What Should We Do? (Part Three: Coping Mechanisms)
Can the world be beautiful even if your life feels like it isn’t?
Beauty is a feeling; it’s an experience we have as conscious things.
Sometimes this experience is easy to have. Other times it can be very hard. We might go weeks or months without having it and that might make us worry we’ll never have it again.
If you’ve been waiting to have that feeling, here are a few coping mechanisms that might be able to help.
A tiny, crucial pocket of relief
Isn’t it weird that we are breathing all the time? We’re like these little air pumps walking around, constantly pumping in and out.
It took me about three years of meditating before I realized why so many guided meditations use the breath as an anchor. Breathing is something we usually do automatically without even noticing that it’s happening.
For so long while meditating I had been controlling my breath to make it deeper or more rhythmic, but one day it finally clicked to where I removed myself from the action altogether. I simply observed as a third-party my bizarre air-pump of a body move in and out without changing anything myself.
What one eventually realizes doing this is that just as air is continuously pumped in and out of our bodies by our unconscious systems, thoughts too, throughout the day, are pumped in and out of our minds without any intention or autonomy on our parts.
Our minds feed us stories about our lives, and these stories are usually depressing.
You found love that one time, but then you ruined it and now you’re doomed to a life of loneliness.
You thought you had so much potential growing up. You and your friends were going to conquer the world. Now you’re nobody, doomed to live an insignificant, boring life until you die.
You did something bad, and that makes you a bad person. The worst part about your aching sadness is that you deserve to feel it.
For many of us, our sadness comes as a result of being unable to see a way out of these stories we tell ourselves. We feel as if we are unlucky characters stuck in a tragic movie that we can’t escape from.
The truth that meditation teaches us to notice is that, in reality, we are audience members watching an ambiguous movie, and its interpretation is up to us. My favorite movie, Slumdog Millionaire, is also one of the saddest I know. And yet I love watching it.
Meditation enables me to love living my life in the same way. When you stop identifying with all of those sad stories you tell yourself, which is to say when you stop thinking without being aware that you are thinking, you gain a sliver of distance from the screen and in that sliver is a tiny, crucial pocket of relief.
Music
Nothing is a better reminder of life’s beauty than music.
In his book “Musicophilia” neurologist Oliver Sacks explores the theory that music is a remnant of primal language systems we used to communicate in the deep past.
Rather than using words or grammar, some neuroscientists think that we used primal grunts and sounds to communicate basic emotions and warnings.
The parts of our brains which evolved to interpret those grunts and sounds are still in there today, and that’s why we can have such powerful emotional experiences listening to music.
It’s like that one melody of your favorite song is saying something which you can’t quite parse but you can understand the base emotion it’s conveying in a powerful, consoling way.
That moment of raw communication is magical. It can also be deeply cathartic.
Pour it onto a page
This is one of those things that sounds like some boring solution white people dole out on Instagram. Maybe for some it is, and there’s definitely a weird culture surrounding certain self-help practices like this one.
But speaking from personal experience, the relief of pouring your thoughts and feelings out onto a page like a dump truck at a landfill is something you can test more or less instantaneously.
I’m still skeptical of it every time I start, but by the time I finish the results are undeniable.
“The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brian is a fictional story about the Vietnam War based on the author’s real experiences as a young soldier.
The title and how it plays into the content of the book is brilliant. In many chapters the author lists the laborsome equipment the various soldiers carried on their backs right alongside the even heavier cargo of guilt and fear they carried in their minds.
For the author writing the book was a way of letting that mental cargo go, or at least of putting it in a safe place he could always come back to when he wanted.
You don’t have to write a novel to gain the same relief.
You surely carry mental cargo with you wherever you go, and if you don’t unload that cargo somehow it will eventually become too heavy to bear.
Try expressing whatever is going on in your mind in whatever way feels right to you. Maybe it’s writing an impromptu poem or drawing a picture. Maybe it’s scribbling ferociously on the page. Often for me it’s just writing half-baked sentences and words as they pop into my mind.
It’s such a relief to be able to express yourself in a way that is entirely free from expectations or social pressures. It doesn’t have to be “good” or deep or genius. It just has to be authentic.
Whether the thoughts and feelings you end up expressing are negative or positive or just straight up gibberish, it always feels good to unload them.
Pseudo self-help Instagram influencers be damned, journaling works for me and it might work for you too. You can’t know until you give it a try.
Talk to a professional
You might think that your situation isn‘t bad enough to call a crisis hotline or seek therapy. But I promise it’s better to seek help too early then it is to to do so too late.
The people who offer these services want to help. That’s a core source of meaning and satisfaction in their lives. You aren’t burdening them by asking for help.
A lot of times just having another human understand what you’re going through can be super validating.
It’s important to remember that we all go through hard times, and you’re not any less of an amazing person for going through them with us.
What should we do when we want to stop feeling bad? We should ask for help:
National suicide hotline
Find a Therapist
Psychology Today has a fantastic “Find a Therapist” tool which can help you find a therapist in your area. There are options to filter by which insurance the therapists take, what their specialities are, and other helpful information.
Greater Good Science Center
UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center is a fantastic resource if you’re looking for some articles and advice about scientifically tested ways of leading a happier life.
Reducing the amount of psychological pain you feel is essential, but another part of being human we sometimes forget is actually feeling a positive good (as opposed to just feeling less bad).
Greater Good in Action gives some wonderful practices in a practical, streamlined way that really will help you in the immediate short-term. If you’re interested in trying something right now that will make you feel happier, give those practices a browse and try one out. One of my personal favorites is Random Acts of Kindness.
What coping mechanisms do you use that were not mentioned here? I’d love to hear them. Thank you for reading and keep up the good work out there!