Dreadless: Healthy Coping

If you are new to this blog series, please start here: Dreadless: An Introduction.

It was a hot tropical night in Costa Rica. I stood up in the middle of a crowded outdoor bar in sight of the beach and challenged everyone to a foosball tournament. There were cheers in Spanish and lots of drunken yelling as the whole bar crowded around the dusty foosball table. I gripped the handles as the ball was served onto the weathered green surface. Tracking the little white ball with robot-like precision, I flipped and spun my handles, clank! bang! With a clatter, the ball spun past my opponent’s defenses and into the goal.

I was eighteen years old, and I had been playing foosball at parties since I was fifteen. In spite of my firm belief then in the false story that I was physically inept at hand-eye coordination, I was a champion when it came to foosball.

Years later, Ace and I were staying at a hotel with a foosball table in the lobby. I bragged about how great I was and how I was going to beat him. Instead, to my great surprise, I lost miserably. It wasn’t just rustiness–I got a little better as we played a few more games, but I only performed with average ability. I never regained the champion status I had had as a teenager.

The difference? I wasn’t drunk. As a teenager, drinking had relaxed me enough to think I could play well or not care if I didn’t. Drinking took away my concern over the shame and embarrassment if I lost or did poorly.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I was using alcohol as a coping method for my awkwardness with physical skill. In daylight hours, I would never have joined a company soccer team or stepped into a basket-ball game in the park. The very idea would have terrified me. And yet, when I was drunk, I would challenge an entire room of strangers to a foosball tournament–and I would beat most of them.

Several times over the course of my long saga with driving Ace and I joked to each other that it would be so much easier if I could just drink my way through driving practice. If there had been a way to safely learn how to drive while I was drunk, I probably would have tried it. Drinking would have replaced my anxiety with complete confidence in my abilities behind the wheel, and I would not have cared about looking like an idiot when I messed up parallel parking.

Aside from the obvious problems with this, such as getting a DUI before even getting my license, or killing myself or someone else by driving drunk, there was another good reason not to rely on drinking as my coping method. What would happen to my anxiety the first time I had to drive without a drink in me?

This question highlights one of the telltales of an unhealthy coping method: reliance. In the process of building coping methods for handling my driving anxiety, I learned that a good coping method should move you toward not needing the coping method, rather than becoming a crutch.

Unhealthy coping mechanisms reinforce the issues they are intended to protect you from. Avoidance only compounds anxiety. Drinking is, all in all, another form of avoidance. It doesn’t actually remove the anxiety, it only keeps you from feeling it while alcohol is present.

Based on my experiences with both healthy and unhealthy coping methods, I have come up with a set of ideal criteria for healthy coping methods:

1. The method should be something you can do any time or place.

2. The method should reduce the interfering emotions over time, not just mask them in the moment.

3. The method should be constructive to the body and help it cope with the negative effects of emotions.

4. The method should be self-contained, not reliant on other people or objects. (This is different from Support which I will discuss in another post).

These criteria raise the question: what can you do any time and any place with just your body and mind?

The best answer I can find to this question is: Breathe. There is no situation in which you cannot breathe. For that reason, I consider breathing to be the most optimal coping method ever. Whenever your emotions start to overwhelm, stop what you are doing and breathe. If you can’t stop what you are doing because you are, say, stuck in bumper to bumper traffic on the freeway, keep doing what you must, and breathe.

Here’s another thing you can do anytime, any place with what you have onboard: Stay in the present. This one is a little harder than breathing, but really valuable. In the last post, I discovered that a huge part of anxiety is about worrying over the future. Dwelling on the past can be distracting as well–“Oh no I just cut off that car when I turned, what a terrible mistake.” Constantly bringing your focus back to the present reduces the cascade of anxious thoughts that emerge from obsessing about the past or future.

Another coping method I use (although, fortunately for Ace I didn’t start this until I was driving on my own) is to sing. I find that singing aloud, preferably along to music but even without, significantly calms my anxiety. The words and the effort take my mind off that cascade of negative thinking that is part and parcel with anxiety.

Of course, I can’t sing anytime, any place. The set of criteria above are ideal, not final. I have several other coping methods I started using during the final push to get my license that don’t completely meet the criteria above, but that are certainly healthier and more effective than drinking my way to driving success. One of these is meditation–I started meditating for three minutes before each practice. Another was to write up a personal statement (I’ll share more about this in an upcoming post) and say the statement out-loud before each practice. Another was to stop partway through a practice and take a short walk to calm myself down.

