solely inside the confines of our own skulls. And depending on our emotional state, level of energy, sense of confidence or experience, or access to resources our perception of those personal challenges can sometimes all too easily get off kilter…