Coping Resources

[Bair]

I was reading "facts" about INTPs, my Myers-Briggs type.  One of the things I noticed was a statement about INTPs, as a group, usually have the lowest or next to lowest amount of coping resources of all the 16 types. 

I don't think I have ever noticed that term before-- Coping Resources.  I have heard 'Coping Skills'.  Is it possible to have good coping skills but be low on resources?  What is the difference between a skill and a resource?  For example is self talk a skill or resource?

[fromheeltoheal]

Hey Bair-

I don't think the semantics matter as much as what you're trying to cope with.  It could be people, situations, relationships, your health, you career, life in general, and I think the coping tools (hey, there's another term) that work are dependent on the situation.

The tools I've found to be effective, for life in general and really everything goes better when I practice them, are:

Get 7-8 hours of sleep per night

Eat a clean, healthy diet

Hydrate well, 3 or 4 quarts of water a day

Daily exercise, which doesn't have to be all formal, just do something hard enough to break a healthy sweat, anything works

Limit or eliminate caffeine and alcohol

Challenge your self-talk: every time your inner critic says something disempowering, tell it to fck off and find something empowering to believe instead

Surround yourself with empowering people and remove disempowering ones from your life

Be happy and smile all the time, on purpose

Meditate for 20 minutes a day, which doesn't have to be all formal either, just sit down, slow down, and focus on just being instead of thinking or doing

[Bair]

Get 7-8 hours of sleep per night

Eat a clean, healthy diet

Hydrate well, 3 or 4 quarts of water a day

Daily exercise, which doesn't have to be all formal, just do something hard enough to break a healthy sweat, anything works

Limit or eliminate caffeine and alcohol

Challenge your self-talk: every time your inner critic says something disempowering, tell it to fck off and find something empowering to believe instead

Surround yourself with empowering people and remove disempowering ones from your life

Be happy and smile all the time, on purpose

Meditate for 20 minutes a day, which doesn't have to be all formal either, just sit down, slow down, and focus on just being instead of thinking or doing

Those are all good tools.  The survey I took split resources into five areas: Cognitive; Social; Emotional; Spiritual/Philosophical; and Physical. I was a low average on Cognitive and Spiritual.  Way low in the Social, Emotional, and Physical.  Most all of your suggestions are specifically suggested in the Self-Improvement section.  The suggestions for improvements in the Cognitive, Spiritual, and Physical areas are appealing.   The suggestions for Social and Emotional improvements are not appealing.  Perhaps not surprisingly, Social and Emotional were my lowest scores.   I think I will set some goals to do the following:

In the Cognitive area I am going to try to make it a habit to write down five things a day that are good about me or my life.  I get down about things sometimes and talk myself out of it.  Perhaps writing things down will talk me out of getting down before I get down.

In the Spiritual area I need to sort out my mission/purpose in life.  I've had a bit of a focus over the years to set up my finances to be able retire.  I am now there so to speak but I don't know what to do next.  I can afford to retire, but I don't know what I am going to do with myself.

In the Physical area I plan on eating less crap and I have some specific exercise goals in mind: 10,000 steps and 10 flights of stairs a day and some weight lifting.

[fromheeltoheal]

Interesting Bair, I haven't read those suggestions, I just figured out what works after decades of trial and error, might have saved myself some time... .

A visual I like is to imagine the areas of your life on a wheel, with each spoke a different area.  If one or two spokes are shorter than the rest and we work on those, it makes the wheel more round, so life rolls easier.  A big piece is to just focus on this stuff, which you're doing, whatever we focus on tends to get better, and we do things like set goals towards things we want to achieve or grow in.  I've found it can be easy to get deep in the doing and forget the overall picture, so it's also helpful to back off and look at the big picture from time to time, see how we're doing, and refocus on the areas we want to work on.  It's great work, the best work, and also helpful, once we've got our life somewhat balanced, is to contribute to other people, that might be the social area you mention; we're social animals after all, and even if we handle all the internal and physical stuff, life will still feel empty without contribution.

[Bair]

Tomorrow I am going to a T.  A couple of months back my wife and I got into an argument and I ended up banging my head on the wall.  I was so tense going into the situation, I couldn't take the argument.  I have to do better with the stress in my life. 

[JaneStorm]

My T is a Stoic. I realize that I have lived by these principles in the past and will do so again.

“‘A consciousness of wrongdoing is the first step to salvation.’ This remark of Epicurus’ is to me a very good one. For a person who is not aware that he is doing anything wrong has no desire to be put right. You have to catch yourself doing it before you can reform. Some people boast about their failings: can you imagine someone who counts his faults as merits ever giving thought to their cure? So—to the best of your ability—demonstrate your own guilt, conduct inquiries of your own into all the evidence against yourself. Play the first part of prosecutor, then of judge and finally of pleader in mitigation. Be harsh with yourself at times.” — Seneca, Letters From a Stoic

“Don’t just say you have read books. Show that through them you have learned to think better, to be a more discriminating and reflective person. Books are the training weights of the mind. They are very helpful, but it would be a bad mistake to suppose that one has made progress simply by having internalized their contents.” — Epictetus, The Art of Living

This last one is always my challenge. I 'know' so much; however, in my learned state, I forget to apply what I know. It is harder than it seems! Hang in there! 

