Coping Strategies for My Younger Self

Boca da Encumenada trail, Madeira.

Coping is not easy; I’m still only learning how to do it. This article is an attempt to distill what I know, and I hope it to be something that would have been useful for me had I read it a few years back. By “coping” I mean dealing with your internal world. Many people have no access to it, some do but they try to run away from their feelings or get lost in them. Perhaps the minority is at peace with their internal environment and can harness signals from their body for their own good. While I’m striving to move to the third camp, I’m still definitely in the second one: I have a rich inner life that is overwhelming at the best of times. 

People who usually end up in camp one (no access to feelings) or two (overwhelmed by them) do so because of trauma. While I’ve never experienced big T trauma, there’s been plenty of little t traumas when I was growing up. As an extremely sensitive child with a rich inner world to begin with, I developed an intense anxiety that I can trace back to when I was about fifteen. How intense? Imagine tripping over something and falling down. The ground is rushing toward you; you’re fully aware of what’s happening, and you know there is absolutely nothing you can do to stop it: you’ll hit the ground in a second. That’s intense, right? Now imagine this feeling, but taken out of context. You have no idea what’s causing it, nor how long it’s going to last. It could last for hours, sometimes for days, at that same unwavering level of intensity. So you can imagine that, with no mechanism to manage that feeling, a lot of my life was structured around it; around doing what I possibly could to not feel that gut-wrenching fear.

My anxiety was, and to some level still is, caused by an existential fear of not being good enough: the belief that I can very easily be rejected by the world if I don’t work hard enough or don’t take care of those around me. As a result, I became extremely attuned to how people feel, always anticipating any mood changes of those around me, and ultimately linking how I feel to how others feel (enmeshment). I also learned to prepare for any events where I’m being evaluated: I started studying extremely hard so that I could be certain I max out any test I take, and I started training really hard so that no one could question my fitness (my dad is an ex-athlete, now training to break a 5k European running record for 65-year-olds). Ultimately, this resulted in workaholism and exercise addiction: two outcomes that, while being socially acceptable, can be extremely detrimental to the health and well-being of the individual involved. Still, these two behaviors were aimed at decreasing the average level of anxiety and existential fear. To manage the acute outbursts of unpleasant feelings, I involuntarily developed a few more strategies: overeating, acute exercise, masturbation, and compulsive dating.

Looking back, I’m grateful for having developed these coping mechanisms, for they allowed me to get where I am in life despite these extremely difficult internal experiences. Frankly, I’m quite impressed that I did not end up as a drug addict. However, running away from my own feelings, not being able to self-regulate, and depending on other people for co-regulation is not particularly sustainable. It is a constant energy drain; I have to put so much time and energy into managing how I feel that there’s almost nothing else left for other activities. I get by at work, but only just, and there is almost no way of engaging in any other productive endeavors outside of work: there’s simply no fuel left in the tank. 

I’ve spent about six years now trying to get “better” and engaging in different healing modalities. This involved therapy (psychoanalytic, psychodynamic, CBT, and Somatic Experiencing), daily meditation (transcendental, focus, and insight), journaling, reading tens of books on psychology, relationships, and trauma, countless conversations and reflections, and several psychedelic journeys. These endeavors certainly helped, for I know myself much better than I used to, my communication skills improved vastly, I’m much better at knowing what I need and setting and enforcing my boundaries, and I believe I resolved some of my traumas. What I haven’t done is solve the original problem: the anxiety and the existential fears are still there, and I’m still not very good at tolerating the resulting discomfort without acting on it. If anything, I have much better access to what I feel in my body, which often makes my subjective experience even worse. What has changed, though, is that now I understand the problem (or so I think). It’s perhaps the first time in my life that I understood that the only way is through: that I need to learn to regulate my own emotions, by myself, without any external help: not from other people, and not from the coping mechanisms I developed. Borrowing from Marcus Aurelius: the pain is there to indicate that something is wrong, and it is up to us to sit with it long enough to understand what it is trying to teach us. This is exactly what I’m going to focus on next in my journey.

The majority of my issues stem from attachment wounding. Recently I’ve been listening to Heidi Priebe, who has excellent resources on what that is and how to heal from it. One of the main ingredients is developing self-trust. A part of it is trusting yourself that you can handle yourself well when shit hits the fan. Below, I list a few (healthy) coping strategies that I employ when I’m feeling anxious, or not good enough, or when I have the urge to use one of my (maladaptive) coping strategies, including relying on other people for co-regulation. This list also serves as a reminder to myself of what I can do, because sometimes, when things get really bad, it’s easy to forget.

