June 27, 2024 • 43 mins
Very few of us ever receive an education on coping. We are taught bad things happen, we are taught pointless math equations, we are taught to grin and bear it, but not effective psychological ways of integrating stressful, painful, frustrating experiences. In this episode, we break down the psychology of coping mechanisms, including:
- Problem focused vs. emotion focused coping
- Maladaptive vs. adaptive coping
- Our most common defence mechanisms
- How to stop numbing ourselves to our experiences
- How to consciously deal with hard things in life
- Our coping statements
- Freud, Carl Jung and many more
Listen now for a comprehensive deep dive into coping in your 20s and beyond.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Psychology of Your Twenties,
the podcast where we talk through some of the big
life changes and transitions of our twenties and what they
mean for our psychology.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Hello everybody, or welcome back to the show. Welcome back
to the podcast, New listeners, old listeners. Wherever you are
in the world, it is so great to have you here,
back for another episode as we of course break down
the psychology of our twenties. There is a lot going
on during this decade, and we talk about a lot
of it on this podcast. Heartbreak, grief, feeling confused about
(00:49):
our future, our careers, our friendships, our relationship with our families,
our bodies, ourselves, the state of the world. But what
we don't talk about a lot is how to cope
with so much going on. Sometimes we can get really
wrapped up in our experiences and our emotions, and the
only solution that we have is to begin to rely
(01:11):
on some pretty unhealthy coping mechanisms, or we kind of
go numb completely and we tune it all out, only
to really see our emotional and our mental state get
worse and worse. But there is of course an alternative,
and today I want to discuss our ways of coping
and dealing with whatever it is you have going on
(01:33):
in your life, and our ways of coping in a
positive and healthy way. For me, I always see coping
mechanisms as like the umbrella in a storm. They shelter
us from the worst of the weather in our lives.
As cheesy as that sounds, and you know, the storm
doesn't stop. We might still feel a few rain drops,
but our coping mechanisms are the thing that shields us.
(01:57):
There are so many proactive ways that we can, you know,
seriously help ourselves out during tough times or even regular
times when things set us back or frustrate us. And
it is so wild to me that in all of
our years at school being taught calculous and long division
and the history of civilizations that aren't even around anymore,
(02:19):
all things that I'm sure are very important, But amongst
all of that, we are never really taught how to
properly regulate our emotions and our nervous system. We are
never taught effective psychological strategies for managing some of those
universal things in our lives, for managing failure or loss
(02:40):
or distress. And these are skills that I think everyone
could use. I don't think I know everyone could use these,
and they are so often neglected or left out of
our education or our general knowledge, and just personally, I
believe that you shouldn't need a psychology degree or years
of therapy to know how to make life work best
for you. Today, we are going to break down these
(03:02):
psychology of coping mechanisms. We are going to talk about
the different categories of coping skills and coping mechanisms that
we come across, from emotion focus to problem focused, to
adaptive versus maladaptive. You know, here's the thing, not all
coping mechanisms are created equal. There are a whole lot
(03:22):
of behaviors that may make us feel better in the moment,
but which are super detrimental in the long term. Alcohol
is a great example of that. You know, Yes, it
naturally lowers our levels of anxiety, and if that was
the only thing that we were concerned with, well then
that's great, But it can also create dependency and addiction.
(03:43):
And the same goes for a lot of avoidant coping mechanisms.
Ignoring the bad situation, just trying to minimize the emotional
reaction that we are having rather than actively making our
circumstances better or act trying to improve our mood and
(04:03):
improve what's going on around us. I also want to
briefly discuss defense mechanisms. I feel like they come up
a lot, but there is actually a huge difference between
coping mechanisms and defense mechanisms, and finally, the ways that
we can really tap into our subconscious to get to
the bottom of what's bothering us and really find a
(04:25):
way through. So that was a bit of a ramble.
Enough of that, without further ado, Let's talk about the
psychology behind our coping mechanisms and how we can make
the most out of them. So let's start super simple
and from the beginning, what is coping? What are coping mechanisms.
(04:49):
Coping is not just about getting over something and moving on,
because by definition, coping is not a passive process. It
is an active choice around integrating and recognizing and experience
fully sitting with it and finding a way forward. It
is not pushing it to the sidelines. It's not hoping
that it will go away. It is being the person
(05:13):
who takes things by the reins and moves through them
as hard as they may be, and coping behaviors. Coping
mechanisms are the tools that we use in that kind
of journey, in that battle. Coping behaviors are voluntary and
conscious ways of managing stressful situations and events by responding
(05:34):
to either our emotions about the problem or the problem itself.
It is essentially any way that we choose to manage trauma,
to manage stress, pain, anything emotionally unpleasant. And the word
conscious and voluntary is super important to focus on here
because it is what distinguishes our coping mechanisms from our
(05:58):
defense mechanisms. So, in contrast to the very active nature
of coping mechanisms, defense mechanisms are unconscious and they occur
beyond our level of awarenes it's very deep in the mind.
The idea behind them is that when something occurs that
is anxiety inducing or upsetting, or that our conscious mind
(06:20):
just simply can't deal with, can't process, our unconscious mind
switches into gear and employs a number of backup strategies
so that we don't feel the full force of an
emotion or a situation. So these defense mechanisms, they were
first labeled by Freud, the grandfather of psychoanalytic psychology, but
(06:41):
they were actually really articulated by his daughter, Anna, And
Anna often gets left out of a lot of the
conversations around the history of psychology and some of the
main theories that have come up in the last one
hundred years, including this one. And she kind of took
over the baton from her father and expanded a lot
of his work into what we know it is today.
(07:04):
So you've probably heard of a few defense mechanisms in
your lifetime, even if you have like zero experience with
therapy or psychology. Denial is a big one, being unable
to accept reality that is actually a defense mechanism. Another
one is repression, or what we would call motivated forgetting
(07:25):
pushing an unpleasant experience very way down subconsciously when we
aren't prepared to deal with it. Let me think of
a few others of my favorite projection attributing our unwonted
thoughts and feelings to another person Like you might not
like them very much, but deep down in the hidden
parts of your mind, you know that that's not an
(07:47):
appropriate thing to feel or admit, so you end up
believing that they don't like you as a way to
protect yourself and your unacceptable desires. That's projection. Regression is
another one, regret, you know, reverting back to a less
mature version of yourself to deal with the situation that
is really distressing. So those are defense mechanisms. The reason
(08:12):
that we want to prioritize coping mechanisms and why they
always come at on top of here, is because they
are something that we can control, whereas our defense mechanisms
are something that we can't. They are, you know, stemming
from our subconscious, which means that they are automatic. They're
often controlled by impulse, by ego, by trauma, and so
(08:33):
not entirely beneficial in these circumstances, even if we feel
like they're protecting us, even if they are still managing
or reducing our stress. Defense mechanisms kind of take us
out from behind the wheel and put us in the
passenger steat. Coping mechanisms make us the driver. So coping
mechanisms is where it's at, and you probably know quite
(08:55):
a few. These are things typically like meditation, exercise, nature walks, practicing, gratitude, journaling,
processing your emotions with a friend, humor, making light of
a situation, planning, rationalizing a problem, but then also things
like numbing yourself isolating yourself, binge eating, binge drinking, risk taking.
(09:20):
All of these behaviors, the good and the bad, they
have an important component. Their performance serves some secondary mental purpose.
For example, you might take major risks to achieve a
high that makes the bad feelings feel less sharp. You
(09:41):
journal not just because you like the look of the
words on the page, but because there is some emotional
clarity achieved through this practice, some kind of peace that
you are able to voluntarily bring to yourself without waiting
for the situation to change. So our pattern of coping mechanisms,
(10:02):
that huge list that we just spoke about, they often
become quite entrenched and they form a habit, meaning that
when something really stressful happens in our lives, we tend
to respond to those situations in the same way every
single time because we kind of know what works, we
know what makes us feel better. Of course, there's a catch.
