Weekly Training: The Ultimate Guide To Coping Mechanisms

Welcome to the mantalks show. I'm Connor Beaton and today we are going to talk about everything you need to know about coping mechanisms. This is. I've tried to make this as detailed and comprehensive as possible. And this actually comes from. I've had a lot of people reach out through Instagram and ask questions about, you know, what is a coping mechanism? Are there good coping mechanisms? Are there bad coping mechanisms? And recently in the shadow work program that I released, I had a few people bring up these types of questions around coping mechanisms. And are some of these coping mechanisms in the shadow? Are they things that, you know, are. Do our coping mechanisms help us better understand the shadow? And so this comes from a question somebody said. So are coping mechanisms bad? Are they not there to help you deal with something that otherwise you wouldn't be able to deal with? And what if you did not have any? What if you don't have any coping mechanisms? I understand that they are a symptom to a root cause, that something has caused these coping mechanisms. Is that correct? And how do I deal with them? So let's talk a little bit first about what a coping mechanism is. Then let's talk a little bit about the good and the bad ones and how coping mechanisms and sometimes defense mechanisms are a little bit different. So I'll make that distinction as well. So a coping mechanism is something that can show up in a response to a perceived stressful situation. So it's the body's. It's your internal ecosystem's response, your neurological response, physiological response, nervous system's response to a stressful situation. So significant life events. And again, this stressful situation can be positive or negative in our subjective perception. So both positive and negative events in our lives can cause psychological and emotional stress or duress. So difficult life events like going through a breakup or getting fired and laid off, or having conflict with your partner, or more extreme things to losing a job, all of those can cause a sense of grief and distress and stress within the body. And that stress will put us into a sympathetic nervous system response. So it will release cortisol in the body and it'll flood our gut and our brain, sometimes with adrenaline, but specifically with that cortisol, which is a stress hormone. And our body will feel in a state that it needs to sort of come down from or come up from. And depending on how you deal with stress response, you might downregulate or upregulate. So all that that means is that you might upregulate and move into a space of becoming Much more active, much more vibrant. So you, like, vibrate at a higher frequency. So you might upregulate and want to deal with that stress through the coping mechanism of taking stimulants, right? Drinking more coffee, having a Coca cola, eating a chocolate bar, watching horror films or action movies. Or you might downregulate by endlessly scrolling through social media or smoking a joint to help calm you down or whatever the case may be. So that's the difference between upregulation and down regulation within coping mechanisms. But even positive events can cause stress within the body, right? So things like having a kid, which I'm about to enter into, things like date, you know, going on a, on a new date with somebody, buying a home, all of those things can, while they're positive, be stressful in their inherent nature. And especially when those positive things are new and they're foreign, our brain can't predict what's going to happen. And so when we don't know what's going not going to happen, when we can't sort of figure out or predict and we don't have a good structure internally, psychologically, cognitively to predict what's going to happen, our brain doesn't like that. And so it can, it can also produce stress. So how do we deal with that positive or negative stressful situation? For some of us, we will have a, a coping mechanism response. And I'm going to, I'm going to just break the coping mechanisms down into two forms. So I'm not going talk about good coping mechanisms or bad coping mechanisms. I'm going to talk about maladaptive and virtuous coping mechanisms. So there's two different forms that we can look at before we dive into the difference between maladaptive and adaptive. I just want to talk about the difference between a defense mechanism and a coping mechanism because these often get confused. And sometimes when people are in conflict in a relationship, you'll hear like, oh, that's just a coping mechanism, that's just a defense mechanism. And they might be mislabeled. So let's just talk about these two concepts because while they're similar in some ways, they're quite different. So a coping mechanism is used to manage often an external situation that's creating problems or stress or duress for us as individuals. And defense mechanisms can often change our internal psychological state. So defense mechanisms mostly occur at an often unconscious level. So if you think about getting into conflict with your partner, a lot of the times when we become defensive, we don't even know that we're becoming defensive, we're just reactive. Maybe we're angry, maybe we've shut down, maybe we're closed off, maybe we've become critical of them. So we're generally unconscious. Defense mechanisms are generally unconscious. And when we have a defense mechanism, we are often unaware that we are enacting a defense mechanism. Whereas with a coping mechanism, there's often a cognition there, right, that you pick up your phone, you're endlessly scrolling, you're like, I know I'm avoiding sending that email. I know that I'm avoiding the conversation with my partner. I know that right now I'm feeling anxiety that I don't want to feel and so I'm distracting myself. Right. There's a little bit more of a cognitive connection when it comes to coping mechanisms. And so really what I would like you to do is just think about some of the ways in which you cope with stress. How do you as an individual cope with stress? You could even write down a question to answer later, which is how I cope with stress is. And the mechanisms, behaviors and patterns that I use to cope with stress are. So you can start to explore some of those. So let's talk about the distinction between maladaptive coping mechanisms or sort of quote unquote unhealthy coping mechanisms and virtuous coping mechanisms. So the maladaptive ones are as follows. Self harm. Self harm is a form of a maladaptive coping mechanism. So we as an individual may engage in some form of a behavior when we are trying to deal with a trauma response. So something that has triggered a similar context to our trauma in the past, whether that's sexual or physical or whatever the trauma was. And so self harm can look a number of ways. Right. For some