Replace Coping Mechanisms With Generative Rituals

All right, so welcome to the mantalks show. I'm Connor Beaton, and today we're gonna be talking about the second installment of the Mental Health Month, which is replacing your negative coping mechanisms with generative rituals. So in this video, I'm going to talk about why coping mechanisms get built, what generative rituals are. I'm actually going to break down what a ritual is. We hear this term all the time. You know, have rituals, make sure you have good rituals. But for the average person, they're. I don't know really what the hell a ritual is, other than the things that I've seen in religion or, you know, when I used to go to church on Sunday. And so I'm going to break down what a ritual is and what the etymology is and what the term actually initially meant and why it's so important, especially in our modern culture. And then I'm going to give you three tactical steps that I took to shift out of my negative coping mechanisms and into more generative rituals. Because, to be honest, I had pretty much every single coping mechanism known to man. Like, that's probably an embellishment, an exaggeration, but, I mean, I had a ton of coping strategies to deal with. The stress, the anxieties, the loneliness, the fear of death, the fear of abandonment, neglect, insecurities, the general human experience that we all have. Overeating from a very young age, using drugs, using alcohol, using porn to sort of numb out and distract myself, and excessive masturbation. Sometimes we're really getting personal right now. I know, Getting the whole. You're getting the whole thing. I mean, drugs, porn, alcohol, sex, women, constantly texting multiple women at the same time and engaging in relationships, social media, you know, endless amounts of time on social media, binge watching tv. I mean, I kind of ran the gamut. The only thing that I didn't really get into was, was gambling, mostly because I had a bad experience. I turned 18 and went to the casino with some friends and lost like $500, which at the time, when I was 18, that was like my life SA. And I was like, this is fucking terrible. I'm never going to do this again. For whatever reason, I sort of, like, learned my lesson in that one area. But everywhere else I was like, you know, just complete mess. So let's talk about why we develop coping mechanisms in the first place, especially ones that we consciously and cognitively know. Like, we. On a logical, rational level, we know that they're not healthy, right? Whether it's excessive drinking, you know, we have a few Bottles of, of beer or a bottle of wine every single night to sor with our day, or, you know, we have to smoke weed in order to go to bed, or, you know, so that we. So that we don't deal with our anxiety or the physical unrest that we sort of feel or, you know, we're. We're binge eating food, we're overeating, which, you know, is really where it started for me as a kid. I didn't really know how to deal with the stress of my home environment. I didn't know how to deal with the challenges that I faced at school and not feeling like I belonged. My own insecurities. And for whatever reason, I to get a lot of attention and praise for my ability to just eat copious amounts of food. I got a lot of what I thought was positive attention. And so I took on this sort of moniker, this label of being like the human garbarator, as if that was a good thing. And so from a very early age, I have a lot of memories from, you know, being like 8, 9, 10, 12 years old and eating myself sick, like literally eating until I felt sick. And when I look back at that time in my life, what I'm really present to is the fact that I was struggling emotionally. I was really dealing with a lot of stuff with, you know, parents, divorce and family and trying to fit in with school. And no one was really teaching me how to deal with that stress and the anxiety that I had as a kid. And so what did I do? I started to use food as a means of numbing out some of that anxiety and numbing out some of that stress that I felt as a child of not belonging or not fitting in or feeling neglected. And then when I was, you know, 12, 13, 14 years old, I found porn that sort of got layered on top. It didn't replace the food. The binge eating. I kept the binge eating and I added in porn. And then as I went through, you know, I sort of added in these, these other layers of coping mechanisms. But in a simplest, in its simplest form, a coping mechanism is there because we are trying to avoid something that we are experiencing, something we are feeling within us that the mind doesn't want to deal with, doesn't know how to deal with. So the body's sorting, sending information about maybe the experience of depression or anxiety or heightened levels of stress or loneliness or neglect and abandonment or rage and frustration. And the mind says, I don't know how to deal with this. No one's taught me how to Deal with this. But I've learned along the way that I can suppress or repress that experience simply by using this external behavior or this external device, right? Whether again, it's binge watching TV or overeating or whatever it is that we use. And so in many cases, we are either trying not to experience or we're trying to move towards something, right? We're trying to avoid pain or we're trying to get pleasure. And sometimes those things go hand in hand, right? Especially when we're using