All of these coping methods have the benefit of actually reducing anxiety rather than masking it. Because of this, the need to use them in specific situations goes away. I no longer have to breathe deeply and meditate for three minutes before I start the car. However, when I’m driving in heavy freeway traffic, which is when anxiety still comes up for me the most with driving, I can calm myself down by breathing and singing. If I need to, I can pull over safely and take a walk, or meditate, or even take a nap to calm my body down again.

Unhealthy coping methods compound anxiety. In addition to being anxious about the original source of anxiety, one becomes anxious about losing the coping method. Say I have social anxiety and I drink to cope with it. What if I get to the party and there isn’t any alcohol? How am I going to cope with being at a party then? Even before I get to the party, I’m going to be worried about what I’m going to drink.

I’m referring to drinking a lot because I think it is a really common way that people cope with emotional issues, but it isn’t the only one. Most of the unhealthy coping methods are substances. I might smoke pot to cope with my anger issues, or drink heavy amounts of coffee to cope with my depression. Coping methods can be people, too. For a long time, I felt like I could only drive with Ace in the car. Practicing driving with other people was scary to me. My dependency on his support could well have become a crutch. Coping methods can also be rituals or objects–say, I can only drive after walking around the car three times, or with my grandmother’s necklace on. These aren’t usually as unhealthy as substances, but they don’t usually reduce the negative emotions in the same way that breathing, staying present, positive statements and meditation do. And, as I mentioned before, coping can be as simple as avoiding the issue altogether.

I should say that I’m not advocating against drinking or taking any specific substance in general, any more than I’m advocating that you should not have rituals or supportive people in your life. The distinction I’m making is between doing those things for the pleasure of doing them, versus using them as a coping method that becomes a crutch. Sometimes, the line isn’t very clear. Are you having a few drinks for fun with friends, or are you relying on alcohol to soothe your social anxiety? The question that reveals the answer to this is: Could I be doing this same activity without the coping method, and not be uncomfortable or overwhelmed by my emotional obstacles? If the answer is no, it’s an unhealthy coping method. If you’re unsure, test it.

If you are currently relying on unhealthy coping methods, I don’t recommend taking them away all at once. It might be just as bad to have no coping methods at all as it is to have unhealthy ones. Rather, I would suggest that in a safe, low-stakes way, you try to replace the unhealthy methods slowly with the healthy ones. Practice meditation when you are not face to face with your demons, and it will strengthen your ability to stay present when you are. Before you reach for the shot glass, take five good, deep breaths and notice how your body feels. Get more exercise and you will strengthen your body’s ability to process the physical effects of stress. Eventually, you might find yourself needing the unhealthy coping methods less and less, as the healthy coping methods allow you to approach your challenge with fewer emotional obstacles.

For me, the turning point in heathy coping was the personal statement, because it allowed me to directly counter one of the greatest obstacles–the cascade of negative thoughts that would pour through me whenever I made the tiniest mistake. In the next post, I’ll talk about how I developed this statement in Dreadless: Everything Is A Dance.

In case you want to take something away from these posts other than just my story and some advice, here are a couple of activities you can use to apply the strategies I learned while overcoming my fear of driving. Please refer to the disclaimer in Dreadless: An Introduction.

Storytelling: Flaws give your hero dimension. A great source for flaws is unhealthy coping methods. Consider building tension in your story by showing how much your character relies on a certain coping method as a crutch. During a scene of high conflict, take the crutch away and watch what happens to your character. Suddenly, they are face to face with themselves and their problems. In order to succeed, your character will have to grow, moving beyond the crutch. (Note: While it’s fun to torture our characters this way, there’s no reason to do this to yourself in real life. I recommend the opposite approach in real life–weaning yourself gently off the crutch in a safe and comfortable way. Not as dramatic, but much healthier.)

Personal Growth: In the last exercise, you will have made a list of your current coping methods. Now, examine the list and identify places where you could begin, safely and comfortably, to replace any unhealthy methods with healthy ones. For example, maybe you’re not ready to stop drinking in social situations to mask your anxiety. But when you are alone at work and start to have anxiety about your job performance, you might start using breathing, being present, and positive statements. Start there. As the healthy coping methods become a natural response to stress, you’ll find yourself less reliant on the unhealthy ones in any situation.

Be creative–the healthy coping methods I’ve listed here are what work for me, but there are surely ones that are unique to you. You might already be using methods in certain situations that you can “borrow” for other situations. The key is to make sure they come close to the criteria above and will move you towards equilibrium, rather than becoming a crutch.