Coping and it’s Stigma as Weakness
Coping Basics: The Balancing Act of Life
Coping is often misunderstood. When it comes up in movies, shows, conversation, etc. it frequently has this intentional or unintentional tone of insult, jab, accusation, warning, or condescension.
Many people associate it with negative behaviors—drinking, avoidance, or other ways we "deal" with problems without truly addressing them. However, coping is much more than that. At its core, it’s an essential part of how we maintain balance, or with a more technical term from the biology world is homeostasis—which has less assumptions and baggage.
The human brain is constantly engaged in a balancing act, reacting to stress, emotions, and the demands of daily life—most often without our conscious awareness. In fact, many forms of coping are hardwired into us, deeply rooted in evolutionary processes that help us survive.
Coping: More Than a Conscious Choice
Before diving into examples, it's important to recognize that much of our coping happens below the surface of our awareness. The brain is wired for survival, and one of its primary tasks is managing the complex world around us while keeping us emotionally and physically stable. Coping is a big part of this. It is the brain’s way of protecting us, managing stress, and helping us adapt to new situations. While we are not mere automatons, blindly responding to stimuli, we do have evolved systems that influence how we cope, often without our intentional control.
This can be both beneficial and challenging. We live in an increasingly complex world filled with more stimuli than ever before—especially for children, who are now exposed to vast amounts of information and stressors at an early age. Our coping mechanisms are constantly working in the background, processing this information and maintaining balance. This complexity can make it difficult to consciously recognize all the ways we cope.
Everyday Examples of Coping
Coping doesn’t only appear when we’re overwhelmed. It’s at play throughout our day, often in subtle ways. Here are a few examples of everyday coping mechanisms we might not even recognize:
Daydreaming: When we mentally drift off for a few moments, our brain may be coping with stress or boredom. It’s a way to give ourselves a break from constant focus.
Physical Movement: Fidgeting, pacing, or going for a walk can be coping strategies to release pent-up energy or manage anxiety.
Routine Behaviors: Washing the dishes or organizing the house can be ways we cope with feelings of chaos or a need for control.
Social Media Browsing: While often criticized, scrolling through social media can sometimes serve as a quick mental escape when our brain feels overstimulated.
These are often minor, healthy ways our brain helps us adjust and cope with daily stressors. They are part of the natural balancing act our brain performs to maintain equilibrium.
When Coping is Healthy
Coping can be a powerful, healthy force that helps us navigate difficult times. Some of the healthiest ways of coping can involve things like:
Exercise: Physical activity is a highly effective way to reduce stress, boost mood, and regulate emotions. Whether it’s running, yoga, or even gardening, these activities help maintain balance.
Social Support: Talking with friends or family, engaging in supportive communities, and seeking emotional validation are all coping strategies that allow us to process emotions and avoid feeling isolated.
Creativity: Art, writing, music, or even cooking can provide outlets for emotional expression, helping us cope with difficult feelings in constructive ways.
Mindfulness and Relaxation: Practices like meditation, deep breathing, or simply taking time to relax are coping strategies that help regulate our nervous system, providing moments of calm in stressful situations.
When Coping Becomes Problematic
However, coping is not always healthy. Sometimes, the strategies we develop early in life—especially those learned in childhood—can become maladaptive, leading to long-term problems. These strategies may have been helpful at one point, but over time, they can create more harm than good.
Substance Use: Drugs, alcohol, or overeating can initially serve as ways to "escape" from overwhelming emotions, but over time, they can lead to addiction and damage relationships, careers, and health.
Avoidance: Constantly avoiding difficult emotions or situations can lead to emotional numbness and anxiety. Avoidance prevents us from processing the issues at hand, prolonging the stress.
Overworking: While hard work is often seen as positive, constantly throwing oneself into work to avoid confronting personal issues is a form of unhealthy coping. It can lead to burnout, exhaustion, and emotional disconnection.
The challenge is that many of these coping strategies develop early, sometimes in response to difficult environments or during childhood. For example, a child who grew up in a chaotic or unsafe environment might have learned to disconnect emotionally as a way to survive. This emotional numbing might have been necessary then but becomes problematic in adulthood when it interferes with relationships or emotional growth.
