Anxiety is not bad news, if we can change our perspective from thinking of it as being something we should try to avoid and get rid of, to something that is both informative and beneficial. The key is taking the information that our anxiety is telling us and using it to live in ways that support our well-being, evaluating the ways we cope with stress and changing them for the better.
In the face of stressors and the anxiety they often trigger, we all develop coping strategies to manage and get ourselves back on track. These go-to behaviours or thought processes often function automatically, beneath our conscious awareness, and many were developed when we were younger and less mindful. We developed these coping mechanisms to self-soothe or avoid uncomfortable feelings. But when these coping mechanisms stop working to manage stress, they tend to make matters worse, exacerbating our anxiety and undermining our belief that we are in control of our lives. If you cope in ways that are productive for you, then your anxiety is probably under control. But if you cope in ways that undermine your health, job, safety, or relationships, it may be time to consider your options.
In general, coping mechanisms are either adaptive (good at helping us manage the stress) or maladaptive (bad for us because they cause other damage, through avoiding a problem that then gets bigger or giving us another problem, for example with alcohol dependence or abuse). When the feelings underneath these behaviours are left untouched or unprocessed, those components of anxiety will grow and stay stuck. Then our negative coping behaviours only end up reinforcing our inability to manage or regulate our feelings, and if we respond by isolating ourselves, we remove the opportunity for encouragement and support from our social relationships and take away a vital bad-anxiety buffer.
To better understand how this happens, it can help to look at what is happening in the body when bad anxiety takes the wheel:
• When we are under chronic strain from anxiety, our capacity to manage emotions becomes downregulated — less effective at responding to internal or external stimuli. We become highly sensitive to stress of any kind and can begin to feel self-doubts and a loss of confidence.
• Next, when our body is depleted and doesn’t get enough restorative time and rest, it will not be able to increase our motivation (the predominant emotion of a positive mindset). This inability to reset further erodes the capacity to maintain emotion regulation.
• Then, if we respond by isolating ourselves, we remove the opportunity for encouragement and support from our social relationships and thereby take away a vital bad-anxiety buffer.
• Further, if we look to drugs or alcohol (or gambling, or sex, or food) for relief, we may unintentionally exacerbate our anxiety once the “high” has passed. Indeed, addictions act as a depressant on our nervous system. They also interfere with our processing of dopamine and serotonin (rest-and-digest hormones), giving us a false sense of relief from anxiety.
These responses represent a downregulation in functioning of various neural pathways. Yet, for all these negative coping strategies and their drawbacks, a silver lining can emerge: it is entirely possible to change our negative ways of coping with anxiety and their underlying effects on our brains and bodies. Restoring emotional balance requires energy, curiosity and recognizing that we have a choice: we can learn to recognize signs of our own physical depletion and/or emotional dysregulation and begin to make changes. This is the essence of how using good anxiety works. When you are anxious or upset what do you typically do to calm yourself? Without overthinking, read through the following common negative coping techniques. Which are familiar to you?
Negative Ways to Cope
• Use or abuse alcohol or drugs or gambling or sex or food
• Act violently toward others
• Act out or misbehave on purpose
• Avoid conflict
• Rationalise or blame others for your problems
• Deny there is a problem
• Repress or forget what has happened
• Behave like someone you are not
• Dissociate yourself from a situation
• Exhibit controlling behaviour
• Become a workaholic
• Isolate yourself and withdraw from activities and others
• Feel like you need to control or manipulate others
• Refuse to communicate
• Fantasise regularly
• Catastrophize
• Help others over helping yourself
Next, go through the list of positive coping techniques — these are beneficial ways of managing anxiety.
Positive Ways to Cope
• Name your feelings, positive or negative
• Control your anger
• Practice self-reflection
• Seek support from friends and family
• Communicate or talk about your feelings
• Exercise
• Participate in hobbies and/or sports and/or creative pursuits
• Spend time outdoors
• Consider a situation from another point of view
• Remain flexible and open to new ways of thinking
• Keep a journal or engage in another form of conscious self-reflection
• Spend quality time with family, partner, friends
• Use positive self-talk and affirmations
• Meditate
• Clean or organise your workspace or home
• Seek support from a health professional when you need it
• Play with or be with a pet or children
Without judging yourself, ask yourself: what, if any, of my go-to ways of coping with stress are helping me and which of these coping strategies could I do more of? Are any hindering me, or having unwanted secondary effects and do I need to stop using them?
It’s important to be aware of how we respond to stress and feelings of anxiety. The use of more than two or three negative coping strategies can be an indication of being stuck in bad anxiety; on the other hand, the use of positive coping strategies shows a tolerance of stress and flexibility around emotions. Our relationship with anxiety changes over time, as does our ability to process it, so our coping strategies must be updated and ones that are maladaptive need to be addressed.
The more we stay unaware of how our coping mechanisms are no longer benefiting us or giving us the mental break we need, the more intense our bad anxiety will be and the more entrenched our negative coping strategies will become. Once we see our situation for what it truly is — a case of an overdue update to our coping strategies — we’ll be able to start changing aspects of our situation and orient ourselves to a more satisfying life, just what we all need and deserve in 2022!