(10:24):
We think we know what makes us feel better. Sometimes
these coping mechanisms that we're using, whether that is exercising, journaling,
binge drinking, it's what we learn from our parents. Other
times it's just an emotional reflex. We responded to a
really awful situation once in some kind of way. We
(10:45):
responded by talking it out with a friend, or we
responded by going off and speeding around in our car,
and it kind of worked. So we learned the association
between the behavior, the coping mechanism, and feeling better, and
so now that's what we rely on. It's kind of
like the analogy I always give is going back to
(11:07):
the same mechanic for your car, even if you might
be able to get a better price or service elsewhere,
because it's just like what you trust and what you know,
and it kind of gets the job done. Even if
you know that you know there might be a better
mechanic who could give you a better price, or who
could fix your car faster, a better coping mechanism, you
become kind of entrapped in what you know and what
(11:31):
you've always relied on. For example, I have a really
good friend who every time she's frustrated, every time she
has to work late, every time she is annoyed at
her family, she will switch off her phone and she
will go for a run, and it really helps her.
It's super effective, but it doesn't work in every circumstance, right,
like if you're on a plane or if you're injured.
(11:51):
That's why we need a toolkit of coping mechanisms. We
can't just rely on one and the only one that
you know, we come back to every time that makes
us feel better. For me, you know, I really like
to sit and intellectualize my problems. I don't think that's
a surprise. I literally have a psychology your podcast where
I break down every single thought I ever have. But sometimes,
(12:13):
you know, for me, a feeling can't be rationalized, It
just needs to be felt, which is why we need
a toolkit, which is why we need multiple coping mechanisms.
So regardless of what habits have formed, these all kind
of create a coping style. And there are four different
(12:33):
ways that we cope, four different categories that all of
these behaviors fall into. So the first one is problem
focused coping. So this addresses the problem causing the distress
by planning out a solution or waiting till it's an
appropriate time to act, looking at the problem and kind
(12:56):
of realizing that if the problem goes away, if we
can find way to work around it, our stress, our distress,
our grief will go away as well. That's problem focused
the first category. Then we have emotion focused coping. This
basically aims to cope by just reducing the negative emotions
associated with the problem. You might not actually do anything
(13:19):
about the problem, it's just kind of treating how you
feel about it. So reframing the situation is something positive acceptance,
turning to humor, turning to spirituality, or of course suppressing it.
Then we have meaning focused coping, which kind of falls
into emotion focused coping. So under emotion focus coping there
(13:42):
is meaning focused and social coping. So meaning focused is
when you and I might use cognitive strategies or some
kind of part of our belief system to make it
seem like this situation has some kind of higher meaning
to it. So if you hear people say, you know,
(14:02):
everything happens for a reason, or rejection is just redirection
in response to something really awful or unfortunate happening, that
is them applying a meaning focused coping style, and it's
their way of pushing through the situation by once again
applying some kind of higher belief or higher reasoning to
why they're going through that it makes it like a
(14:24):
little bit easier to swallow. And finally we have social coping,
also known as support seeking where you know, we reduce
our stress by seeking out the support of friends or
family or seeking out others around us to make us
feel better. So the best coping style, not that it's
(14:44):
a competition, but it kind of is the best of
them all, the one that gets the gold start every
single time, is actually a combination. It is a coping
style that incorporates all dimensions of those four different categories.
It's problem focused, emotion focus, meaning focused, and we can
always pull out social coping if we need it, And
it's kind of like a healthy diet. You know, you
(15:06):
can't just eat one food group. You can't just really
rely on social coping or meaning focused coping and expect
to have the proper nutrition or the proper skills. So
there's been some really interesting studies recently that have actually
suggested that, you know, having a combination of all of
these different types of coping is best. But also problem
(15:30):
focused coping strategies need to make up the majority. And
the reason why is because problem focused coping mechanisms are
what gives us a sense of control over the problem.
They are what show us that we have agency, that
we can change the outcome of a situation. Whereas meaning
(15:52):
focused coping, social coping, emotional coping, they all kind of say,
you know, bad things just happen to us and we
have to find a way to deal with them, rather
than we have some level of control over our circumstances. So,
of course there are certain things that we just you know,
death is one of them, failure is another. They do
(16:14):
just happen, and sometimes we do have to be reactive
to that and find a way to pull through. But
the reason problem focuscroping is so important is because the
rest of those things that occur, you know, all these
other circumstances that might happen, failure actually being one of them. Right,
you fail a test, you fail your driving test, I
(16:35):
don't know, you fail an exam, you go through a breakup,
whatever it is. There is only so much that dealing
with the emotion can help you before you have to
think about how you can move on and what kind
of strategies you can put in place before that happens.
The stress is always going to remain in some form,
and it might return. Because the other thing that links emotions,
(16:58):
social and meaning based coping is that they are reactive
versus proactive. So what does that mean exactly well. Coping,
like I said, isn't just about making ourselves feel better
in response to an event. That is part of it.
You know, you really can't do anything if you're paralyzed
by fear, regret, pain, stress, so you have to kind
of move past that first. But the next level up
(17:20):
from that is also doing a favor for our future
selves and doing what we can to prevent that situation
from happening again, whatever it may be. That is why
problem focused coping is known as proactive, because it is
also protective. So, for example, if you keep getting into
fights with your partner and it's extremely distressing, and the
(17:43):
only way that you can push through it is by
you know, going and having like a huge ran about
it to your friends, you know, involving social coping, and
then you move on. You are kind of bound to
keep having that fight, You are bound to keep going
through that cycle. But if you respect by yeah, firstly
of course seeking support, but then also going to counseling
(18:04):
or setting boundaries for yourself or taking a step back
when you are arguing and realizing it's not working, you're
also developing and evolving rather than just making yourself feel better.
And I think that's something that I've realized the older
that I've gotten. It's not just about, you know, it's
not just about always giving myself the benefit of the doubt.
(18:26):
It's not just about always soothing hard things. It's also
about doing things that are going to make my life
better in the long term. Like my future self is
just as important in that situation as my current feelings.
And I think that that is a perfect kind of
segue into talking about another very important distinction, the crucial
(18:47):
difference between adaptive coping mechanisms versus maladaptive coping mechanisms. Why
is it that sometimes we choose coping mechanisms that are
actually self destructive, that actually hurt us more like you know,
going and speaking to a friend every time we get
into a fight, rather than actually trying to improve our relationship.
It feels very instinctual, it feels very meaningful, perhaps in
(19:11):
the moment, But why is it that we find ourselves
in these cycles of not actually wanting to perhaps improve
our circumstances or not even knowing how to do it.
So we're going to talk about that after this short break.
Stay with us. When something really awful happens, or even
(19:33):
something frustrating or overwhelming. Sometimes all we want to do
is distract ourselves and ignore it entirely. We want to
completely disengage. That is an example of a maladaptive coping mechanism.
Like I said before, right at the very beginning, not
all ways of coping or created equally. Some actually end
up doing more harm than good avoidance. As an example,
(19:53):
even if in the moment they serve the primary purpose
of making us feel it tied better, sometimes they actually
make this situation worse, or they make our emotional response
to a situation worse in the long term. So that
is where the distinction between an adaptive versus maladaptive coping
mechanism comes into play. Adaptive coping mechanisms are positive. They
(20:15):
help us evolve, They help us grow from a situation,
even if it's baby steps. They are what we want.
Maladaptive coping mechanisms they're quite shallow and they work in
the short term, but they do so by hiding the
problem from us. They hide the situation from us by
getting us to just focus on dealing with what we're feeling.
(20:36):
They also often have negative consequences. Actually, that's a huge factor.
They always do. That's what makes the maladaptive, and like
I said, they're emotion based, not problem based. Let me
give you some examples of what I mean here. So
I spoke about this before, but binge drinking is a
huge one, and definitely a huge noteworthy one because amongst
(20:57):
twenty year olds, twenty something year olds, most people in
this decade, alcohol is just so widely accepted and excessive
drinking is so tolerated that sometimes we don't even realize
that we are using alcohol or some other substance to
numb our pain as like dramatic as that sounds. Alcohol
is naturally a depressant, which means that it slows down
(21:19):
how messages travel through our body, including anxious messages, and
so initially when something really terrible happens, having like half
a bottle of wine is going to make you feel
more relaxed. It's going to make you feel better. It's
a lot harder to focus on our worries when you
know we're a bit tipsy or we're drunk, and in
that way the negative feelings are eliminated. In my own experience,
(21:46):
the times I have, you know, drunk the most to
be a bit vulnerable with you guys, have been when
I've been in the most emotional pain at the end
of a relationship, when I first moved to a new city,
in a new no one and I was really, really lonely.
