Let’s say you have a job performance review coming up. You naturally feel stressed about it, and to take your mind off of things you go home and watch a funny movie. Suppose the job review doesn’t go all that well, and after work you go to the gym to de-stress. In both cases, we would say you made good use of coping mechanisms. Coping mechanisms are defined as “strategies people often use in the face of stress and/or trauma to help manage painful or difficult emotions.” (goodterhapy.org).(1)
Coping mechanisms, then, help us to reduce stress. Mindfulness, too, is known for reducing stress–the mindfulness training developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn is dubbed Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction. Hence, it is natural enough to ask about the connection between the two. Is mindfulness just another coping strategy?
My answer is no although, as they say, it’s complicated.
Coping mechanisms are short-term strategies we use on a post facto basis. Indeed, implementing a coping skill before a stressful event is a bit like taking an aspirin before you have a headache. But when some incident, event, or thought pushes us over and above our stress limit, coping skills can often help us regain our balance. In case you can’t come up with any on your own, Google “coping mechanism” and you will come across a laundry list of activities designed to be used to bring us down from a felt high state of stress: exercising, listening to music, taking a bath, writing in a journal, going for a walk are the first five on a list of 34 from the website verywellmind.com. The complication comes in that meditation—the quintessential mindfulness activity—invariably finds its place on even the shortest list of coping skills. What gives?
I want to begin by admitting that meditation is indeed a coping skill. It is a short term activity that can deescalate stress. Yoga as well can be classed as a coping skill, something one can do (if one is much more flexible than me) to reduce stress. But although meditation and yoga are indeed parts of Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) they are not the sum total of that program, nor are they identical to the broader concept of mindfulness any more than prayer, which is a part of Christianity, is identical to that life or definitive of Christianity.
Importantly, in MBSR meditation and yoga are not undertaken for the purposes of reducing stress. Instead both activities are engaged in in order to train our attention, increasing/strengthening our ability to stay in the present moment, on purpose, and without judgment. Someone who cultivates this capacity will ultimately reduce their stress level. But again, this is neither the point nor purpose of the activity. Indeed, it can be said that while coping mechanisms work to lower our stress level, mindfulness allows us to accommodate more stress in our lives while maintaining balance, thus potentially eliminating the need to activate coping skills.
Mindfulness is a way of being in the world that is pursued because living in this way makes us most awake to life and best able to engage in the world that is happening around us. In this way mindfulness is more like a religious worldview or a philosophy like Stoicism—an all embracing view of reality that buoys us in bad times. Psychologically speaking these would be classified as defense mechanisms, though I am reluctant to use that term because of the negative connotation. A crisis occurs, and rather than get upset or stressed, if I am a Christian, I trust in God that it will turn out well. If I practice Stoicism, I remind myself that the only thing I am in control of is how I respond to events, and that it is in my power to remain calm in the face of anything. If I am a practitioner of mindfulness, I acknowledge the thought of the stressful event, let it go and place my attention in the present moment.
Both coping skills and defense mechanisms protect the ego, assisting it in remaining stable through turbulent events. The distinction usually made is that while coping skills are engaged in consciously, defense mechanisms take place at the unconscious level. That is, one doesn’t have to make the conscious effort to engage in a belief system the way that one has to make the conscious effort to go for a walk or write in a journal to deescalate oneself from a stressful situation. It becomes second nature. Just the way for Kant we view the world through the lens of space and time, so the believer receives events through the lens of whatever worldview the happen to have adopted.
There may be something like the paradox of happiness going on here. Some argue that going out and consciously pursuing happiness is an ineffective way to make it happen, since happiness often just comes over us unexpectedly, when were are not doing anything that we particularly thought would make us happy. Just so stress reduction may be best achieved by a way of life that is not particularly aiming at that end goal. The person who goes home to watch the funny movie thinking “I will de-stress in this way” is a bit like the person trying not to think of the elephant. The thing you are trying to escape invariably pursues you. Mindfulness offers another route to this end: to be fully engaged in the present moment.
(1)Although we tend to think of coping strategies as positive actions, there are negative or “maladaptive” coping mechanisms as well. Let’s say that to get you mind off the upcoming job performance review you got drunk, and after the review went badly you went and got drunk again. In both cases, we would you used a maladaptive coping mechanism. Whereas constructive/adaptive coping strategies help us to maintain and even flourish in the face of stress, while maladaptive coping skills invariably make things worse by creating bigger problems down the road in terms of our personal life or interpersonal relationships. Here, I am only concerned with positive coping strategies.