people it's a physical form of self harm. Things that maybe look like cutting, but self harm can be also abusive thoughts. Right. We can have very sort of abusive internal dialogue which will lead to self harm. Excessive drinking, excessive drugs. Right? So if your somebody that feels very stressed out during the week and you go and get blitzed on the weekend. Right. I know I used to do that in my younger days. And that was a form of self harm. So self harm is a form of a maladaptive coping mechanism. Next one is numbing. And numbing is a little bit more, I would say it's probably one of the most popular coping mechanisms. I don't know if we're rating these things by popularity. I don't think that that's useful. But from the work that I've done, I Think it's the one that most people are in contact with. Right. So numbing often is labeled as like a self soothing behavior. Right. We have, we have this perspective that we know that we're stressed out, maybe we feel anxious, maybe we feel alone or sad or angry or whatever the case may be. And we're using often an external substance in order to do that to numb out how we're feeling. So when a person is moving towards numbing, they are usually aware, again, there's a cognition there, there's a understanding that what they're doing is an act to seek out something that will help them numb out the pain, override their stress, or sort of drown out or ignore the conflict or the chaos, you know, that that's brewing internally. And so people will seek to numb out their. Yeah, see, people will seek to numb out stress and anxiety and loneliness and sadness or anger or grief by things like drinking alcohol, eating junk food, scrolling through social media, binge watching TV episodes. I mean, if you've ever watched a season or two of a certain TV show more than like two or three times, it's probably a numbing agent. I'm just gonna put that out there. If you've watched Friends 10 times, like it's, you know, it's there to, as a coping mechanism. So that's what numbing is. Numbing is, is, is a coping mechanism designed to repress or help us avoid the overwhelming feeling or experience that we're having internally. Whether it's stress or anxiety or whatever the case may be. The next one is escape. So some of us will use escapism as a means to cope with things like anxiety or stress. And so we will isolate ourselves completely from friends, from family. So when conflict comes up, stress arises within your relationship. Maybe you use withdrawing, cutting yourself off from your partner, not talking to them, not engaging, you know, sort of walling them off for days at a time. That type of escapism is a maladaptive attempt at protecting the self. And so we can isolate and put ourselves into playing video games or reading or again, being online or watching television or whatever the case may be. But we'll escape. And generally we're both escaping from the external stressor and from the internal stressor. So we're both trying to escape from what we perceive to be causing our stress and the stress internally. Next is unhealthy self regulation, unhealthy self regulating. So for some of us, when we feel stress and, or anxiety and whatever the other the stressful internal state is, we will enact an attempt to self regulate or self soothe in a way that is detrimental to us. So some of these, like I talked about before, include things like binge drinking, excessive video games. Right? So you're playing like eight hours at a time, excessive pornography watching. Right. You're watching like three, four hours of porn a day, or you're masturbating, you know, four or five times a day. And it's an attempt to escape from or soothe what's happening internally. Overeating, binge drinking, those types of things as well. So that is unhealthy self regulation. And lastly is a predilection towards risk taking. So really being drawn towards risky situations and scenarios that you know are not healthy for you. Right. Adrenaline invoking, sort of scandalous risky situations and behaviors like gambling, prostitution, sometimes for some people, theft, really reckless driving. Right. I used to do that one as well. It's interesting as I go through this and as I talk about this, I've had all of these maladaptive coping mechanisms. Just so we're clear. Throughout my life I have had all of these maladaptive coping mechanisms. And that's because there was trauma, there was abuse in my life. And so, you know, we have a tendency to lean on maladaptive, unhealthy coping mechanisms when we've had trauma, when we've had abandonment, neglect in our past, when there's addiction in our family, when we have, when we have experienced tremendous amounts of shame in our life, is when we will move towards these things. So I just want to normalize that. You, in case you hear me talking about these and you're like, oh shit, like I have a lot of these, it's okay, it happens, you know, many and most have been there. So the last one is that risk taking, risk taking. So those are the maladaptive ones. Those are the ones that we want to become aware of and we want to start to work towards moving these maladaptive coping mechanisms into more virtuous coping mechanisms. And I haven't thought of a different word for coping, for coping mechanisms in this case, but we're just going to stick with that. So adaptive or virtuous coping mechanisms. I like virtuous because it feels expansive. You know, what we're trying to do here is not live in that shameful way where we are using these maladaptive harmful coping mechanisms to deal with our stress, to deal with our sadness or our grief or whatever is happening internally for us. What we want to do is we want to be able to shift some of those maladaptive coping mechanisms to be more virtuous to serve us. We want our coping mechanisms to serve us. And so I just want you to think about that question. What would happen if my coping mechanisms were serving me in a virtuous way rather than keeping me stuck or self destructive? So let's explore virtuous coping mechanisms. So simple things, let's just start easy. Physical activity is a really good virtuous coping mechanism. Now, can some people turn this into a maladaptive one? Yes, absolutely. But for the majority of people, physical activity things like doing yoga, breath work, running, weightlifting, hockey, playing football, you know, dancing, those types of things can all help us deal with and reduce the impacts of our internal stress, anxieties, et cetera. So that is a very virtuous coping mechanism. Anything in the mindfulness realm. So mind. A mindfulness practice, like a meditation, like a breath work, like a cold immersion practice, Right. Taking cold showers, those types of pieces, those again are a virtuous, mindful coping mechanism. Things like humor, right? Humor can be an incredibly virtuous coping mechanism. So making light of certain situations.