And any kind of substance that numbs us or artificially
induces you know a lot of happy feelings that kind
(22:08):
of mask the real problem is a form of maladaptive coping,
because it is keeping you attached to the idea that
if you feel better, you are moving forward. So, speaking
of alcohol consumption, let's also talk about food as well.
Emotional eating is another maladaptive coping mechanism. So I did
(22:29):
do an entire episode on this last year. It's episode
one hundred and thirty five if you want to listen
to it, and it really goes into this a lot more,
but sometimes not always, but sometimes we eat as a
way of regulating our emotions rather than from a place
of actual hunger. Like food is a form and a
source of comfort. Food is warm, food is filling, and
(22:53):
it also elicits feelings of control, feelings of fullness where
emotional fullness perhaps is possible underneath it all though the
emotions remain the same. It is once again a band aid,
another huge one. An honorable mention, I don't know, A
dishonorable mention maybe, but a huge one for our twenties
(23:14):
is isolating ourselves and withdrawing. Often we don't even realize
that we're doing this. We think that we are helping ourselves.
We think that we are helping those around us. We
think that we are giving ourselves space to process, but
we are actually reducing the social resources that we have
available to us, those social touch points that help so much.
(23:35):
You know what if we actually, unconsciously as well, like
with withdrawal, are punishing ourselves because we don't feel like
it should be somebody else's problem, or we don't feel
like we deserve empathy or we deserve support. There was
this paper published in two thousand and one that I
read when I was researching this episode, and it spoke
about how isolation is often a self induced coping mechanism
(24:00):
to deal with excessive worry and to avoid human interaction.
We herm it. Obviously, that is not always the case, right.
Sometimes the fact that we don't have social support is
what causes us to use other maladaptive coping mechanisms. But
sometimes as well, withdrawing from a social support system or
from friends and family and who are available is a
(24:22):
way of coping that we don't realize we're doing. And
it's kind of no surprise to me that this mechanism,
it often does co occur with things like depression or
social anxiety, where there is already a tendency within these
conditions towards withdrawal escapism. That is another maladaptive coping mechanism,
(24:44):
finding comfort in a reality or a fantasy that is
detached from your own, like binge watching endless hours of TV,
or escapism through daydreaming, putting up this wall between you
and reality, you and the situation that you're dealing with
through a form of really emotionally consuming destruction. And this
(25:09):
really links to the last example I'll give today, because
you know, the list could definitely go on, but this
is the example they gave at the beginning, which is
avoidance outright ignoring the problem. Now, this might sound a
lot like denial, which we know as a defense mechanism,
because it's you know, it's similar, right, it's pretending the
problem doesn't exist. But actually, with avoidance, it's a conscious
(25:33):
choice to look away. You kind of know that the
situation is happening. You know that if you were to
seriously deal with it, it would be really painful or tricky
or stressful. Denial is not even realizing that there is
a problem. You know, you're choosing to postpone or choosing
to avoid or evade a problem. With avoidance denial, you're
(25:54):
just completely politifully unaware that it's even happening. So, if
coping mechanisms are voluntary, and we know these behaviors keep
leading us back to the same or even a darker place,
why do we do it? Why do we use poor
forms of coping? There is not one answer for you.
My answer is that it's complicated, but I will offer
(26:14):
you a few explanations. The first and most simple explanation
is that maladaptive coping mechanisms are sometimes just more accessible.
They are easier for relieving the immediate discomfort, whereas adaptive
coping mechanisms sometimes require you know, it's a hard reality,
They require a bit of an investment. They kind of
(26:36):
take longer to help. If you've just gotten broken up
with or you've just lost out on a really you know,
amazing opportunity, you've just had a fight, you've gotten your
hopes up and you've been let down. You know, a
couple glasses of wine and trying not to think about
it is going to immediately make you feel better. But
(26:56):
you know, meditating, for example, probably isn't going to make
you feel better if it's your first time ever doing it.
You know, meditation is amazing. I do actually really promote it.
But the thing is that is that it's a practice, right,
It's a skill that builds over time. Whereas anyone over
the age of eighteen in Australia or you know, twenty
twenty one elsewhere can go and use alcohol, or abuse
(27:18):
alcohol or rely on alcohol, and it's a much quicker fix. Secondly,
sometimes maladaptive coping mechanisms do act as a form of
self sabotage. So if you have poor self esteem, a
lot of self doubt, imposter syndrome maybe as well, when
bad things happen, it's hard to not see those as
(27:39):
coming down to something wrong with you or some character fault.
You see yourself as a failure, or as a loser,
or as not deserving of love, And why would someone
like that deserve to be taken care of, or deserve
to not be in pain, or deserve to invest in
healthy coping mechanisms. If at the end of the day
they are a bad person or they are a lost cause.
(28:01):
It all comes down to, I think sometimes self esteem
and what we believe that we should be providing with ourselves.
It's interesting because in this case, you know, firstly, those
false beliefs are entirely untrue, let's get that clear. But secondly,
those beliefs are subconscious, but the actions derived from those
feelings are conscious. So it's like this weird mix of
(28:24):
defense and coping mechanisms, if that makes sense. Our motivations
are subconscious, but our behavior is conscious, and it is
in response to a feeling that we just can't quite identify. Right,
We are numbing ourselves. We are withdrawing as a conscious
way of dealing with our emotions because perhaps underneath it all,
(28:45):
we don't feel like we deserve to offer ourselves something better,
and we are self sabotaging. Generational trauma and learning comes
into this conversation in a major way. Coping strategies begin
in early childhood, and they begin through not just our
own psychological and physical responses to stress and testing what works,
(29:09):
but also by what we see our parents doing. When
we see our parents engaging in dysfunctional strategies like avoidance,
like numbing themselves with alcohol or food or some other
substance or activity. Not only do we observe and mimic that,
but it can also create a childhood environment in which
(29:31):
we are not taught to accept and hold hard emotions
or to work through them. We are not taught to
be soft and tender and to turn to others for support,
but to instead find a way to just feel better
in the moment and eventually move on. So this is
a form of emotional and validation. And when you are
told that your emotions, especially as a child, were not reasonable,
(29:54):
they weren't rational, they weren't valid, you're too sensitive. That
becomes part of our habits and part of the suppression,
part of the maladaptive coping that we perform. I feel
like this is quite obvious, but we see that a
lot with men, people who are raised as boys and
raised as men, whereby there is such a societal influence
(30:16):
around them at all times to be quiet when it
comes to their emotional problems. And so it's through that
social conditioning that they learn how to use maladaptive coping
mechanisms to help themselves, and we all know that doesn't
work right. It ends up in angry outbursts, it ends
up in sabotaging relationships, it ends up in dysfunction. But
(30:39):
a lot of the times it's not even like we
had a choice. Nobody has set an example. The other
main problem with a lot of these techniques, if we
can call them that they are techniques for managing emotions,
is that they actually leave a lot of residual grief,
They leave a lot of residual suffering, residual sadness, residual stress,
because we haven't been proactive about the situation, or we
(31:04):
haven't actually fully processed and moved through the emotion. So
it goes on to kind of hide and influence our
behavior in other areas. You know, say you've gone through
a really rough period at work. You do what you
can to feel better, You cope, you suppress, you drink,
you do whatever it is, and you move on. The
thing is, you actually haven't found a way to make
(31:24):
your work life better for you, if there even is
a way. You haven't found a way to put in strategies.
You haven't found a way to talk out your emotions
or to process them, and so a lot of the time.
And I remember this happening with me when I worked
as like a in a corporate job. I would get really,
really stressed. I would just push it all down. I
would keep busy, and I would notice that in the
(31:48):
weeks and the days that followed, those bad feelings that
I hadn't actually processed led into my relationships. I would
start fights with my boyfriend, I would ignore my friends,
and the disruption of that event and experience would remain. Again,
it is not our fault. That is something I really
want to impress on you all. You've just kind of
(32:08):
picked up on the examples set for you by family,
by peers, by society that you know, really should have
a one oh one class on, like how do you
actually cope with hard things in life? We have never
had the opportunity or perhaps even in the time to
see what else is out there, to see how we
could cope better. Because also sometimes like the feelings are
(32:28):
just so intense, we just do what we have to do.
