A coping strategy is a short-term solution to emotional suffering:
You feel anxious, so you do a deep breathing exercise.
You feel angry, so you count to 10 before acting.
You feel insecure, so you repeat a positive affirmation.
While there’s a time and place for coping strategies, most people don’t think enough about their downsides:
Coping strategies treat the symptom but often ignore the cause.
If you’re tired of struggling with low self-esteem, learn to identify these 5 common coping strategies and rethink your reliance on them.
- Staying busy all the time
Chronic busyness is a coping strategy people resort to when they’re afraid of their own minds.
At the root of most forms of mental suffering is a subtle but powerful fear — the fear of your own mind:
You may be afraid that if you have enough anxious thoughts, you’ll end up having a panic attack.
You might be afraid that if you have a disturbing thought — about hurting someone, for instance — that it means you’re really a psychopath.
You might be afraid that if you feel too sad for too long, you’ll end up getting depressed again.
Whatever the case may be, without knowing it you may have developed a phobia of your own mind — an excessive fear of your own thoughts, emotions, memories, and desires.
And as a way to avoid being surprised by any of these “bad” thoughts or feelings, you’ve developed a coping strategy to try and keep them at bay — constant busyness:
You keep your schedule jam-packed so you never have too much downtime.
You always have the radio on, TV playing in the background, or some other form of noise any time you’re alone.
You feel anxious and uneasy unless other people are around you or in communication with you.
In addition to being incredibly stressful and exhausting in the long-run, there’s an even more costly side effect of chronic busyness:
If you constantly run away from your thoughts and feelings, you train your brain to be afraid of them.
When you habitually try to avoid things, your brain interprets them as threats, which means it stays increasingly vigilant for them and tends to react with a strong fight or flight response when they do show up.
In the end, you can’t outrun your own mind. Best to face up to things squarely and learn to live with all your thoughts and feelings — the good, the bad, and even the ugly.
Those who are wise won’t be busy, and those who are too busy can’t be wise.
- Superficial Inspiration
Feeling inspired is often the biggest obstacle to actually accomplishing things.
From pump-up Tony Robbins clips on YouTube to quotes from Seneca and Marcus Aurelius in your Twitter feed, 21st Century life has no shortage of inspiring bits of wisdom and motivation. In fact, it’s possible we have a glut.
Consider the following:
Imagine yourself sitting down at your desk early one morning to finally work on that novel/programming project/guitar lesson you keep telling yourself you want to do. You take a few stabs at your project but quickly start to feel frustrated and discouraged because you’re still struggling and seemingly so far away from your goal.
So you tell yourself that what you need is a little inspiration and you hop over to YouTube and search “motivational videos.” You watch a couple, feel much more inspired, then look down at your phone, realize you don’t have any time left, and move on to the next part of your day.
While you managed to feel more inspired and less frustrated, your goal is just as far away as it ever was.
Here’s the problem:
External sources of inspiration are frequently a distraction from simply doing the work — the difficult, frustrating, lonely work.
Few things worth doing will be frustration-free. Which means that if you can’t tolerate difficult feelings of frustration and disappointment and push on regardless, you’ll end up never achieving your goals and feeling terrible about yourself as a result.
Stop relying on other people for inspiration and learn to inspire yourself by doing the work that matters most.
Remember that frustration, anxiety, embarrassment, and disappointment are all natural feelings when working on something important. None of those successful people ever talk about it, but the secret they don’t share is how they learned to work with their frustration instead of numbing it out watching YouTube videos.
We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.
- Hypercriticism
Criticizing others is often a subtle defense mechanism designed to make us feel better about ourselves.
Criticism isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The ability to think carefully about our world and other people is an essential skill:
If you want a happy marriage, you need to be able to think critically about the person you’re dating and whether they would really be a good partner.
If you want to lose weight for good this time, you need to think critically about a diet that’s actually s
