How Coping Skills Are Fuelling Your Anxiety
“We are not thinking machines that feel; rather, we are feeling machines that think.”
— Antonio Damasio
“I decided to start therapy to learn how to “cope” with my anxiety. You know, get some “tools.” Sound familiar? This is arguably one of the most common goals clients bring up in therapy. Given the endless online advice urging us to manage or eliminate anxiety, it is no wonder people often come in seeking quick coping strategies to “fix” themselves. But the very notion of “coping” with anxiety is part of the problem.
Rates of anxiety are surging worldwide, with anxiety disorders topping the charts as the most commonly diagnosed mental health condition, affecting approximately 4.05% of the global population (Our World in Data). As anxiety rises, so does society’s quest to control it. Unfortunately, one of the go-to approaches is to “cope better” through emotional management techniques. Don’t get me wrong, having coping skills is valuable, learning to regulate your emotions when they arise can help in the moment. However, anxiety and other uncomfortable emotions are rarely the root cause of mental distress. Wait, what?! Do you want to tell me that my relentless anxiety is not the thing holding me back from living my best life?
No, it is not…
Relying on coping techniques to manage an uncomfortable emotion just reinforces the idea that this emotion is inherently bad or dangerous, something that should be avoided rather than understood. When we sidestep processing our emotions, we miss crucial chances to integrate and learn from them. Instead, we bottle up unprocessed emotions which eventually show up as “triggers.”
Let me give you a very basic example:
Imagine you feel hurt because a friend cancelled plans at the last minute. Instead of acknowledging that feeling and asking yourself why it bothered you, you push it down and say, “It’s fine, I don’t care”. By not processing this feeling, you have not given yourself a chance to understand that maybe reliability and feeling valued in friendships are important to you.
Over time, when you experience a change in plans by someone else, even small changes, it starts to bother you much more than it should. This reaction is what then becomes your “trigger”, which stems from an unresolved emotion that you did not integrate at the time. Each unprocessed emotion can create a similar reaction in the future, often with greater intensity.
To prevent accumulating bum bags full of emotional triggers, we need to process our difficult emotional experiences so they can be fully integrated. One of the most powerful ways to do this is through language — transforming our emotional experiences (right brain) into words (left brain). It should then not be surprising that psychotherapy is a great tool for this. Why? Well, because language acts as a substitute for action–something very few people believe.
We believe if we have a problem, we need to fix it. So how on earth does “talking about” a problem fix it?! Because it f… (*wait Dr E, this is a newsletter*), bloody does! Proven! Naming emotions integrates them, fostering coherence in our self-concept and creating a flow state. Through language, we move the emotion from the emotional right hemisphere to Broca’s area in the left hemisphere, where it takes on verbal form.
This becomes particularly valuable when the problem you need to fix is somewhere in the past. Unless you can time-travel, good luck in physically fixing that. But we are human, we love not to feel anxiety surging through our bodies. So what do we do instead? We cope with anxiety. We grasp for an immediate fix–coping skills, benzodiazepines, distractions, or anti-depressants.
Don’t get me wrong, I have a deep appreciation for the fact that not everyone can enter into a therapeutic process to do emotional integration. Our messed up healthcare systems make it so that very few can afford it. Therefore, while some people need these immediate interventions, they are ultimately not a long-term solution. Anxiety does not simply go “poof” with a few deep breaths or a mindfulness app.
I am a strong advocate of educating people more about how to process emotional experiences and do their own emotional integration so that coping skills become a nice to have and not a first port of call. I want people to embrace ALL of their emotional experiences, comfortable and uncomfortable (not “good” and “bad”).
We need our emotional experiences to propel us into action. We actually need shame to help us make changes in how we look after ourselves. We need anxiety to succeed at important opportunities in life, or to make important life decisions that we keep avoiding. Similarly, we need anger to take action to protect ourselves. Anger also shows you exactly what your values are, you need it! By using emotional coping strategies (i.e., coping skills), we are essentially eliminating the best tool we have to create meaningful change in our lives, namely, our emotions!
I always try and explain our relationship with our emotions like this: Try and think of your emotions as being similar to the indicators on the dashboard of your car. They light up and notify you when something is wrong. They are not dangerous — they are protective. Ignore these signals, and you are heading toward a breakdown! Using coping skills is like covering that blinking red light with a sticker. The problem is not fixed, it is just silenced, and we all know where that leads.
Our societal approach has come to treat uncomfortable emotions like anxiety as a problem andsomething to be eliminated. However, it is merely our internal alarm system notifying us that something is broken–generally outside of us. No longer do we have space to process, to reflect, to pause. We are biologically wired for downtime. Our brains and bodies have not been able to keep up with the rapid pace of our technological advancements. The infiltration of digital devices into our daily lives has profoundly changed how we relate to others and, more importantly, ourselves.
Is it not alarming enough that it has become a fad to “raw-dog” flights? Do not be alarmed, it has nothing to do with inappropriate human behaviour. This ridiculous fad involves people bragging about enduring an entire flight without screens, as if enduring a few hours with just a book or, heaven forbid, talking to someone, is a feat worthy of social media. Doing nothing used to be the norm on flights! Now, people rush to their seats, headphones at the ready, craving even more stimulation. Random thought: Have you noticed the only ones still striking up conversations on flights are usually the older generation — those who grew up with minimal technology?
The surge in anxiety is not a personal failing. It is a sign that something outside us needs attention. If you do not have a diagnosable biological condition, you are likely functioning just fine. So, the next time you feel tempted to cope away an uncomfortable emotion, try inviting it in instead. Give it a name, reflect on it, and then let it go. I promise it will not linger forever, it just wants to be acknowledged.
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