You know, our lives are so busy that sometimes it's
impossible to pull ourselves away and you know, take a
break or go on a nature walk or to journal
out our feelings. Sometimes we just have to respond to
what is happening. So one final explanation for an over
reliance or maladaptive coping mechanisms, especially the emotion focused kind,
(32:52):
comes down to a concept in psychology called learned helplessness.
If you've been handed a few sets of just really
bad cards, you've just had some really bad luck recently, Firstly,
you're probably feeling exhausted. But secondly, if your efforts to
(33:12):
keep picking yourself back up and doing better and picking
yourself back up and problem solving and picking yourself up
and having a good attitude, if that just isn't working,
you've probably adopted an idea that you just don't have
the control that you would like, You don't get a
say in what's happening to you, and so you have
adopted a position of learned helplessness. Sometimes we start to
(33:37):
be quite global with that judgment, right, and we believe
that the reason all these bad things keep happening is
because we just have bad luck or bad karma, or
it's a bad period, and so we just endure it
and we do what we can emotionally, and that means
sometimes falling into bad habits with how we cope. So
how do we break this pattern and move away from
(33:59):
avoidant or maladaptive coping to approach orientated coping. How do
we kind of stop, you know, sometimes making things worse
for ourselves, even though our intentions are merely just to
feel a little bit more at peace, a little bit
less stressed. Let's talk about it. So, there is this
very well known Carl Jung quote that I love, and
(34:20):
it says, until you make the unconscious conscious, it will
direct your life, and you will call it fate. And
what I always interpret this quote is saying is that
our maladaptive coping skills have an origin. Until we work
out what that is, we are basically destined to always
(34:41):
see life in our circumstances as against us and to
find ourselves in a bit of a toxic cycle. That
might be a harsh truth, that might be something that
you don't really want to hear. I probably didn't want
to hear it when I first did. But one of
the only things we can control in this world is
how we reac act to what happens to us, and
(35:02):
how we as much as we can positively integrate that
into our story and find a way to learn and
grow from it, like it just kind of sucks sometimes
because a lot of the time we didn't do the
damage in the first place, the stress or the pain,
it wasn't caused by us, but we do get to
reclaim our power in response to it and coming back
(35:22):
to our adaptive, positive ways of coping. So, firstly, if
you've become really reliant on maladaptive coping, you have to
understand why that might be. Is it past trauma, is
it stress overload? Is it because you don't know any
other way to cope? Is it the immediate relief? Is
it the temporary control? Is it history? Getting clear and
(35:44):
where it begins helps you find an alternative and practice
those positive alternatives. It's really annoying and frustrating that adaptive
coping mechanisms take a while to really take hold, but
it's one of those things that really I think deserves
an investment. I saw this really interesting. I don't know
if it was on like Twitter or I don't know,
but somebody said this the other day. I read it
(36:06):
somewhere that was like, you can ruin your life in
a second. What is something that you can do in
that same amount of time that would drastically improve your life,
and it is positive croping. If you've had a stressful
day and you want like to have just a huge
rant to your friend, or you want to have half
a bottle of wine, try something else first. Try something
more energetic or nourishing for you, nourishing for your soul,
(36:28):
nourishing for your mental health. Try something that your mind
and your nervous system will thank you for later. Maybe
some somatic healing. Have a dance around your house, get
the nervous energy out some movement, Take ten minutes and
do a brain dump. One of my favorite things to
do is called progressive relaxation, where you work from your
toes to your forehead, really tensing and then releasing your
(36:51):
muscles and notice, pay attention. Do you feel the stress
lesson in your body? Do you feel less overwhelmed? Adopting
more positive coping strategies is as much about relearning what
your body and your mind responds to as it is
unlearning previously counterproductive ways of dismissing or suppressing your hard emotions.
(37:15):
Something that really helped me was coping statements as well,
and the list I Love the Most was created by
these two psychologists back in twenty fifteen and I love
them because these statements have really helped me reshape the
narrative in my head, or the narrative that I used
to have that anything I did wouldn't help my circumstances.
You know that learned helplessness mindset, and the statements include
(37:36):
things like, I'm going to face this challenge and handle
it as best as I can, even if the outcome
doesn't change. It might not work out one hundred percent,
but you know, I'm going to give it my best
and see what happens. I've been in this situation before,
and I've survived. I am strong enough to handle this
whatever it is that it happens. Things often aren't as
bad as they first seem. Those are your coping statements.
(38:00):
Hopefully you see why these would be helpful, right. It's
not just about thinking positive thoughts or whatever like that
toxic positivity mindset, but being able to just acknowledge that, yes,
this circumstance is sucky, this is shitty, this is annoying.
I can't change that situation, but I am capable. I
am the common denominator. My actions are a big factor
(38:21):
in pushing through and changing next week's circumstances or changing
how I respond. That kind of brings me to my
next tip. Know yourself and know your stresses. If there
is a situation you know you struggle with and you
will really have to rely on your coping mechanisms, perhaps
more than normal, make yourself a list of what works.
(38:43):
Make yourself a dictionary of coping, and include in that
list one thing from every bucket that we spoke about before.
An emotion focused way of coping, social focused, meaning focused,
and problem focused. It's like having four lines of defense.
So for me, you know, I know that going on
(39:05):
a plane is something that's really stressful. For others, it
might be exam season, it might be seeing your family.
For me, it is going on a plane. And I
have in my notes at all times a list of
like ten plus things I know will help me before, during,
and after a flight. I also have, you know, five
statements that help me rationalize my feelings, five affirmations. I
(39:25):
have my anxiety meditation downloaded. You know, the more productive adaptive,
positive coping skills you have in your artillery, the better
it's going to be, because it's the security of having
multiple things you can fall back on. I think at
the end of the day, I'm going to say it again,
and you're probably like, Okay, I get it. But you know,
coping isn't just about eliminating bad feelings, because we know
(39:48):
that feelings are not evil, they're not bad, they are
just our body trying to communicate with us. Coping is
also not about always having an answer or a solution.
It's about rezili alliance. And the four biggest factors and
contributors to resilience are wellness and taking care of yourself
in the good times and the bad. Healthy thinking, being
(40:11):
realistic about your problems, not you know, catastrophizing or doomsdaying.
Finding meaning and purpose, knowing that there is a deeper
part of you that these hard times can't touch. And finally,
connection sharing, being vulnerable, having an open heart even when
it is really difficult to reach out. That makes us.
You know, that kind of makes up part of our
(40:32):
social focused coping skills. But I think if you want
to be resilient, focus on what you can do when
times are good, but also find a way to lean
back on your positive relationships so that it doesn't feel
like you're only doing so during a crisis, and so
that you avoid withdrawal and isolation. Because I think that
always just makes things a hundred times worse. Coping mechanisms,
(40:57):
at the end of the day, they are the umbrella
in the storm. Right, it's still going to be raining,
but you're carrying something with you that you can pull
out to protect yourself. You are changing how you react
to a bad day at work, how you react to
a fight with your partner, how you react to a
bad mental health day, a bad mental health month. And
it's not about ignoring it. It's not about letting it
(41:19):
consume you. It's about having this relationship with your emotions
whereby you're like you were just a little ghost in
my house, And yeah, I wish I could get rid
of you, but maybe I won't. So let's find a
way to move forward and integrate what I'm experiencing. So
thank you so much for listening. If you have made
it this far, I really enjoyed this episode. I feel
like I needed a reminder on coping mechanisms. It might
(41:42):
seem so basic, right, it might seem so boring, But
for so many of us, when was the last time
like you really sat down and thought about what skills
you had to make hard things in your life a
little bit easier. When were we ever taught that. It's
just mind blowing to me that I went to school
for so many years and nobody ever did a class
(42:04):
on this, nobody ever explained these things to me. So
hopefully this is the education that you needed when it
came to this topic. As always, if there is somebody
who needs to hear this episode, please feel free to
share a link, send them a screenshot, whatever you would like.
And if you enjoyed this episode, please leave a five
star review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you are listening
(42:27):
right now. It will take a couple seconds and it
really does help the show to grow when you leave
nice reviews. I read them all, so chances are if
you have already, I've read it and I've saved it
into my little smile file and I really appreciate it.
