4. On coping
How are you coping, hun? Has lockdown pushed you past the point of no return? Have common habits of hygiene slipped by the ‘waist side’ like your former hairstyle? Bad puns aside, it’s not hard to imagine that our vices have really come out in lockdown – an increase in eating, drinking, less exercise, less social contact, less touch! Less sensory stimulation, regular ‘doomscrolling’ [1] on our phones, or more seriously, an increase in domestic violence. But you don’t need me to show you the data to back up the pandemic playlist because we’re all livin’ in this Black Mirror dystopic reality.
Ok, maybe some of you are faring alright - doing regular squats in your living room, connecting with old friends, or learning a hobby. Take it a step further and some of you have become ‘productive’ learning permaculture or languages, volunteering, fermenting, looming, and so forth.
Without judging our coping mechanisms as good or bad, let’s just take a step back from how you fill your days to how you feel in your days. That is, to listen to that inner dialogue.
How much can you tolerate?
We all have a different Window of Tolerance (developed by Dr. Dan Siegel) for stress. This is a tool to see how our brain and body deal with adversity. Referring to another one of my (rough) illustrations below, we can see our window of tolerance as it moves up the Y-axis and down to the X-axis. The wobbly line can move between different thresholds or arousal states.
Hypo-arousal
We can move downwardly between stasis, numbness, and switching off or disassociation. This may look like a bit of plonk and a bit of Netflix - in elastics. No judgment. It serves to switch off from a busy day. Or it may distract or numb any uncomfortable feelings or sensations. Follow the downward spiral at its base and disassociation looks like depression, exhaustion, and paralysis. (The point is that we can move between thresholds and that’s ok so as long as we move and are not stuck in one extreme. (Don’t worry - there is no causal link between Netflix and depression!)
Hyper-arousal
Oppositely, we can be peaking in a hyperarousal state where we are hypervigilant and are flooded with anxiety or emotions which may show up as heart palpitations, sweaty palms, and panic sending our limbic brain into fight/flight response. This is not a place where we can operate for very long without crashing. That said, we need to be hypervigilant at times, say when we are walking along a dark street alone, or looking after a little one in a chaotic playground. It’s having the awareness to switch it on or off or turn the dial down to keep ourselves regulated.
Wiring our circuits - ‘off’ and ‘on’
Ideally, given a stable environment and one in which we feel supported by others, we are able to tolerate stress and we can hover somewhere in the middle of hyper- or hypo-arousal to be engaged and alert as well as calm.
For many of us though, even if we wish to be in the middle ground, we can get stuck in hyper - where you’re always ‘on’ or hypo where you’re tuned ‘off’. We may be doing this because we feel we have to - say if you are always ‘on’ as a result of having a high-impact job and a dependent family. I have to operate in this way. My mother won’t survive, my department will collapse, I’ve got bills to pay, my children have to eat and do well at school, and, and, and….[insert: breakdown/illness/pain/relational conflict/etc]. We can only stay in one state for very long before our body and mind necessitate change - even incrementally. Our bodies will respond if we pay heed to our aches and pains. Our psyches may speak to us in our sleep, and our manifestation of particular kinds of neuroses can eventually multiply and get in our way.
Are you regulated or dysregulated?
We also need to understand how we regulate ourselves in stress. As children, we learn how to self-soothe. For some of us, we had parents and role models to help us feel safe and support us to learn how to emotionally regulate. For a good deal of us though, we may not have learned how to effectively regulate our emotions and this is where we end up dysregulated - when our emotions can overrule us and we are at odds with our bodies and minds. This can look like internalising feelings because you are confused and unable to feel or identify with them. It may look like emotional outbursts and projecting our stuff on to others.
Many of us soothe our emotions and pain unconsciously with uppers and downers to manage our adrenals, aka our anxiety. We may take stimulants when we are lethargic and down. When we feel emotionally vacant, we may be avoidant in our relationships. We may be very high functioning - holding a job down, being affable and sociable with friends, and tacitly keep our interactions at a more shallow level so no one really understands who you are and what you’re feeling. This is also a form of coping - with our window of tolerance being pretty limited in order to keep safe from being exposed.
What’s your limit?
Knowing where our limits are is a helpful tool for self-awareness and managing stress. How you cope with stress could be based on a variety of circumstances and indicators such as historical trauma, neurobiology, your support group and environment and so forth. Over time, if you have repeated stressors and trauma and your tank is running low on empathy (empathic distress) or even awareness that you are suffering, minor stressors and events can make us kick-off and we will likely act disproportionate to the event in a hyper- or hypo-arousal state or dysregulated.
Like all living things, our wobbly lines will fluctuate – some days we want to shut down and switch off. Some people live fully in the fire – such as the frontline health workers do day in and day out. We all have limits (including the NHS!) Often times our limits are not known until we go too far or feel that they are pushed by other demands. We need to understand our boundaries (a whole topic unto itself that has become heavily featured in women’s wellness circles). We also need to learn what will chill us out and soothe us. Is it ice cream (oral fixation/short-term approach)? Do we expect our partners and close friends to solve our problems and take our pain away (mother/father complexes and co-dependencies)? These most certainly might balm the pain temporarily but if we really want to be in a capacity to function in the world with autonomy and integrity, we need to learn how to take care of ourselves. We need to start being kinder to ourselves. It all starts with self-awareness…
If you are finding it difficult to cope, are suffering from PTSD, or depression, please do seek out professional help. There are a variety of trauma specialist therapies out there depending on your needs.
On reflection
What does your window of tolerance look like? Is it narrowly open? Is it shut? Play around with the metaphor.
How do you know when you are in hyper states, say feeling wired and anxious? Where do you first begin to notice it in your body? What is the scenario?
How do you know when you are in hypo states, feeling down or depressed? How do you experience it in your body? What do you tell yourself?
Where do you see your wobbly line now on a graph? How has it fluctuated over the pandemic?
What are your coping mechanisms? Are they historic? Do they soothe you?
Do you know your limits? Do you push past them in service to others? Because…?
Resources
Draw: How you fill your days/How you feel in your days
1. A pie chart of how you spend your time on an average day and/or over an average week.
2. Now add another layer on top of your pie to indicate your feeling states using different colours/symbols. Are you content to be spending a quarter of your time doing X? Are you resentful that you spend a third doing Y? Where can you take some time away from to give to something else? Is there any free time? If your tank is really empty, explore the underlying causes of this.
Decrease arousal: Deep breathing like ‘the 7/11’ (inhale for 7 counts, exhale for 11).
Increase arousal: Sensory activities - brisk walking, cooking, dancing, drawing, painting, sculpting, smelling
Try: I Can’t F*cking Adult Today: A Journal for the Days When You'd Rather Stay in Bed (by Monica Sweeney. Excellent and hilarious prompts for even the most cynical of journalling).
Watch and learn: Dr Dan Seigel’s ‘Hand model of the brain’ (8 mins)
Sources
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/stop-doomscrolling/
Herman, J. Trauma and Recovery. 1971
Dr Daniel J. Siegel’s books are excellent for parents looking for support in co-regulating as well as understanding attachment and development psychology