food and porn and drugs and alcohol and stuff like that. We are trying to consume something that makes us feel good, to sort of paint over over the experience of something that we are going through that we don't really want to be or know how to digest, right? So what happens is our nervous system actually sets off the alarm, right? So our sympathetic nervous system, which is kind of like the fight, flight or freeze response in our body, whenever we're feeling that heightened level of anxiety or stress, or maybe it's anger and rage for you or loneliness, our body will set off the alarm system, our sympathetic nervous system will go off and our brain will say there's something wrong. And even maybe it's not at like a heightened alarm level, right? Maybe it's not like a 10 out of 10. Maybe it's just like a 4 or 5 out of 10 on the anxiety or stress level. And our body says, ah, it's kind of. Our mind says, our body's kind of freaking out right now. It's getting a little bit too high. And so we. I need something to deal with this tension. And so really a coping mechanism is there to in some ways regulate your internal sense of homeostasis, right? All of our, all of our bodies are looking to be regulated and find a sense of cohesion, coherence. And balance maybe isn't the right word, but alignment and congruence. And when the system gets too stressed or taxed, it looks for mechanisms to bring it back into balance. And many of us haven't been taught simple generative rituals that can help put us back into balance. And so we seek these, these sort of very Westernized Americana sort of capitalistic pieces that allow us to pretend like we have balance, that sort of trick our nervous into feeling dulled out, right? Like if you're, if you have a lot of anxiety at the end of the day and you know you have to smoke a joint before you go to bed or a bowl to go to bed, that is a very sort of medicated way. And as A mentor of mine once said, you need to medicate less and meditate more. And so a ritual in its simplest form is going to be a form of meditation. Not in its traditional sense that you need to sit and, you know, try and clear out all the clutter, but in the sense that it is a practice, an experience that is going to bring you back into a sense of coherence with yourself and with your community writ large. So let's talk about a ritual, what rituals are. And I'm going to give you some very specific, tactical things to try so that you can move the needle, to move those coping mechanisms to more generative rituals, so that you can help find that sense of coherence and balance within yourself. So what is a ritual? I did a good amount of studying on this, and this is something that's always fascinated me, because I think modern spirituality within our culture uses this term a lot, but never really defines it. And because of that, you have a lot of people talking about rituals, but they don't really know why they're using them, why they're important. And so the etymology of a ritual is ritus, and that's Latin. And that Latin originally meant a proven way. And so rituals were a proven way of doing something. And in its original space, a ritual was about bringing together or bringing you back into a proven way of being where you could bridge the gap between the profane and the sacred. And so rituals sort of allowed us to bridge the gap between the everyday and the. And the mythical or the mysterious aspects of existence and life. It's almost like rituals act as the bridge between the yin and the yang, right? You have the. The dark and the light. You have the known and the unknown. And rituals allow us to bridge that gap and act as a means of merging or helping our inner experience be in coherence with our external world. And that was the other part of rituals. Rituals were really meant to help us as individuals be in coherence with our community and our society at large. And so you see a lot of rituals that are done not just as on an individual level, but they're done in groups, then they're done as a community. They were really meant to bring a kind of moral coherence and social coherence within the community without sort of forcing people, you know, later on in. In our history, they kind of got hijacked by religion and politics, and now, you know, they're sort of seen and talked about in these ways of not coherence, but compliance. And I think a lot of People approach rituals with that compliance based mindset. You know, they're trying to force them into the waking up at 6am and calling it a ritual. They're trying to force themselves into the morning journaling and complying to this, to this rule that they're instituting in their life. And they're missing the sort of sacred quality that a ritual is meant to embody or bring into their life. It's meant to help us contact that mysterious unknown level of existence or of experience, whether that's external or internal. Internal. And there's a lot about ourselves that we don't know. And for many people, that unknown within us or that unknown within life can be quite frightening. And so that sometimes is even the thing that we're running from. And so to use ritual is to really allow us to reconnect and find a deeper level of coherence. The last thing I want to say is I use the word generative rituals very specifically because generative in many ways is the experience of relating to or capable of production or reproduction. So this is about being able