And if you do have an episode's suggestion, I say
this at the end of every episode, hit me up
on Instagram at that Psychology podcast. I would love to
(42:49):
hear from you. And until next time, stay safe, stay kind,
be gentle with yourself, please, and we will talk soon.
Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Psychology of Your Twenties,
the podcast where we talk through some of the big
life changes and transitions of our twenties and what they
mean for our psychology.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Hello everybody, or welcome back to the show. Welcome back
to the podcast, New listeners, old listeners. Wherever you are
in the world, it is so great to have you here,
back for another episode as we of course break down
the psychology of our twenties. There is a lot going
on during this decade, and we talk about a lot
of it on this podcast. Heartbreak, grief, feeling confused about
(00:49):
our future, our careers, our friendships, our relationship with our families,
our bodies, ourselves, the state of the world. But what
we don't talk about a lot is how to cope
with so much going on. Sometimes we can get really
wrapped up in our experiences and our emotions, and the
only solution that we have is to begin to rely
(01:11):
on some pretty unhealthy coping mechanisms, or we kind of
go numb completely and we tune it all out, only
to really see our emotional and our mental state get
worse and worse. But there is of course an alternative,
and today I want to discuss our ways of coping
and dealing with whatever it is you have going on
(01:33):
in your life, and our ways of coping in a
positive and healthy way. For me, I always see coping
mechanisms as like the umbrella in a storm. They shelter
us from the worst of the weather in our lives.
As cheesy as that sounds, and you know, the storm
doesn't stop. We might still feel a few rain drops,
but our coping mechanisms are the thing that shields us.
(01:57):
There are so many proactive ways that we can, you know,
seriously help ourselves out during tough times or even regular
times when things set us back or frustrate us. And
it is so wild to me that in all of
our years at school being taught calculous and long division
and the history of civilizations that aren't even around anymore,
(02:19):
all things that I'm sure are very important, But amongst
all of that, we are never really taught how to
properly regulate our emotions and our nervous system. We are
never taught effective psychological strategies for managing some of those
universal things in our lives, for managing failure or loss
(02:40):
or distress. And these are skills that I think everyone
could use. I don't think I know everyone could use these,
and they are so often neglected or left out of
our education or our general knowledge, and just personally, I
believe that you shouldn't need a psychology degree or years
of therapy to know how to make life work best
for you. Today, we are going to break down these
(03:02):
psychology of coping mechanisms. We are going to talk about
the different categories of coping skills and coping mechanisms that
we come across, from emotion focus to problem focused, to
adaptive versus maladaptive. You know, here's the thing, not all
coping mechanisms are created equal. There are a whole lot
(03:22):
of behaviors that may make us feel better in the moment,
but which are super detrimental in the long term. Alcohol
is a great example of that. You know, Yes, it
naturally lowers our levels of anxiety, and if that was
the only thing that we were concerned with, well then
that's great, But it can also create dependency and addiction.
(03:43):
And the same goes for a lot of avoidant coping mechanisms.
Ignoring the bad situation, just trying to minimize the emotional
reaction that we are having rather than actively making our
circumstances better or act trying to improve our mood and
(04:03):
improve what's going on around us. I also want to
briefly discuss defense mechanisms. I feel like they come up
a lot, but there is actually a huge difference between
coping mechanisms and defense mechanisms, and finally, the ways that
we can really tap into our subconscious to get to
the bottom of what's bothering us and really find a
(04:25):
way through. So that was a bit of a ramble.
Enough of that, without further ado, Let's talk about the
psychology behind our coping mechanisms and how we can make
the most out of them. So let's start super simple
and from the beginning, what is coping? What are coping mechanisms.
(04:49):
Coping is not just about getting over something and moving on,
because by definition, coping is not a passive process. It
is an active choice around integrating and recognizing and experience
fully sitting with it and finding a way forward. It
is not pushing it to the sidelines. It's not hoping
that it will go away. It is being the person
(05:13):
who takes things by the reins and moves through them
as hard as they may be, and coping behaviors. Coping
mechanisms are the tools that we use in that kind
of journey, in that battle. Coping behaviors are voluntary and
conscious ways of managing stressful situations and events by responding
(05:34):
to either our emotions about the problem or the problem itself.
It is essentially any way that we choose to manage trauma,
to manage stress, pain, anything emotionally unpleasant. And the word
conscious and voluntary is super important to focus on here
because it is what distinguishes our coping mechanisms from our
(05:58):
defense mechanisms. So, in contrast to the very active nature
of coping mechanisms, defense mechanisms are unconscious and they occur
beyond our level of awarenes it's very deep in the mind.
The idea behind them is that when something occurs that
is anxiety inducing or upsetting, or that our conscious mind
(06:20):
just simply can't deal with, can't process, our unconscious mind
switches into gear and employs a number of backup strategies
so that we don't feel the full force of an
emotion or a situation. So these defense mechanisms, they were
first labeled by Freud, the grandfather of psychoanalytic psychology, but
(06:41):
they were actually really articulated by his daughter, Anna, And
Anna often gets left out of a lot of the
conversations around the history of psychology and some of the
main theories that have come up in the last one
hundred years, including this one. And she kind of took
over the baton from her father and expanded a lot
of his work into what we know it is today.
(07:04):
So you've probably heard of a few defense mechanisms in
your lifetime, even if you have like zero experience with
therapy or psychology. Denial is a big one, being unable
to accept reality that is actually a defense mechanism. Another
one is repression, or what we would call motivated forgetting
(07:25):
pushing an unpleasant experience very way down subconsciously when we
aren't prepared to deal with it. Let me think of
a few others of my favorite projection attributing our unwonted
thoughts and feelings to another person Like you might not
like them very much, but deep down in the hidden
parts of your mind, you know that that's not an
(07:47):
appropriate thing to feel or admit, so you end up
believing that they don't like you as a way to
protect yourself and your unacceptable desires. That's projection. Regression is
another one, regret, you know, reverting back to a less
mature version of yourself to deal with the situation that
is really distressing. So those are defense mechanisms. The reason
(08:12):
that we want to prioritize coping mechanisms and why they
always come at on top of here, is because they
are something that we can control, whereas our defense mechanisms
are something that we can't. They are, you know, stemming
from our subconscious, which means that they are automatic. They're
often controlled by impulse, by ego, by trauma, and so
(08:33):
not entirely beneficial in these circumstances, even if we feel
like they're protecting us, even if they are still managing
or reducing our stress. Defense mechanisms kind of take us
out from behind the wheel and put us in the
passenger steat. Coping mechanisms make us the driver. So coping
mechanisms is where it's at, and you probably know quite
(08:55):
a few. These are things typically like meditation, exercise, nature walks, practicing, gratitude, journaling,
processing your emotions with a friend, humor, making light of
a situation, planning, rationalizing a problem, but then also things
like numbing yourself isolating yourself, binge eating, binge drinking, risk taking.
(09:20):
All of these behaviors, the good and the bad, they
have an important component. Their performance serves some secondary mental purpose.
For example, you might take major risks to achieve a
high that makes the bad feelings feel less sharp. You
(09:41):
journal not just because you like the look of the
words on the page, but because there is some emotional
clarity achieved through this practice, some kind of peace that
you are able to voluntarily bring to yourself without waiting
for the situation to change. So our pattern of coping mechanisms,
(10:02):
that huge list that we just spoke about, they often
become quite entrenched and they form a habit, meaning that
when something really stressful happens in our lives, we tend
to respond to those situations in the same way every
single time because we kind of know what works, we
know what makes us feel better. Of course, there's a catch.
(10:24):
We think we know what makes us feel better. Sometimes
these coping mechanisms that we're using, whether that is exercising, journaling,
binge drinking, it's what we learn from our parents. Other
times it's just an emotional reflex. We responded to a
really awful situation once in some kind of way. We
(10:45):
responded by talking it out with a friend, or we
responded by going off and speeding around in our car,
and it kind of worked. So we learned the association
between the behavior, the coping mechanism, and feeling better, and
so now that's what we rely on. It's kind of
like the analogy I always give is going back to
(11:07):
the same mechanic for your car, even if you might
be able to get a better price or service elsewhere,
because it's just like what you trust and what you know,
and it kind of gets the job done. Even if
you know that you know there might be a better
mechanic who could give you a better price, or who
could fix your car faster, a better coping mechanism, you
become kind of entrapped in what you know and what
(11:31):
you've always relied on. For example, I have a really
good friend who every time she's frustrated, every time she
has to work late, every time she is annoyed at
her family, she will switch off her phone and she
will go for a run, and it really helps her.
