Flirting With Disaster?

Are your coping mechanisms helping or hurting?

- Aditi Maheshwari

Are your coping mechanisms healthy? Ah, coping mechanisms! Those quirky little habits we develop to deal with the minor inconveniences of life-like existential dread, looming deadlines, or realising you've been talking to a mute Zoom screen for 15 minutes. The real question is, are these coping strategies actually helping, or are they the emotional equivalent of slapping a Band-Aid on a broken leg?

Let's explore this with a bit of humour because if we can't laugh at our coping mechanisms, we'll probably cry. And let's be honest, who has time for crying when you've got a Netflix series to binge?

The Binge Watch

Let's start with the most popular coping mechanism: binge-watching. Nothing screams "I'm handling my problems well" like finishing five seasons of a TV show in one weekend. Yes, immersing yourself in the lives of fictional characters is a great way to forget about your own but what happens when you emerge from your TV cocoon, only to find that your laundry has somehow turned into Mount Everest?

Healthy or not? Well, if the show you're watching teaches you a new skill-like how to escape a zombie apocalypse or what to do if you find yourself on a mysterious island-it's practically self-improvement. But if your coping mechanism leaves you wondering if your family still lives in the house, it might be time to reconsider.

Retail Therapy

Then there's retail therapy. Who among us hasn't filled an online cart with things we don't need, in hopes of filling the void in our souls? Sure, buying that tenth pair of identical black shoes feels like a solution, but deep down, we all know it's just a way to temporarily distract ourselves from life's problems.