Letters from the Unconditional Love to Myself

I’ve been using this one a lot lately. In fact, I’m trying to turn it into a morning habit (I’m using one of Heidi Priebe’s methods of re-building self-trust: set yourself a goal of doing something every day, and do it no matter what. I’m at day 23 of this one). I learned about “Two-Way Prayer” as it’s called from the Tim Ferriss podcast with Elizabeth Gilbert – she has been writing a letter to herself every day for over 20 years now. I wholeheartedly recommend the podcast, but here’s the gist of it.

You find a quiet spot and think of or read something dear to you. Gilbert recommends a poem; I like Marcus Aurelius’ meditations, or just being quiet for a minute or two. Gilbert recommends starting with a question. If I feel particularly off, e.g. super sad and anxious, I’ll skip this part because I know what I want to hear. Otherwise, I might start with something that looks like this:

• Dear Love, I’m feeling really sad. I’ve been through a breakup recently, and I keep thinking of my ex, fantasizing, and thinking of ways of coming back together. How do I move on?

Then you write to yourself directly, answering the question if you asked one. Gilbert recommends starting with a term of endearment (I often use something like: My dearest little child, My smartest little Adaś, and so on). This is important because if you feel a lot of shame or like you’re not good enough, or if you’re a perfectionist, you might feel that you don’t deserve to be addressed in this way. The first few times I did that, I cried my eyes out, it was so powerful. The next bit is to write to yourself the things that you most want to hear someone else say to you. For me, it’s usually a voice that makes sure I feel seen (“I see that it’s really hard for you Adasiu, that you feel so anxious, so helpless, and that there is a lot of resistance in you, and that you really would want to stop feeling that way, but you don’t know how to”). Eventually, it moves to the practical part of answering the question and giving advice on how to move on. 

The strange thing about these two-way prayers is that it doesn’t feel like it’s me who’s writing. It’s like an external voice that is being channeled through me. And relatedly, it’s not like I choose when to end. I just know. The voice finishes, it goes away, and I just know there is nothing more to say. The first few times it happened I was really puzzled, but I learned to accept it. The first few times, I also didn’t know how to sign the letter. Then it came to me, but it’s too personal to share it here. I’m sure it’ll come to you, too.

Doing it first thing in the morning sets me up for a “nice” day, in the sense that it reminds me to be kind to myself, and addresses any mood issues that I might have after waking up. I’ve noticed myself coming back to it during the day as well if I feel particularly sad or anxious. I’m amazed by what it does to me.

Journaling

I tend to get stuck in unproductive thought patterns. It’s not really beating myself up, but more about how sad I am, how things suck, etc. Writing my thoughts down slows down the thinking, and allows me to analyze my thoughts. This usually breaks the loop and instantly makes me feel better.

Sitting with Myself

This one is interesting; I found out about it through the Diary of a CEO podcast with Dr K. Very differently to meditation, the goal is to just be. You can stare out the window or drink coffee, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that there is no goal. The idea is to be with yourself, be idle, not focus on anything, and just try to let go. What makes it different from meditation is that you are explicitly not trying to pay attention or even to observe. You’re trying to let go, to just be ok with whatever arises. You’re trying to be ok with stillness when there is no goal attached to it – which for me, is the most difficult thing ever. This is more of an exercise than a coping strategy – it trains me to tolerate stillness and sensations that I learned to label as difficult.

Going on a Walk (silent, music, or a podcast)

When I feel particularly sad or anxious, I also often feel lonely and helpless. I feel, or rather think, that there is nothing I can do about how I feel. Simply getting up and going for a walk changes that. It restores the sense of agency, and that changes everything. I suppose this is connected to how people say that trauma usually arises when the person feels absolutely helpless like they have no influence over what is happening to them. In my case, it’s about learned helplessness in situations in which I feel sad or anxious. It’s incredible how little I need to break out of that pattern, but it’s also incredible how difficult reaching for that can be.

Letting Go and Getting on with My Life

Very often, when I feel anxious and I experience various urges, it’s really because I am resisting how I’m feeling. This is quite subtle, and I noticed it only recently. In some cases, just noticing the anxiety and letting go changes things. When I say let go, I mean physically trying to release tension. If I sit in a chair, I might try to relax into the chair, as if to allow the chair to take on more of my weight. What usually happens is that the anxiety morphs into something else: sadness, maybe even anger. But what also happens is that I relax, and even if I still feel sadness or a different emotion, it doesn’t weigh me down. I can just get on doing whatever it is I was doing. If I’m sad I might be a little slower with my movements, but it doesn’t prevent me from engaging with the world like (the resistance to) anxiety does. This subtle shift, for me, has incredible consequences, because it means I don’t have to back off from life whenever I’m anxious.

There you go. These are my main coping strategies and exercises I use to retrain myself to be ok with emotional discomfort and to learn to soothe myself without relying on vices or on other people. Writing this has been incredibly helpful for me, and I hope that you, too, can take something for yourself from it.