It's super effective, but it doesn't work in every circumstance, right,
like if you're on a plane or if you're injured.
(11:51):
That's why we need a toolkit of coping mechanisms. We
can't just rely on one and the only one that
you know, we come back to every time that makes
us feel better. For me, you know, I really like
to sit and intellectualize my problems. I don't think that's
a surprise. I literally have a psychology your podcast where
I break down every single thought I ever have. But sometimes,
(12:13):
you know, for me, a feeling can't be rationalized, It
just needs to be felt, which is why we need
a toolkit, which is why we need multiple coping mechanisms.
So regardless of what habits have formed, these all kind
of create a coping style. And there are four different
(12:33):
ways that we cope, four different categories that all of
these behaviors fall into. So the first one is problem
focused coping. So this addresses the problem causing the distress
by planning out a solution or waiting till it's an
appropriate time to act, looking at the problem and kind
(12:56):
of realizing that if the problem goes away, if we
can find way to work around it, our stress, our distress,
our grief will go away as well. That's problem focused
the first category. Then we have emotion focused coping. This
basically aims to cope by just reducing the negative emotions
associated with the problem. You might not actually do anything
(13:19):
about the problem, it's just kind of treating how you
feel about it. So reframing the situation is something positive acceptance,
turning to humor, turning to spirituality, or of course suppressing it.
Then we have meaning focused coping, which kind of falls
into emotion focused coping. So under emotion focus coping there
(13:42):
is meaning focused and social coping. So meaning focused is
when you and I might use cognitive strategies or some
kind of part of our belief system to make it
seem like this situation has some kind of higher meaning
to it. So if you hear people say, you know,
(14:02):
everything happens for a reason, or rejection is just redirection
in response to something really awful or unfortunate happening, that
is them applying a meaning focused coping style, and it's
their way of pushing through the situation by once again
applying some kind of higher belief or higher reasoning to
why they're going through that it makes it like a
(14:24):
little bit easier to swallow. And finally we have social coping,
also known as support seeking where you know, we reduce
our stress by seeking out the support of friends or
family or seeking out others around us to make us
feel better. So the best coping style, not that it's
(14:44):
a competition, but it kind of is the best of
them all, the one that gets the gold start every
single time, is actually a combination. It is a coping
style that incorporates all dimensions of those four different categories.
It's problem focused, emotion focus, meaning focused, and we can
always pull out social coping if we need it, And
it's kind of like a healthy diet. You know, you
(15:06):
can't just eat one food group. You can't just really
rely on social coping or meaning focused coping and expect
to have the proper nutrition or the proper skills. So
there's been some really interesting studies recently that have actually
suggested that, you know, having a combination of all of
these different types of coping is best. But also problem
(15:30):
focused coping strategies need to make up the majority. And
the reason why is because problem focused coping mechanisms are
what gives us a sense of control over the problem.
They are what show us that we have agency, that
we can change the outcome of a situation. Whereas meaning
(15:52):
focused coping, social coping, emotional coping, they all kind of say,
you know, bad things just happen to us and we
have to find a way to deal with them, rather
than we have some level of control over our circumstances. So,
of course there are certain things that we just you know,
death is one of them, failure is another. They do
(16:14):
just happen, and sometimes we do have to be reactive
to that and find a way to pull through. But
the reason problem focuscroping is so important is because the
rest of those things that occur, you know, all these
other circumstances that might happen, failure actually being one of them. Right,
you fail a test, you fail your driving test, I
(16:35):
don't know, you fail an exam, you go through a breakup,
whatever it is. There is only so much that dealing
with the emotion can help you before you have to
think about how you can move on and what kind
of strategies you can put in place before that happens.
The stress is always going to remain in some form,
and it might return. Because the other thing that links emotions,
(16:58):
social and meaning based coping is that they are reactive
versus proactive. So what does that mean exactly well. Coping,
like I said, isn't just about making ourselves feel better
in response to an event. That is part of it.
You know, you really can't do anything if you're paralyzed
by fear, regret, pain, stress, so you have to kind
of move past that first. But the next level up
(17:20):
from that is also doing a favor for our future
selves and doing what we can to prevent that situation
from happening again, whatever it may be. That is why
problem focused coping is known as proactive, because it is
also protective. So, for example, if you keep getting into
fights with your partner and it's extremely distressing, and the
(17:43):
only way that you can push through it is by
you know, going and having like a huge ran about
it to your friends, you know, involving social coping, and
then you move on. You are kind of bound to
keep having that fight, You are bound to keep going
through that cycle. But if you respect by yeah, firstly
of course seeking support, but then also going to counseling
(18:04):
or setting boundaries for yourself or taking a step back
when you are arguing and realizing it's not working, you're
also developing and evolving rather than just making yourself feel better.
And I think that's something that I've realized the older
that I've gotten. It's not just about, you know, it's
not just about always giving myself the benefit of the doubt.
(18:26):
It's not just about always soothing hard things. It's also
about doing things that are going to make my life
better in the long term. Like my future self is
just as important in that situation as my current feelings.
And I think that that is a perfect kind of
segue into talking about another very important distinction, the crucial
(18:47):
difference between adaptive coping mechanisms versus maladaptive coping mechanisms. Why
is it that sometimes we choose coping mechanisms that are
actually self destructive, that actually hurt us more like you know,
going and speaking to a friend every time we get
into a fight, rather than actually trying to improve our relationship.
It feels very instinctual, it feels very meaningful, perhaps in
(19:11):
the moment, But why is it that we find ourselves
in these cycles of not actually wanting to perhaps improve
our circumstances or not even knowing how to do it.
So we're going to talk about that after this short break.
Stay with us. When something really awful happens, or even
(19:33):
something frustrating or overwhelming. Sometimes all we want to do
is distract ourselves and ignore it entirely. We want to
completely disengage. That is an example of a maladaptive coping mechanism.
Like I said before, right at the very beginning, not
all ways of coping or created equally. Some actually end
up doing more harm than good avoidance. As an example,
(19:53):
even if in the moment they serve the primary purpose
of making us feel it tied better, sometimes they actually
make this situation worse, or they make our emotional response
to a situation worse in the long term. So that
is where the distinction between an adaptive versus maladaptive coping
mechanism comes into play. Adaptive coping mechanisms are positive. They
(20:15):
help us evolve, They help us grow from a situation,
even if it's baby steps. They are what we want.
Maladaptive coping mechanisms they're quite shallow and they work in
the short term, but they do so by hiding the
problem from us. They hide the situation from us by
getting us to just focus on dealing with what we're feeling.
(20:36):
They also often have negative consequences. Actually, that's a huge factor.
They always do. That's what makes the maladaptive, and like
I said, they're emotion based, not problem based. Let me
give you some examples of what I mean here. So
I spoke about this before, but binge drinking is a
huge one, and definitely a huge noteworthy one because amongst
(20:57):
twenty year olds, twenty something year olds, most people in
this decade, alcohol is just so widely accepted and excessive
drinking is so tolerated that sometimes we don't even realize
that we are using alcohol or some other substance to
numb our pain as like dramatic as that sounds. Alcohol
is naturally a depressant, which means that it slows down
(21:19):
how messages travel through our body, including anxious messages, and
so initially when something really terrible happens, having like half
a bottle of wine is going to make you feel
more relaxed. It's going to make you feel better. It's
a lot harder to focus on our worries when you
know we're a bit tipsy or we're drunk, and in
that way the negative feelings are eliminated. In my own experience,
(21:46):
the times I have, you know, drunk the most to
be a bit vulnerable with you guys, have been when
I've been in the most emotional pain at the end
of a relationship, when I first moved to a new city,
in a new no one and I was really, really lonely.
And any kind of substance that numbs us or artificially
induces you know a lot of happy feelings that kind
(22:08):
of mask the real problem is a form of maladaptive coping,
because it is keeping you attached to the idea that
if you feel better, you are moving forward. So, speaking
of alcohol consumption, let's also talk about food as well.