to expand in some ways. Generative, you know, is, is used in all sorts of things today, generative farming, generative commerce, et cetera. But here generative is about returning to a sense of inner coherence, inner alignment, inner authenticity. And so when we have a generative ritual, it's about bringing us closer to who we see ourselves as capable of being and becoming. It's about being able to in some sense, own the truth of who we are at our core and know ourselves to be in a loving capacity. So let's just talk about some of the tactical pieces. And if you have questions or you want to add to what I've talked about, please comment on this video. I would love to hear what your thoughts are, what questions you have, what you would like to challenge, or you know, what you'd like to know more about. So now let's talk about the tactical pieces that I used specifically in my life to move from these coping mechanisms and coping strategies to more generative daily rituals to bring a higher level of coherence, alignment and authenticity into my life. The first one was that I spent time journaling on the question what I'm feeling right before using this coping mechanism is what I'm feeling or wanting to avoid feeling. That's the important part. What I'm feeling or wanting to avoid feeling right before using this coping mechanism is. And so this is a really important part because for most of us, our coping mechanisms are completely unconscious. We're not really aware that we even feel that coping mechanism happening. And so we need to get present to what are we experiencing. Am I having anxiety? Do I feel depressed and lonely? Do I feel frustrated and angry? And I don't know how to deal with that, Am I really stressed out? Right. Anxiety and stress kind of go hand in hand. So getting more present and aware to the sensations, the experience physically, somatically, within the body, some of the thoughts within the mind and some of the emotions that you might be feeling is going to help you identify when that coping mechanism is starting to rear its head, right? Because maybe that coping mechanism doesn't get put into place until you're at like a 7 on the anxiety scale. And so if you can start to feel that experience in your body beforehand, you can start to use the generative rituals before you even get to that place of wanting to use the coping mechanism. So spend a week or two journaling about that question what I'm feeling or wanting to avoid feeling right before using this coping mechanism is, so spend some time with that, sit with it, notice it when it comes up, when that coping mechanism is rearing its head. The second one is choose a coping mechanism that you'd like to shift and specifically commit to replacing it with a generative ritual. So maybe instead of watching porn when you're feeling stressed as a form of release, or smoking weed or having a drink at the end of the day when you just want to relax, you Specifically choose for 30 days, you commit for a period of time, right? Set a smart goal, specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time bound. So you, you pick a period of time, let's just say 30 days, because that's measurable and realistic. And you Decide that for 30 days you are not going to use that coping mechanism. But every time you feel like you want to use that coping mechanism, you are going to do this generative ritual. It could be yoga, it could be Tai Chi, it could be going out in the garage and hitting your punching bag for 30 minutes. It could be meditation, breathwork. Breathwork was the big one for me because usually what was happening is that I was feeling something in my body. I was feeling stress, I was feeling anxiety, I was feeling frustration or loneliness. And so breath work can really help bring some of those experiences, some of those emotions up to the surface so that you can actually feel them and process them in a very meaningful way. So you're actually digesting your experience rather than trying to numb your experience, you know, which can make us sort of emotionally, intellectually constipated so those are the two main things that I would encourage you to try. The last one that I want to leave you with is for you to define what a generative ritual looks like for you. This is really important because you know you can take my insight on it, but I would encourage you to spend some time defining what a generative ritual looks like for you, specifically with the definition that it brings you back into a deeper level of coherence, alignment and authenticity. And so it might be helpful for you to just say, do some journaling on I feel the most coherent when I feel the most incoherent, internally, when I feel the most authentic, when I feel the most aligned, when, and then just start to get a deeper sense of what are some of the foundational pieces. Maybe there's already some generative rituals that you're using to put you into that state, but start to get a deeper sense of what leaves you feeling incoherence, what leaves you feeling aligned, and what leaves you feeling authentic. So thanks so much for tuning in. Comment below with what questions you have. Don't forget to share this and I would love to hear what you have and what you would like to contribute to this conversation and if there are other pieces to this that you would like me to dive further into. So thanks very much. Until next week, this is Connor Beaton signing off.