To Live is to Cope

Spraying Raid can’t help when you’re feeling antsy.

By Ashley Sudeta

I’ve told every therapist I’ve worked with that my top strategy for coping with overwhelming stress is watching YouTube. Maddening fear of failure? YouTube. The bone-aching suspicion of being hated by all of humanity? YouTube. An intense restlessness telling me that I have made only bad decisions in life and MUST CHANGE MY WAYS NOW!!?! Youtube. Ignoring the psychological and societal implications of this, I’ve begun to find it pretty ironic. After all, my primary motive for reducing my anxiety is so that I can gain greater function, and watching YouTube for 2 hours is the pinnacle of procrastination. Funnily enough, instantly blurring any discomfort away with some of the worst content the internet has to offer doesn’t fix any issue. At best nothing changes, but usually it manages to worsen the situation by rescheduling the stressor for a later day and making the deadline tighter.

I think it’s important to be conscious of what we are choosing to turn to in our times of stress and restlessness. In an ideal world social media would be a neutral vessel for users’ content, but in actuality it is engineered to hold your attention captive in order to generate maximum revenue. To make the situation worse, much of the content posted has turned platforms into cesspools of negativity, judgment, and sheer detachment from reality. Online platforms have shown time and time again that they don’t care about their users well-being, just their revenue. This is not the kind system I should be putting myself at the mercy of when I’m in a vulnerable state. We need to evaluate our methods of coping with the discomfort of stress, because while the deeper issues associated with my habits may be fairly obvious, the negative aspects of what you choose to do might be more discrete.

Because of my recent strides in basic reasoning (and a sense of shame and embarrassment regarding my screen time) I have begun trying to tolerate my anxieties in order to prove to myself that living with the jitters is better than forcing myself into a day off. Practice builds resilience, so, in theory, if I make this a habit, then I might be able to consider myself more of a fully functioning person eventually. With the ability to act and seek information constantly at our fingertips, the need to occupy our minds can be suffocating, but the right action can prevent this from becoming a lifelong issue. Of course this, like all advice, is not a blanket statement that can be applied to everyone indiscriminately. There are times when it is necessary to forget life’s worries, but it’s up to you to determine when that is. With this in mind, I believe it’s incredibly important that we learn to sit with some discomfort rather than rush to numb it. Through this we can find the ability to take a step back and just allow life to happen to us.