Shifting Coping Strategies Over Time
What’s important to remember is that coping strategies can change as our life circumstances change. During particularly stressful periods, we might engage in coping behaviors that seem unhealthy or undesirable. Yet, as life calms down, we often return to healthier forms of coping.
For instance:
- During a stressful time at work, someone might rely on comfort food or binge-watching TV shows as a way to decompress. This might not be the healthiest way to cope, but it works for the time being. Later, when things settle down, they may naturally shift back to healthier strategies like going for walks or spending time with loved ones.
- A person going through grief might withdraw socially for a while, isolating themselves to cope with their emotions. But once they start to heal, they might re-engage with their community and find healthier ways to cope with their loss.
It’s important to have empathy for ourselves during these shifts. We can’t always control how we cope, and beating ourselves up for unhealthy behaviors only adds to the burden.
Why Do We Struggle to Change Coping Behaviors?
Many people feel conflicted when they recognize that their coping strategy is harmful, yet they continue to engage in it. This conflict is a common human experience, and it speaks to the deep, subconscious pull that coping behaviors can have on us. Even when we know something is "bad" for us, it can be incredibly hard to simply "choose" a better alternative. The brain’s wiring and the emotional connections tied to our coping mechanisms often go deeper than conscious choice.
For example, someone who turns to alcohol during stressful times may fully understand that it's harmful. Yet, the subconscious pull toward that behavior might be tied to deeper issues like unresolved trauma, learned behaviors from their environment, or simply the overwhelming nature of their current stress. It’s not just about making a different choice—it’s about understanding the layers of emotion, history, and brain chemistry that drive that behavior.
The Stigma Around Coping Strategies
Some coping strategies, like substance abuse, can hijack lives—but this is an easy example as there are many others that are less obvious but are not recognized as such because of social conditioning and what is okay and what is not okay. While it’s easy to stigmatize those who struggle with addiction or self-destructive coping mechanisms, it's essential to understand that these individuals often didn’t have the support, resources, or knowledge at critical moments in their lives to choose healthier alternatives.
Many people who fall into these destructive patterns were coping the best way they knew how at the time. Without a stable support system or the tools to handle stress in a healthier way, they turned to the only options available to them that were more often than not being offered by friends or family—who obviously were in their own trap unfortunately.
So often as I speak and ask these patients the history or events before they went down that line, it’s heartbreaking that that theme of “they were only trying to help” is there.
Tragically, some of these coping strategies—especially drugs—are highly aggressive in their ability to take over lives, making it harder and harder to escape—so can you imagine how hard this must and how this just feeds shame when those around them are reminding them how stupid it is to “make that choice” again?
It truly is a trap and although these type of scenarios are painful for all involved (like loved ones) it again just emphasizes how much hardwiring there is under the surface we are unable to see and understand.
Compassion is Key
At the heart of this discussion is the need for compassion—both for ourselves and for others. Coping is hardwired into our being. It’s a fundamental part of survival, and yet it’s not always easy to manage. The balance between healthy and unhealthy coping is one of the great challenges of life because there are not signs at the supermarket that say “healthy” or “unhealthy,” or flashing warnings in the App Store that gives apps a “suck you in” scale or measurement on how much this TV series or that channel will compete with your attention to your family or even the things you “use” to like to do.
Even when a healthier option is staring us in the face, the subconscious pulls and emotional forces can make change incredibly difficult. We are only scratching the surface of this complexity in science and I don’t believe it’s something we were meant to understand fully. Learn about sure but fully be aware of? No. Not in this life. I truly believe the experience of it was the intention.
While certainly knowledge of complex sociobiological and human development has many gifts that will bless the world and smooth the ride, we simply cannot live long enough to master it in this life no matter how hard we try. But the Lord wanted trying not mastering.
Instead of beating ourselves up for our coping behaviors, we need to recognize that we’re more often than not, doing the best we can with the resources we have at the moment. The more we understand how coping works, the more empathy we can have for ourselves and others. And with that empathy comes the ability to learn, grow, and—over time—shift toward healthier coping strategies that help us thrive.
