How are you coping?
Hello, it’s your friendly neighborhood behavior analyst back again to check in on you! As the pandemic rages on and we head in to cold and flu season (have you gotten your flu shot yet? Now is the time, and this year it’s more important than ever), let’s talk a little bit about coping skills.
What is coping? To “cope” is to invest your efforts into solving personal and interpersonal problems, in order to master, minimize, or tolerate stress and conflict (Thanks Wikipedia). Coping strategies are the tool belt that we keep certain skills in to help us achieve that homeostasis during stressful times. Hello stressful time!
If you are reading this blog, the likelihood that you are a parent is high, the likelihood that you are a parent with a child with special needs is also high, but not guaranteed, so shout out to those of you who are reading this, regardless of your parenting challenge, because they’re all really real this year. #2020.
Let’s consider the especially difficult 8 months we just had. There are several indicators of how we’re doing as a society, one of those is the national divorce rate. Legal Templates, a company that provides legal documents published some recent statistics that are staggering. The number of people seeking a divorce was 34% higher from March through June compared to 2019. What does this mean? The lockdown has been hard on marriages. Parenting a special needs child is also hard on marriages. A study by Namkung et. al., in 2015 found that the divorce rate among parents with a special needs child is around 2% higher than parents with typically developing children. It’s easy to imagine what those numbers might look like in the COVID era.
What does this mean? It means we are struggling. Our relationships are strained, we are overloaded, and our responsibilities by no means have been lessened by staying at home. Some of us find ourselves working more than ever to keep the wheels of the family turning. Coping strategies are important to our survival more than ever, and coping strategies can take several forms.
There are good coping strategies, and not-so-good coping strategies. In a previous post I wrote about self-care in the light of a short-term event like the stay-at-home orders. We were so cute back in March, thinking this would all be over in a few weeks. Sure, we can drink a little more wine to help lower our stress, sure we can stay up late to enjoy some quiet time or binge-watch Tiger King (doesn’t that seem like so long ago?!?!?). These coping strategies are fine in the short term, they act as a band-aid. Things have gotten more complicated since March, and long-term coping strategies now need to move to the front lines in the mental health battle.
Coping Strategies
Sleep Hygiene:
I wrote a post recently on sleep hygiene for children, it is as important for us to get enough sleep as it is for our children. We can improve our overall well-being simply by getting enough rest, and quality rest. We can achieve this by going to bed at roughly the same time every night and getting up at roughly the same time every morning, regardless of the day of the week. Sleeping in on a Saturday is glorious and can definitely improve your mood in the short-term, but the better option is to get up at the same time each day. In the long run. I’m not here to take away your weekend lie-in, really. Just some food for thought about best practices when it comes to our mental health. When it comes to these things do as I say, and not as I do.
Breathing:
It may sound trivial but taking some time to breathe can reset your system. When we are under intense amounts of stress, the sympathetic nervous system goes into action, this is the “fight or flight” response that is triggered by a threat. The brain does not separate out if the threat is tangible (there’s a lion that’s about to pounce so we’d better run), or abstract (there’s a virus in the air that could potentially be deadly to me our my family member), our brain’s reaction to this threat is the same. We start to sweat, the body releases glucose and cortisol, digestion slows down, and we get a jolt of energy. Think about what happens when we almost fall off of something or catch our kid as they almost fall off of something. Breathing slowly is one way we can hack our own system in to shutting down, by taking several slow, deep breaths your brain interprets that as the threat being over and shuts down its response. This is a very easy way to calm the brain and calm the whole body, science is pretty neat, right?
Grounding Techniques:
Here’s where this post is about to get long (longer than usual), but it’s worth it. Many people with anxiety use grounding techniques to help bring them back to baseline when their anxiety or fear gets them out of whack. I’m going to give you a look in to the grounding techniques I use with my patients on a daily basis. Experimenting with each one of these, and trying them to find the one that works best for you can be super helpful in trying to manage your anxiety in this never-ending pandemic we’re all experiencing. The next time you’re feeling anxious or overwhelmed, bust one of these guys out.
The Grounding Chair
Sit down in a comfortable chair, one where your feet reach the floor. Close your eyes and focus on your breath. Breathe in slowly for the count of three, then out slowly. Bring your mind’s focus to your body. How does your body feel sitting in that chair? Move your bum right into the back of the seat so the whole length of your back is pressing into the back of the chair. Can you feel the contact between your body and the chair’s surface? If the chair has arms, touch it, is the material smooth or textured? Press your arms down the length of the chair arm, notice how your hands hang off the end. If your chair doesn’t have arms, touch the material on the seat, how does that feel?
Next push your feet into the ground, imagine the energy draining down from your mind, down through your body and out through your feet into the ground. I picture it as a color filling my body as it goes from top to toe, but this is your image so choose whatever you want your energy to look like. As the energy drains from your head, feel how heavy each body part becomes, your torso feels heavy and now your arms as you relax those muscles. Lastly, feel the heaviness go down your legs, through your feet and down into the ground.
5-4-3-2-1 Grounding
This second technique gets you to use all your five senses to help you to get back to the present. It starts with you sitting comfortably, close your eyes and taking a couple of deep breathes.
In through your nose (count to 3), out through your mouth (to the count of 3).
Now open your eyes and look around you. Name out loud:
5 – things you can see (you can look within the room and out of the window)
4 – things you can feel (the silkiness of your skin, the texture of the material on your chair, what does your hair feel like? What is in front of you that you can touch? A table perhaps?)
3 – things you can hear (traffic noise or birds outside, when you are quiet and actually listening things in your room constantly make a noise but typically we don’t hear them).
2 – things you can smell (hopefully nothing awful!)
1 – thing you can taste (it might be a good idea to keep a piece of chocolate handy in case you are doing this grounding exercise! You can always leave your chair for this one and when you taste whatever it is that you have chosen, take a small bite and let it swill around your mouth for a couple of seconds, really savoring the flavor).
Take a deep breath to end.
Hold and Focus
Hold an object in your hand and really bring your full focus to it. If I was looking at one of my gems I would see the patterns that run through it, see the color variances. Some have veins of different colors going through the or sparkly bits. Look at where shadows may fall on parts of it or maybe there are shapes that form within the object. Feel how heavy or light it is in your hand and what the surface texture feels like under your fingers.
This can be done with any object you have lying around or if you know you are going into a stressful situation, take one of your favorite small objects and put it in your pocket or purse so you can do this calming exercise on the go.
Draw Around Your Feet
Place your feet on the ground and in your imagination pick your favorite color to draw an outline around each foot. Start at the heel and using your imaginary pencil slowly go up the side of your foot to your pinky toe and then make sure you draw around each toe and then go back towards the heel. Repeat on the other foot.
Another quick way to focus on your feet when you are in a stressful situation is just wiggle your toes inside your shoe. Pay attention to the sensation as you move each separate toe. Do some move independently of the others? Tense up your whole foot then stretch it out. Now do the other foot.
Ok so that’s the end of my coping post. Do me a favor a try at least one of these things, for a minimum of 2 weeks. New habits take a least 2 weeks to take hold in our daily lives so trying something for 4 days and calling it quits doesn’t work here. Try. Try for you, try for your kids, try for your significant other because at the very bottom of all of this, a parent needs to put themselves first a least some of the time, in order to be the best parent they can be for the little humans they are working so hard to raise.
I’m here with you, I see your struggle, we can get through this together. Don’t be like Patrick.