Being able to sort of see the ease in that situation or make fun of it and be able to transform that and transmute that, alchemize that into something different. Art is a beautiful, wonderful and very expansive virtuous coping mechanism to express some of that stress or anxiety or anger or whatever is being felt internally through a medium of photography, of painting, of drawing, of singing, of dancing, of creating music. There's many more in there that I didn't list off. But art is a very generative and virtuous coping mechanism. Working on a passion project is another virtuous coping mechanism, right? So sort of pouring some of that stress into something that's just for us. I remember my uncle, when he retired, started to do soapstone carving. And I was like, why? Why are you doing that? Like, he's just, it was so random. And he said, you know, this is, this is how I'm. I'm coping with retirement. I'm starting to craft, I'm starting to build. So you could do things like building canoes, building axes or, you know, certain products, learning how to carve things. So, so you can, you can pour that self into a, you can pour that stress into a passion project that's actually becoming generative. So all of these components, the last, the last one that I'll say is the virtuous coping mechanism is being of service. So when we are of service to other people, it can be incredibly liberating for our own stress. It can help us understand our internal conflict. It can help us understand what we're going through. And so those types of pieces are very important. Now, other coping mechanisms that I'll just give you right now, virtuous coping mechanisms are things like having a gratitude practice or things like journaling, joining a men's group, being able to be a part of a community where we can have transparent discourse. Being able to have transparent discourse is also a virtuous coping mechanism, right? Being able to sit down with somebody that you trust and care about and being able to say, this is what I've been struggling, and I feel like I want to go use these maladaptive or unhealthy coping mechanisms. I just need somebody to talk to. So all of those pieces are virtuous coping mechanisms. And again, the aim here is not to villainize our coping mechanisms, because again, they are a strategy. They are a strategy that our body, that our psyche, that our ego has developed somewhere along the line to deal with something that we didn't know how to confront, that we didn't know how to deal with, right? So if you grew up in a home or went to a school where you were bullied or you were ostracized or you were made fun of, you learned how to cope with that as a child, right? Because the stress of being nine and being told that you're fat or ugly or stupid or a piece of garbage or whatever the case may be, or just feeling left out of a conversation, we learn how to deal with those things in a reactive manner. And those things can perpetuate and build and grow into coping mechanisms that no longer serve us. And so what we want to do is to come into contact with what coping mechanisms we have, how they are serving us or not serving us, and to look at how we can begin to shift our maladaptive coping mechanisms, the ones that we have, which, you know, hopefully after listening to this podcast, you have a good idea of what they are starting to shift those maladaptive coping mechanisms to more adaptive, more virtuous, more expansive, more generative, nourishing coping mechanisms so that when we feel stressed, rather than reaching for another beer or scotch or a joint or whatever the case may be, we force ourselves to sit in meditation for 15, 20 minutes. We go for a run, we have a cold shower, we do some journaling. You know, we. We call a few really close friends. And so we start to lean on these mechanisms that become generative rather than self destructive, self suppressive, and self repressive. So thank you so much for tuning into this episode. If you'd like to hear more of this episode, DM me. If you want me to talk more about coping mechanisms or the Shadow, or give you some prompts and whatnot to dig into this, let me know on Instagram mantalks and please share this episode with a few people that you know are struggling with coping mechanisms or wanting to improve how they deal with stress, how they manage their anxiety or their isolation or their loneliness. So thanks so much for tuning in. Until next week, this is Connor Beaton signing off.