We all learn coping mechanisms over a lifetime, but most of them are for coping with short term stresses, like a difficult week at work, or a busy time of year like Christmas. When you live through a long period of stress, such as a pandemic, parenting young children with little support, or chronic illness, your old coping mechanisms might not be enough to see you through.
Trying new things is hard — but worth it!
By definition, coping mechanisms are something to help us feel better when overwhelmed, and if you feel overwhelmed, you won’t want to try new things — but this is just the time when you need to. Find something easy to try and give it a go for five or ten minutes this week and see how it feels. If you don’t like it, fair enough, try something else next week!
Below are six suggestions based on my experience that have helped me get through the pandemic and moving house while being disabled with ME-CFS.
1) Escapism
This is an old coping mechanism for me, and probably the earliest one I learned in life. I’ve always been a great reader (I read two books a week on average — rarely anything ‘improving’, mostly fantasy, crime and a bit of sci-fi) and the relief of temporarily leaving this world to go live in another one is immense. I also watch TV every day, and deliberately watch comedies to lighten my mood (The Big Bang Theory again, at the moment). When real life becomes so different, so stressful and challenging on a daily basis, to watch something light can re-normalise my view of life and help put things in perspective.
2) Avoidance
At the start of the pandemic, I watched and read the news avidly. After a couple of months I realised it was taking my anxiety to unmanageable levels, so I decided to stop. My partner kept watching the news, and informed me of headlines or important changes in law to do with covid regulations, but not having that constant stream of negativity helped me regain some stability. I’ve slowly slipped back into reading the news, but it doesn’t disturb me as much as before.
Generally I wouldn’t suggest avoidance as a good coping mechanism, but when you feel truly overwhelmed, it can be an act of self-care to draw a line and say, “This is too much for me. I need to step back for a bit.” Forcing ourselves to cope with a constant onslaught is bad for our mental and eventually our physical health, so limiting what you choose to engage with and give energy to is reasonable.
3) Connecting with others
If you’re having a hard time, it is a relief to talk about it, and sharing your feelings and thoughts is important. It’s also good to hear that others are having a hard time too, sometimes! Hopefully this isn’t schadenfreude, so much as not feeling alone: rather than feel I’m weak, I can understand that everyone is struggling and there’s no shame in that. There’s a sense of perspective that comes from knowing how others are coping, a sense of community— I’m doing better than them, worse than them — it doesn’t really matter where you are in relation to others, just to know that you are in relation to others. Everyone’s in this mess together, and hopefully we’ll all get out of it together too.
I’m also lucky that I have a partner who constantly amazes me with his patience and understanding. His stability has helped me no end, and I’m very glad we live together, so we could help each other cope with the lockdowns and other stresses.
4) Physical and mental self-care
I got ME-CFS a few years before the pandemic hit, and this made dealing with the pandemic both easier and harder. It was easier because I had to learn how to take care of myself better when I first got ill, so when the pandemic started I already had many good health practices and daily routines in place: walk for half an hour; T’ai Chi for fifteen minutes; physiotherapy exercises; journaling; meditation and breathing exercises; mentally identifying negative emotions, whether they arise in response to imagining problems or actual events that are happening, and if the latter, what I can do about them.
It also made it harder, because lockdowns and reductions in services are terrifying when you already have health problems. Not only do you have to avoid getting covid, you can’t get treatment for the crippling health problems you had before. I need to have some kind of physiotherapy, osteopathy or other body therapies every couple of weeks to manage my fibromyalgia, and when I couldn’t have any for five months, it got much worse and having a lot of pain several days a week makes it difficult to do anything. Thankfully services resumed to some extent before it got very bad, and I’ve explored a lot of pain reduction techniques over the last few years so I wasn’t completely helpless, but it was definitely not something I’d want to cope with again.
Part of self-care is about accessing help when you need it and developing a support network, but when these are removed, the ‘self’ in self-care gets a whole lot bigger. Being open to trying new things, and doing lots of little things that all add up to feeling a bit better, are sometimes the best we can do.
5) Focus on what you can control
When difficult things happen that are outside of your control, it’s useful to focus on what you can control. Personal projects (see below), volunteering, and studying a new subject all help to keep your mind on something constructive, rather than dwelling on things that make you feel overwhelmed.
I volunteered to join the committee for one of my writing groups as membership secretary; organised an anthology for my other writing group; and started learning Mandarin as an intellectual challenge. (I’m still pretty bad at it. I think I’ve learned three hundred words in a year! Five minutes a day is fun but really doesn’t get you very far.)
We also moved house, like so many people during the pandemic. This took an astonishing year of effort, but was worth it in terms of having something else to focus on, and leaving a part of the city in which I didn’t feel safe for a new town where people are much friendlier. It certainly helped us feel more in control of our lives (part of them, at least). Not exactly a sensible coping mechanism we could employ more than once, and we were lucky to be able to do it at all, but it did work for us given our particular circumstances; and I’m delighted to be able to walk down my new street without seeing smashed bus shelters, flaming bins and people shouting verbal abuse.
6) Creativity
When you’re struggling just to get through the necessary tasks of the day, the idea of doing anything creative as well can feel impossible. Much like human societies in general, if people are focused on survival, they don’t have energy to make art. But if you are able to carve out a few minutes now and then, it’s amazing how uplifting creating something beautiful can be.
If I don’t have much energy, zen colouring for a few minutes is quite nice. It’s arty, but with very little effort. I don’t have to design or decide anything. I don’t need special expensive tools. A colouring book and pencils are pretty cheap.
I also like writing haikus, because they’re so short! I can come up with seventeen syllables on my worst day, and it feels great to have made something. I have several tiny notebooks filled with haikus about nature I see on my daily walks, expressing emotions, or capturing some detail of my relationships. I rarely show them to people, but I know I’ve made something that pleases me, and that’s worthwhile.
When I have more energy, I write novels, short stories, do pyrography, make bead jewellery, crochet, bake… even half an hour a week makes a massive difference to how I feel about life in general. Because life is not just about survival. It’s about elevating our existence to something more than that. And expressing and sharing our experiences, whether in a deliberately ugly doodle, a beautiful painting, or your own or a different language, is all part of what it means to be human.
What are some of your coping mechanisms? Have you ever tried the ones mentioned above? Did they work for you or not so much? Let me know in the comments section!