Emotional eating is another maladaptive coping mechanism. So I did
(22:29):
do an entire episode on this last year. It's episode
one hundred and thirty five if you want to listen
to it, and it really goes into this a lot more,
but sometimes not always, but sometimes we eat as a
way of regulating our emotions rather than from a place
of actual hunger. Like food is a form and a
source of comfort. Food is warm, food is filling, and
(22:53):
it also elicits feelings of control, feelings of fullness where
emotional fullness perhaps is possible underneath it all though the
emotions remain the same. It is once again a band aid,
another huge one. An honorable mention, I don't know, A
dishonorable mention maybe, but a huge one for our twenties
(23:14):
is isolating ourselves and withdrawing. Often we don't even realize
that we're doing this. We think that we are helping ourselves.
We think that we are helping those around us. We
think that we are giving ourselves space to process, but
we are actually reducing the social resources that we have
available to us, those social touch points that help so much.
(23:35):
You know what if we actually, unconsciously as well, like
with withdrawal, are punishing ourselves because we don't feel like
it should be somebody else's problem, or we don't feel
like we deserve empathy or we deserve support. There was
this paper published in two thousand and one that I
read when I was researching this episode, and it spoke
about how isolation is often a self induced coping mechanism
(24:00):
to deal with excessive worry and to avoid human interaction.
We herm it. Obviously, that is not always the case, right.
Sometimes the fact that we don't have social support is
what causes us to use other maladaptive coping mechanisms. But
sometimes as well, withdrawing from a social support system or
from friends and family and who are available is a
(24:22):
way of coping that we don't realize we're doing. And
it's kind of no surprise to me that this mechanism,
it often does co occur with things like depression or
social anxiety, where there is already a tendency within these
conditions towards withdrawal escapism. That is another maladaptive coping mechanism,
(24:44):
finding comfort in a reality or a fantasy that is
detached from your own, like binge watching endless hours of TV,
or escapism through daydreaming, putting up this wall between you
and reality, you and the situation that you're dealing with
through a form of really emotionally consuming destruction. And this
(25:09):
really links to the last example I'll give today, because
you know, the list could definitely go on, but this
is the example they gave at the beginning, which is
avoidance outright ignoring the problem. Now, this might sound a
lot like denial, which we know as a defense mechanism,
because it's you know, it's similar, right, it's pretending the
problem doesn't exist. But actually, with avoidance, it's a conscious
(25:33):
choice to look away. You kind of know that the
situation is happening. You know that if you were to
seriously deal with it, it would be really painful or tricky
or stressful. Denial is not even realizing that there is
a problem. You know, you're choosing to postpone or choosing
to avoid or evade a problem. With avoidance denial, you're
(25:54):
just completely politifully unaware that it's even happening. So, if
coping mechanisms are voluntary, and we know these behaviors keep
leading us back to the same or even a darker place,
why do we do it? Why do we use poor
forms of coping? There is not one answer for you.
My answer is that it's complicated, but I will offer
(26:14):
you a few explanations. The first and most simple explanation
is that maladaptive coping mechanisms are sometimes just more accessible.
They are easier for relieving the immediate discomfort, whereas adaptive
coping mechanisms sometimes require you know, it's a hard reality,
They require a bit of an investment. They kind of
(26:36):
take longer to help. If you've just gotten broken up
with or you've just lost out on a really you know,
amazing opportunity, you've just had a fight, you've gotten your
hopes up and you've been let down. You know, a
couple glasses of wine and trying not to think about
it is going to immediately make you feel better. But
(26:56):
you know, meditating, for example, probably isn't going to make
you feel better if it's your first time ever doing it.
You know, meditation is amazing. I do actually really promote it.
But the thing is that is that it's a practice, right,
It's a skill that builds over time. Whereas anyone over
the age of eighteen in Australia or you know, twenty
twenty one elsewhere can go and use alcohol, or abuse
(27:18):
alcohol or rely on alcohol, and it's a much quicker fix. Secondly,
sometimes maladaptive coping mechanisms do act as a form of
self sabotage. So if you have poor self esteem, a
lot of self doubt, imposter syndrome maybe as well, when
bad things happen, it's hard to not see those as
(27:39):
coming down to something wrong with you or some character fault.
You see yourself as a failure, or as a loser,
or as not deserving of love, And why would someone
like that deserve to be taken care of, or deserve
to not be in pain, or deserve to invest in
healthy coping mechanisms. If at the end of the day
they are a bad person or they are a lost cause.
(28:01):
It all comes down to, I think sometimes self esteem
and what we believe that we should be providing with ourselves.
It's interesting because in this case, you know, firstly, those
false beliefs are entirely untrue, let's get that clear. But secondly,
those beliefs are subconscious, but the actions derived from those
feelings are conscious. So it's like this weird mix of
(28:24):
defense and coping mechanisms, if that makes sense. Our motivations
are subconscious, but our behavior is conscious, and it is
in response to a feeling that we just can't quite identify. Right,
We are numbing ourselves. We are withdrawing as a conscious
way of dealing with our emotions because perhaps underneath it all,
(28:45):
we don't feel like we deserve to offer ourselves something better,
and we are self sabotaging. Generational trauma and learning comes
into this conversation in a major way. Coping strategies begin
in early childhood, and they begin through not just our
own psychological and physical responses to stress and testing what works,
(29:09):
but also by what we see our parents doing. When
we see our parents engaging in dysfunctional strategies like avoidance,
like numbing themselves with alcohol or food or some other
substance or activity. Not only do we observe and mimic that,
but it can also create a childhood environment in which
(29:31):
we are not taught to accept and hold hard emotions
or to work through them. We are not taught to
be soft and tender and to turn to others for support,
but to instead find a way to just feel better
in the moment and eventually move on. So this is
a form of emotional and validation. And when you are
told that your emotions, especially as a child, were not reasonable,
(29:54):
they weren't rational, they weren't valid, you're too sensitive. That
becomes part of our habits and part of the suppression,
part of the maladaptive coping that we perform. I feel
like this is quite obvious, but we see that a
lot with men, people who are raised as boys and
raised as men, whereby there is such a societal influence
(30:16):
around them at all times to be quiet when it
comes to their emotional problems. And so it's through that
social conditioning that they learn how to use maladaptive coping
mechanisms to help themselves, and we all know that doesn't
work right. It ends up in angry outbursts, it ends
up in sabotaging relationships, it ends up in dysfunction. But
(30:39):
a lot of the times it's not even like we
had a choice. Nobody has set an example. The other
main problem with a lot of these techniques, if we
can call them that they are techniques for managing emotions,
is that they actually leave a lot of residual grief,
They leave a lot of residual suffering, residual sadness, residual stress,
because we haven't been proactive about the situation, or we
(31:04):
haven't actually fully processed and moved through the emotion. So
it goes on to kind of hide and influence our
behavior in other areas. You know, say you've gone through
a really rough period at work. You do what you
can to feel better, You cope, you suppress, you drink,
you do whatever it is, and you move on. The
thing is, you actually haven't found a way to make
(31:24):
your work life better for you, if there even is
a way. You haven't found a way to put in strategies.
You haven't found a way to talk out your emotions
or to process them, and so a lot of the time.
And I remember this happening with me when I worked
as like a in a corporate job. I would get really,
really stressed. I would just push it all down. I
would keep busy, and I would notice that in the
(31:48):
weeks and the days that followed, those bad feelings that
I hadn't actually processed led into my relationships. I would
start fights with my boyfriend, I would ignore my friends,
and the disruption of that event and experience would remain. Again,
it is not our fault. That is something I really
want to impress on you all. You've just kind of
(32:08):
picked up on the examples set for you by family,
by peers, by society that you know, really should have
a one oh one class on, like how do you
actually cope with hard things in life? We have never
had the opportunity or perhaps even in the time to
see what else is out there, to see how we
could cope better. Because also sometimes like the feelings are
(32:28):
just so intense, we just do what we have to do.
You know, our lives are so busy that sometimes it's
impossible to pull ourselves away and you know, take a
break or go on a nature walk or to journal
out our feelings. Sometimes we just have to respond to
what is happening. So one final explanation for an over
reliance or maladaptive coping mechanisms, especially the emotion focused kind,
(32:52):
comes down to a concept in psychology called learned helplessness.
