Coping
O Lord, all my longing is before you;
my sighing is not hidden from you.
My heart throbs; my strength fails me,
and the light of my eyes—it also has gone from me.
Psalm 38:9-10
I really, really don’t want to talk about this one, because I’m so afraid I have so much of this in my life through quarantine. I think that when I get sad, I’m a 7 on the enneagram, so I love coping! I love comfort! What I realized in preparing for this episode is coping isn’t all bad and it’s something that can be really, really helpful to us when we’re going through difficulty. But we have to distinguish between healthy coping and unhealthy coping. We can not be people that choose unhealthy coping. I think a lot of us have chosen some unhealthy coping through this crazy time, when we all are feeling undone.
If you’re just joining me for this episode, we’re in the midst of a season called Undone. It’s all the different ways that we are struggling and wrestling through this season of COVID and this pandemic and this crazy year called 2020. We’re talking about all the things. Coping is certainly one of those issues I don’t love to talk about, because again, I don’t want to feel convicted on this.
WHAT IS COPING?
Let me define what coping means. The definition of coping is actions we take consciously or unconsciously to deal with stress, problems, or uncomfortable emotions. Of course during a season where a lot of uncomfortable emotions and stresses are hitting all of us, we’re going to move toward coping! What we want to talk about is what are healthy coping strategies and what are unhealthy coping strategies. I think this is a little bit obvious, but it helped me to know that coping isn’t all bad. We’re all going to do it. We’re all going to look for ways out of uncomfortable situations and look for ways to control our circumstances. What a Christian does is they surrender their control over it. It’s not that they don’t implement healthy practices and disciplines in their lives, but they also are realizing that those will only go so far. The Christian still chooses the healthy rhythms that will bring healing in their life. When I travel and speak, specifically when I get home from being on a bus for 10 days where we ordered pizza late at night and we didn’t eat great or sleep great, I immediately go to the gym and work out. I immediately start eating healthy and set my schedule so that I’m sleeping well and I spend time with good friends. I set back healthy patterns in my life. Those are coping mechanisms! I’ve been unhealthy, I don’t feel good, I’ve been under stress from travel and a lot of output of pouring into other people. I get home and I immediately fill up with good things! I eat more fruits and vegetables. When I get home from traveling I always want smoothies and vegetables and chicken noodle soup, because I need to cope with the stress my body and mind has just been through. The way I do that is choosing good things. I think we’ve got to realize that our bodies were built to deal with stress, and the way we deal with it is either going to be positive or negative. I’m not talking about not coping, but what does it look like to cope well and struggle well?
In the midst of this quarantine, I know a lot of you got bread makers and started making bread, and I think that’s beautiful and I love bread and believe in bread. Another thing I saw is a lot of people walking - in fact we would walk every single night and see so many people out doing the same thing. Because there was nothing else to do! I think some of these are just part of the human way of dealing with stress! We’ve got to put things to help us deal - we have to get out. You’ve all seen the commercial with the dog that’s been overwalked during quarantine because everyone in the family is like, “c’mon, let’s go for a walk!” and now the dog is hiding under a table. That’s where we have been. Whether we’re choosing to make bread or choosing to walk.
UNHEALTHY COPING STRATEGIES
We were talking to a liquor store owner and asking how business has been, and they were one of the essential businesses in Texas, and they said, “business has never been better!” I say that kind of laughing, but in reality, during this season, there have been ways that all of us have been coping that are not healthy. We need to be honest about those. We need to talk about those. We need to see in what ways we have put our hope in something on earth that is going to fail us, and could even be destructive. Let me name some unhealthy coping strategies:
Drug or alcohol use
Overeating
Procrastination
Sleeping too much or too little
Social withdrawl
Self harm
Aggression
These are some of the unhealthy coping strategies that all of us can be prone to. We become prone to comfort and prone to bitterness and prone to sleeping too much, because what else is there to do? We have this season where everyone is a little bit over their screen time limits. The number of minutes we used to limit screen time to before quarantine - I would give anything to get back to that. We are so far past that in quarantine, because there just wasn’t a lot to do.
HOW DO YOU COPE?
The first thing I want you to do is just to think about yours. What are some of the ways you’ve been coping through this? What are some of the things you’ve depended on? Start to put them in those categories. Maybe some healthy coping strategies come to mind and you notice that you have been eating healthier, exercising more, talking about your emotions, seeking out professional counseling. Every counselor that I talk to has never been busier - and that’s awesome! People are actually dealing with what’s coming to the surface during quarantine. Depending on friends, prayer journaling, gratitude journaling, these are some of the positive coping strategies I’m talking about that are God-given. Community, our health, the ability to be grateful, those are all things given to us by God. I think about why Get Out Of Your Head has taken off during quarantine, and I think it’s because we want to believe we have the power to choose better in our minds, to choose better in our bodies, and to choose better in our decisions.
