Why We Can’t Cope With Anything
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Navigating stressful situations can be challenging, particularly if your default coping skill for years was to quit drinking. Recently, I found myself in a stressful business-related predicament that I had no control over. I tried to fix it and, in the process, became incredibly overwhelmed. Despite almost three years of sobriety, this incident exposed a crucial deficit in my coping skills, a familiar issue for many of us who used drinking to cope.
Quitting drinking is just the beginning
Many of us used alcohol as a stress-reliever, a shortcut to numb painful emotions. But quitting drinking does not instantly equip us with healthier coping skills. For example, I started drinking with zero coping strategies and after sobriety, I still had zero. Three years into sobriety, I've developed a few, but there's room for improvement. These strategies can seem 'stupid,' like going on a walk, journaling, or taking a bath, but they are often the first steps toward building resilience against stress and maintaining sobriety.
Drinking alcohol pauses our emotional maturity
Our emotional maturity does not necessarily increase with age. Many of us, after years of alcohol use, find ourselves at the same emotional level as our younger selves when we first turned to alcohol. But understanding this allows us to be more gentle on ourselves. We must remember to not shame ourselves for feeling weak or incapable of dealing with stress.
Resilience, our ability to bounce back from difficulties, is crucial for coping with stress without alcohol. Alcohol abuse erodes our inherent resilience, making us more reliant on it as a coping mechanism. So building resilience is a crucial aspect of staying sober.
How to learn coping skills
A practical tool to start improving emotional resilience is emotion differentiation – the ability to identify how you're feeling accurately. Emotion differentiation can prevent the amplification and misinterpretation of feelings, leading to a more effective emotional response and reduction in self-destructive coping strategies.
Learn more about the effects of chronic stress and how to develop coping skills in episode 119:
Some people just can’t cope. It’s not because they’re weak-willed losers, but it can definitely make us feel like that is the reason. I had a stressful situation last week and I wanted to understand why I escalated it so much in my mind. In this episode I want to share with you why some of us just can’t cope. Both nature and nurture is involved, and at the end of the episode I will share how you can get started on becoming more resilient so you can handle stress in a way that you won’t regret later.
What to listen to next:
E61: How Alcohol Memories are Triggered in Sobriety
E91: Do You Want to be Sober or Do You Want to Drink Without the Consequences?
E115: Why You Aren’t Ready to Quit Drinking and How to Get Ready
E104: Why Alcohol Doesn’t Help You Cope with Dr. Ashish Bhatt, MD, MRO
E46: Neuroplasticity Helps us Recover
Sources
Murrough JW, Abdallah CG, Anticevic A, et al. Reduced global functional connectivity of the medial prefrontal cortex in major depressive disorder. Hum Brain Mapp. 2016;37(9):3214-3223.
Covington, H. Antidepressant Effect of Optogenetic Stimulation of the Medial Prefrontal Cortex. Journal of Neuroscience. 30(48):16082–16090. 2010
Belleau EL, Treadway MT, Pizzagalli DA. The Impact of Stress and Major Depressive Disorder on Hippocampal and Medial Prefrontal Cortex Morphology. Biol Psychiatry. 2019;85(6):443-453.
Cite this episode
Tietz, G. Episode 119: Why We Can’t Cope With Anything. Sober Powered. 2022.