If you've been handed a few sets of just really
bad cards, you've just had some really bad luck recently, Firstly,
you're probably feeling exhausted. But secondly, if your efforts to
(33:12):
keep picking yourself back up and doing better and picking
yourself back up and problem solving and picking yourself up
and having a good attitude, if that just isn't working,
you've probably adopted an idea that you just don't have
the control that you would like, You don't get a
say in what's happening to you, and so you have
adopted a position of learned helplessness. Sometimes we start to
(33:37):
be quite global with that judgment, right, and we believe
that the reason all these bad things keep happening is
because we just have bad luck or bad karma, or
it's a bad period, and so we just endure it
and we do what we can emotionally, and that means
sometimes falling into bad habits with how we cope. So
how do we break this pattern and move away from
(33:59):
avoidant or maladaptive coping to approach orientated coping. How do
we kind of stop, you know, sometimes making things worse
for ourselves, even though our intentions are merely just to
feel a little bit more at peace, a little bit
less stressed. Let's talk about it. So, there is this
very well known Carl Jung quote that I love, and
(34:20):
it says, until you make the unconscious conscious, it will
direct your life, and you will call it fate. And
what I always interpret this quote is saying is that
our maladaptive coping skills have an origin. Until we work
out what that is, we are basically destined to always
(34:41):
see life in our circumstances as against us and to
find ourselves in a bit of a toxic cycle. That
might be a harsh truth, that might be something that
you don't really want to hear. I probably didn't want
to hear it when I first did. But one of
the only things we can control in this world is
how we reac act to what happens to us, and
(35:02):
how we as much as we can positively integrate that
into our story and find a way to learn and
grow from it, like it just kind of sucks sometimes
because a lot of the time we didn't do the
damage in the first place, the stress or the pain,
it wasn't caused by us, but we do get to
reclaim our power in response to it and coming back
(35:22):
to our adaptive, positive ways of coping. So, firstly, if
you've become really reliant on maladaptive coping, you have to
understand why that might be. Is it past trauma, is
it stress overload? Is it because you don't know any
other way to cope? Is it the immediate relief? Is
it the temporary control? Is it history? Getting clear and
(35:44):
where it begins helps you find an alternative and practice
those positive alternatives. It's really annoying and frustrating that adaptive
coping mechanisms take a while to really take hold, but
it's one of those things that really I think deserves
an investment. I saw this really interesting. I don't know
if it was on like Twitter or I don't know,
but somebody said this the other day. I read it
(36:06):
somewhere that was like, you can ruin your life in
a second. What is something that you can do in
that same amount of time that would drastically improve your life,
and it is positive croping. If you've had a stressful
day and you want like to have just a huge
rant to your friend, or you want to have half
a bottle of wine, try something else first. Try something
more energetic or nourishing for you, nourishing for your soul,
(36:28):
nourishing for your mental health. Try something that your mind
and your nervous system will thank you for later. Maybe
some somatic healing. Have a dance around your house, get
the nervous energy out some movement, Take ten minutes and
do a brain dump. One of my favorite things to
do is called progressive relaxation, where you work from your
toes to your forehead, really tensing and then releasing your
(36:51):
muscles and notice, pay attention. Do you feel the stress
lesson in your body? Do you feel less overwhelmed? Adopting
more positive coping strategies is as much about relearning what
your body and your mind responds to as it is
unlearning previously counterproductive ways of dismissing or suppressing your hard emotions.
(37:15):
Something that really helped me was coping statements as well,
and the list I Love the Most was created by
these two psychologists back in twenty fifteen and I love
them because these statements have really helped me reshape the
narrative in my head, or the narrative that I used
to have that anything I did wouldn't help my circumstances.
You know that learned helplessness mindset, and the statements include
(37:36):
things like, I'm going to face this challenge and handle
it as best as I can, even if the outcome
doesn't change. It might not work out one hundred percent,
but you know, I'm going to give it my best
and see what happens. I've been in this situation before,
and I've survived. I am strong enough to handle this
whatever it is that it happens. Things often aren't as
bad as they first seem. Those are your coping statements.
(38:00):
Hopefully you see why these would be helpful, right. It's
not just about thinking positive thoughts or whatever like that
toxic positivity mindset, but being able to just acknowledge that, yes,
this circumstance is sucky, this is shitty, this is annoying.
I can't change that situation, but I am capable. I
am the common denominator. My actions are a big factor
(38:21):
in pushing through and changing next week's circumstances or changing
how I respond. That kind of brings me to my
next tip. Know yourself and know your stresses. If there
is a situation you know you struggle with and you
will really have to rely on your coping mechanisms, perhaps
more than normal, make yourself a list of what works.
(38:43):
Make yourself a dictionary of coping, and include in that
list one thing from every bucket that we spoke about before.
An emotion focused way of coping, social focused, meaning focused,
and problem focused. It's like having four lines of defense.
So for me, you know, I know that going on
(39:05):
a plane is something that's really stressful. For others, it
might be exam season, it might be seeing your family.
For me, it is going on a plane. And I
have in my notes at all times a list of
like ten plus things I know will help me before, during,
and after a flight. I also have, you know, five
statements that help me rationalize my feelings, five affirmations. I
(39:25):
have my anxiety meditation downloaded. You know, the more productive adaptive,
positive coping skills you have in your artillery, the better
it's going to be, because it's the security of having
multiple things you can fall back on. I think at
the end of the day, I'm going to say it again,
and you're probably like, Okay, I get it. But you know,
coping isn't just about eliminating bad feelings, because we know
(39:48):
that feelings are not evil, they're not bad, they are
just our body trying to communicate with us. Coping is
also not about always having an answer or a solution.
It's about rezili alliance. And the four biggest factors and
contributors to resilience are wellness and taking care of yourself
in the good times and the bad. Healthy thinking, being
(40:11):
realistic about your problems, not you know, catastrophizing or doomsdaying.
Finding meaning and purpose, knowing that there is a deeper
part of you that these hard times can't touch. And finally,
connection sharing, being vulnerable, having an open heart even when
it is really difficult to reach out. That makes us.
You know, that kind of makes up part of our
(40:32):
social focused coping skills. But I think if you want
to be resilient, focus on what you can do when
times are good, but also find a way to lean
back on your positive relationships so that it doesn't feel
like you're only doing so during a crisis, and so
that you avoid withdrawal and isolation. Because I think that
always just makes things a hundred times worse. Coping mechanisms,
(40:57):
at the end of the day, they are the umbrella
in the storm. Right, it's still going to be raining,
but you're carrying something with you that you can pull
out to protect yourself. You are changing how you react
to a bad day at work, how you react to
a fight with your partner, how you react to a
bad mental health day, a bad mental health month. And
it's not about ignoring it. It's not about letting it
(41:19):
consume you. It's about having this relationship with your emotions
whereby you're like you were just a little ghost in
my house, And yeah, I wish I could get rid
of you, but maybe I won't. So let's find a
way to move forward and integrate what I'm experiencing. So
thank you so much for listening. If you have made
it this far, I really enjoyed this episode. I feel
like I needed a reminder on coping mechanisms. It might
(41:42):
seem so basic, right, it might seem so boring, But
for so many of us, when was the last time
like you really sat down and thought about what skills
you had to make hard things in your life a
little bit easier. When were we ever taught that. It's
just mind blowing to me that I went to school
for so many years and nobody ever did a class
(42:04):
on this, nobody ever explained these things to me. So
hopefully this is the education that you needed when it
came to this topic. As always, if there is somebody
who needs to hear this episode, please feel free to
share a link, send them a screenshot, whatever you would like.
And if you enjoyed this episode, please leave a five
star review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you are listening
(42:27):
right now. It will take a couple seconds and it
really does help the show to grow when you leave
nice reviews. I read them all, so chances are if
you have already, I've read it and I've saved it
into my little smile file and I really appreciate it.
And if you do have an episode's suggestion, I say
this at the end of every episode, hit me up
on Instagram at that Psychology podcast. I would love to
(42:49):
hear from you. And until next time, stay safe, stay kind,
be gentle with yourself, please, and we will talk soon.
Host
Jemma Sbeghen
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