WHEN COPING BECOMES ADDICTION
I just watched a documentary called The Social Dilemma and if you haven’t seen it yet, I definitely recommend it. I think every single human on earth needs to watch it. The reason why is if you have a smartphone, which most people do, it is causing addiction in your life. It is drawing you in. It is you against artificial intelligence that is smarter than you. That intelligence is trying to keep your attention so that they can sell ads and whatever other product to you. Your attention is the commodity. We have to realize there is an unhealthy relationship between screens and technology in our lives. That is one of the ways we cope! In the documentary it told this story of a family and different members of the family struggling in different ways. The older son gave up his phone for a week just to prove that he could, and he made it a few days. But in those few days, he just wandered around. He didn’t even know what to do. He was so bored. We don’t even know how to be bored. We don’t even know how to be still without coping and distracting ourselves. We have to be able to be alone with our thoughts and deal with what is really bothering and hurting us, because we can so easily distract and numb ourselves. We are missing the best parts of life!
The people that made the documentary, they are the ones who created the technology. Every single one of them played a role in creating Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, Google, and all of them are sitting there essentially saying they regret it and it’s worse than they could have imagined. Even though they created it and they know how addictive it is, they still struggle with it themselves. They will not let their kids have it, because they know how dangerous it is. We’ve got to treat our unhealthy coping mechanisms the same way. We hate them, because they’re taking our joy and our life, and we’re missing out on the full, vibrant life we desire. None of the unhealthy coping strategies are going to end well. They are going to steal our health, relationships, work, enjoyment of people, so we’ve got to fight this. This is serious. This is a great plot of the enemy to cause us to numb out, to check out, to not deal with our stuff, to not be healthy individuals that know how to cope in a healthy way.
WHAT DO WE DO?
We’ve got to grow up. We’ve got to be grown ups and to choose better. It is possible to do so. This is a quote from D.A. Carson and I used it in Get Out Of Your Head: “people do not drift into holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward prayer, obedience, scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord. We drift toward compromise and we call it tolerance. We drift toward disobedience and we call it freedom. We drift toward superstition and we call it faith. We cherish the discipline of lost self-control and call it relaxation. We slouch toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking we’ve escaped legalism. We slide toward godliness and convince ourselves we have been liberated.”
This is the sickness of our generation. We think that in our checking out and numbing out that we are relaxing, but the truth is, we are falling from the gifts of God that are meant to keep us in delightful relationship with him. We are drifting from deep, meaningful relationships with other people in our coping. We are drifting toward our selfish desires instead of sacrificially living for other people. The way Christ has called us to live is to die to self and live for others - it’s the greatest way to live! The most joyful way to live!
What the author of Psalm 38, David, knew is that there is a place to take disappointment. There is a place to take your anger. There is a place to take your bitterness and frustration. There is a place to take your loneliness and boredom and it is to Jesus. We can take it to him and say, “help me process this. Help me be with you. Help me to be still and not need to look at my phone. Help me to not choose alcohol at night.” Even if you’re not drinking too much - to choose it every single night - that’s not okay. I’m going to call it out! It’s not okay to do that. We’ve got to choose better. We’ve got to choose better for our kids and ourselves. What I know is that it’s okay. We have gone through something collectively, but we are still going through it, and it might last a lot longer. We don’t want patterns to fall into our lives that are unhealthy for months and possibly years. Some of us started quarantine and we were like, “I’m gonna eat bad, because it’s just a few weeks at home. There’s nothing else to do!” That can’t go on for years! We have to shift and turn it. Whether it’s alcohol and internet usage or your screen time, we’ve gotta turn it around. We almost need to have our New Year’s Resolutions right now. We’ve got to grab it and deal with it and fight back. This is a great ploy of the enemy to take us down. So let’s choose God’s ways to cope rather than our own selfish desires.
Q&A WITH JENNIE
How can I get to the root of why I want to numb out so much?
I’ve talked about this in previous episodes, but we have to have community. We have to have people we can process with about what’s bothering us, why we’re checked out, etc. I would also say journal. One of the things in Get Out Of Your Head that is so helpful that I still do is that mind map. What’s on your mind? What are you thinking about? Because if you start to see a theme of thoughts you’re having every single day, you can kind of start to deal with that and give it a name. You can start to fight it. If there’s hurt or discontentment or disappointment or bitterness - whatever it is, then you can start to see it as you journal and write out your thoughts. You can see a theme and fight it. I really encourage you - if you don’t have the anxious thoughts guide, you can click here and download it. It has that mind map there for you to process what’s keeping you locked up. Don’t leave it there, because it’s not going to go in a positive direction if you do.
What is the cost of distraction?
The cost of this is that we are missing our lives. We’re missing the way God built us to live. The way almost every generation before us has lived. We’re not experiencing deep connection to God or to others, so life is going by really fast and it feels somewhat meaningless. There’s not this relational capital being grown over year and decades, because we’re checked out and investing our time that would normally be spent with family and friends in devices and a false sense of connection. Social media used the word social on purpose. It was supposed to bring people together and connect them, but it doesn’t do that. It’s a false sense of connection. It’s not actually how people are doing and what they’re actually going through. It’s a show and it’s the worst kind of connection because it actually misleads you into thinking people are all good and okay when they’re not. What I hope is that this would bother us so badly that we’d fight back. We’d fight back against addictions in our lives, we’d fight back against the places we’ve gotten numb and apathetic and checked out, and we would see holiness grow in us. That we would see prayer, knowledge of the Bible and discipleship grow in us. That’s what I pray and want to happen. I believe it can happen! We have more margin - let’s use it for good.