[eeks]

Those are all good tools.  The survey I took split resources into five areas: Cognitive; Social; Emotional; Spiritual/Philosophical; and Physical. I was a low average on Cognitive and Spiritual.  Way low in the Social, Emotional, and Physical.  Most all of your suggestions are specifically suggested in the Self-Improvement section.  The suggestions for improvements in the Cognitive, Spiritual, and Physical areas are appealing.   The suggestions for Social and Emotional improvements are not appealing.  Perhaps not surprisingly, Social and Emotional were my lowest scores.  

I don't know what the suggestions for improvement were on this survey, nor do I know what your desired outcome is in those areas of your life (maybe you'd like to share?).  However, in terms of the general discussion around "coping resources/skills", I would like to add the following.  

I often talk (both here and in real life... .) about the limitations of conscious willpower and discipline in personal change and emotional healing.  People often disagree with me, they feel that these things are necessary and benefit them.  For instance, a lot of people say CBT really helped them, and I believe them and accept that.  I also think that sometimes, people can see the positive results of their discipline in their life and that motivates them to keep going.  I think people may be afraid that what I am saying is defeatist, when really, I just want to make sure that people know that there is another (albeit paradoxical) approach that may help them, if conscious decisions toward habit change don't work.  

I have recently come across a fairly new modality called "coherence therapy" which seems to confirm what I have been thinking for some years now.  That even if a habit seems self- or other-destructive (or at least not beneficial), chances are you are doing it to avoid perceived worse pain. (what coherence therapy adds to my previous conjectures is that that perception of avoiding worse pain is tied to an "implicit memory" according to which the "bad/unwanted" habit or emotion is "necessary" for the client to produce.  And the therapy works in part by making the implicit, explicit, bringing it into awareness)

"For nearly a century, ever since Pavlov's work, the available evidence seemed to imply that once an emotional reaction pattern is consolidated -- stored in the brain’s long-term, “implicit memory” circuits -- it is indelible, permanent for the lifetime of the individual.

Under the assumption of indelibility, the best one can do to get free of an ingrained "negative" reaction is to merely suppress and override it by counteracting it with a preferred "positive" response learned and built up to compete against the unwanted one. Common examples in psychotherapy are the learning of a relaxation technique to counteract anxiety or panic and the cultivation of new beliefs to counteract existing ones.

Counteracting in one form or another therefore became the approach of most therapies, such as the cognitive-behavioral, solution-focused and “positive” therapies now in widespread use.

It is well recognized, however, that an unwanted implicit memory circuit is still fully intact even when it is successfully blocked through counteractive and extinction-like methods. The old response can therefore flare up again, and so ongoing vulnerability to relapse is an inherent weakness of these approaches.

The clinical landscape changes fundamentally with neuroscientists' recent discovery of memory reconsolidation, a form of neuroplasticity that allows an emotional learning or schema stored in long-term implicit memory to be actually erased, not just overridden and suppressed by the learning a preferred response. For an overview of the research and explanation of reconsolidation, please refer to the readings in the column at right.

Coherence Therapy consists of the same process identified by neuroscientists for reconsolidation to occur. How is this fundamentally different from counteracting? If a therapy client is guided to actually dissolve the underlying emotional learning or schema generating his or her anxiety, for example, that anxiety would simply no longer arise. There is then nothing to counteract and no possibility of relapse. The anxiety ceases with no need for a counteractive process of teaching relaxation techniques or any other way of building up a non-anxious state."

[fromheeltoheal]

Hey eeks-

Couldn't help but think of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind when I read the description.

I think changing the belief that something is indelible is half the battle.  What if the brain can be trained like a muscle, and new neural pathways can be built and strengthened, and the ones that go unused wither, like grass overgrowing a trail?  The trail is still there, but no one goes that way anymore, because someone built a stronger, better freeway.

The article mentions 'readings in the column at right'; do you have a link?

[eeks]

The article mentions 'readings in the column at right'; do you have a link?

Oops, I meant to include the link.  www.coherencetherapy.org/discover/ct-reconsolidation.htm

The case studies may also be helpful to read - www.coherencetherapy.org/discover/examples.htm

[Bair]

eeks,

I've down loaded a couple of the articles and I plan on reading them this week.  As I recall, one of the things I got from the book The Power of Habits (at least I think that is the title) was that habits weren't unlearned or forgotten but rather replaced.  So it will be interesting to read more about it.  I tend to be a bit skeptical of new trends in psychology.  Often theories haven't be sufficiently tested.  (Which is not to say the author of the habits book got it right either... .)