One of the better-known stories from the Hebrew Bible is the Judgment of Solomon, in which the wise King Solomon was asked to rule on a complicated, emotional matter.
Two women each claimed to be the mother of a child, and Solomon told them, okay, if we can't figure out who the child belongs to, we'll just cut the kid in half and you can each take one of the pieces.
The woman who said, no no, don't do that, this other woman can have the kid, just don't hurt the baby was, in Solomon's judgement, the true mother of the child, because she was willing to give up having the child as long as he wasn't harmed.
Like many stories contained in holy books, this isn't an uncommon parable: versions of it are found in folktales around the world.
And there are many lessons we might take from it, but one of the core messages extracted by the world of psychology is that with distance—at an emotional remove—we can sometimes make smarter, wiser decisions than those directly involved with the issue at hand.
Solomon's Paradox, in the world of psychology, says that we're often capable of seeing things more clearly when we're able to transcend the situation we're assessing.
This is why, research suggests, we're often smarter about other people's relationships—better at giving advice—than we are with our own relationships.
That emotional distance, that psychological remove, grants us additional powers of rationality (and the resultant capacity to come up with good advice for others) that we wouldn't necessarily be able to come up with for ourselves, related to our own relationships.
The same is true of our professional lives, habits and routines, and anything else directly connected to us about which we care deeply.
We're more capable of seeing the important bits and making clean, helpful determinations about all the moving pieces, in other words, when we're not intimiately involved with any of those pieces.
One explanation for why this is the case is predicated on a concept called self-distancing.
In this context, self-distancing means stepping outside oneself, or the space one is analyzing, so that one is no longer directly influenced by the variables shaping that space.
This can allow us to make better decisions because we're no longer focusing on the often emotional ramifications of a decision: we're deciding whether or not it makes logical sense to break up with a partner, let's say, or to quit a job, despite all the psychological complexities involved in making those kinds of lifestyle-defining decisions.
Studies have shown that we're less anxious when making decisions at arm's-length in this way, and we're thus less likely to allow our momentary worries about anxiety-inducing futures color our perception of the concrete data points we're juggling.
This ability to make decisions as an outside observer is easier to wield when we're literally not involved: when we’re helping someone else figure out their own issues. But it can be harnessed for our personal decisions, as well, if we attempt to frame things in the same way.
Instead of asking “Should I break up with my partner?” then, we might ask ourselves, “If a friend of mine was in this relationship and asking me if they should end it, what advice would I give them?”
Sometimes, even this simplistic and minor shifting of perspective can help us float a bit above the surface of all the roiling emotions and similar confounding variables that might otherwise distort our perception of the problem we're attempting to solve.