TED Talks Daily - Are your coping mechanisms healthy? | Andrew Miki

Episode Date: August 13, 2024

What do you do when you're feeling stressed or anxious? Psychologist Andrew Miki explains how many of the coping mechanisms that help us feel better in the moment — like procrastinating, overusing our smartphones or endlessly scrolling social media — actually leave us feeling more depleted over time. He shows how you can break these habits in order to build up resilience and improve your self-confidence.

TED Audio Collective. You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. In order to become more physically fit, we generally know what to do. Eat smarter and move more. What about what it takes to become more mentally fit? In his 2024

talk, psychologist Andrew Meekie proposes one answer that could be a useful way to maintain self-confidence and avoid anxiety and depression. His talk on mental fitness is coming up after the break. Support for this show comes from Airbnb. If you know me, you know I love staying in Airbnbs when I travel. They make my family feel most at home when we're away from home. As we settled down at our Airbnb during a recent vacation to Palm Springs, I pictured my own home sitting empty. Wouldn't it be smart and better put to use welcoming a family like mine by hosting it on Airbnb? It feels like the practical thing to do, and with the extra income, I could save up for renovations to make the space even more inviting for ourselves and for future guests. Your home might be worth more than you think.

Find out how much at Airbnb.ca slash host. AI keeping you up at night? Wondering what it means for your business? Thank you. from Creative Destruction Lab as they ask bold questions like why is Canada lagging in AI adoption and how to catch up. Don't get left behind. Listen to Disruptors, the innovation era, and stay ahead of the game in this fast-changing world.

Follow Disruptors on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform. There's a little slice of heaven in a mountain town escape. A pace of life that's less hurried, more authentic. Where experiences feel down to earth, yet elevated. Take family time to a higher level with an ATV ride on West Virginia's Hatfield-McCoy trails.

And all around the Hatfield-McCoy region, you'll find unique lodging options, great dining, historical museums, and more. Plan your getaway now at wvtourism.com. And now, our TED Talk of the day. What do you think is the connection between a pigeon's ability to count and human mental health? The answer has to do with learned behaviors. When I was on the path to becoming a clinical psychologist, my career veered in the direction of animal cognition and neuroscience. I found myself teaching pigeons to count using a process called shaping. You start by giving it some food every time it looks at a touchscreen. This creates connections in its brain that become stronger over time, even as the rules become more complex. So just like teaching a dog to stay,

I eventually trained the pigeon to peck at a red square when it saw two flashes of light, and a green square when it saw three. I now had a pigeon that could count. This process happens gradually, day after day, until that learned behavior becomes a habit. I've worked in mental health over 25 years, and I've learned that just like the pigeon, our brains reinforce certain habits or coping mechanisms that help us feel better in the moment. I've seen thousands of educators, health care workers,

and first responders rely on coping mechanisms like procrastination, overusing their smartphones, or working harder through a tough time. This can backfire and train them to become anxious and depressed. For example, do you scroll endlessly on social media instead of getting to that task that fills you with anxiety or dread? Or, late at night, do you get a dopamine hit when you click on the next episode button?

Procrastination can feel good at the time, but, oh, the next day is going to be a real grind. These coping mechanisms help us feel better in the moment, so it is not crazy that we do them. But if we kept repeating them and wonder why we're still stressed or anxious or burnt out, then what we're doing might be insane. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different response. Now, we might not be aware of our own

insane patterns, but chances are we all have them, myself included. The good news is that if we understand our unhelpful coping mechanisms, we can all unlearn them to improve our mental health. Now I'd like to share with you what I've learned from being a father. My awesome daughter Natalia is now a teenager, but luckily for her, having a psychologist as a father means that I've worked hard to shape the connections in her brain. So she understands that the 90s grunge music is the absolute peak of all music ever.

My goal is for Natalia to be self-confident because I've never had a patient with clinical anxiety or depression also have high self-confidence at the same time. Anxiety erodes confidence. We tend to overestimate the amount of danger that we're in and underestimate our ability to cope. With depression, we end up beating ourselves up to the point that we feel worthless and hopeless. But as people overcome depression and anxiety, their self-confidence grows. They begin to talk to themselves like a coach instead of a critic to see how threats can become opportunities. About five years ago, Natalia desperately wanted a smartphone, but I saw this as a threat to her self-confidence.

While she would plead her case over dinner, I'd lean over to her and say, hey, do you generally feel pretty good about yourself? And she'd say, yeah. Are you anxious? No, not compared to some of the people I know. Well, all of the research shows that the more kids are on a smartphone,

the more anxious and depressed they become. So do you want to be less confident and more anxious? Then I'd watch her face change from that youthful optimism to the cold reality that it just wasn't going to happen. And now, back to the episode. Once Natalia finally got her smartphone, I could see how she was becoming like many of us

who use it as a coping mechanism to seek reassurance. For example, imagine you're meeting a friend for dinner at 7 p.m. and they haven't arrived. You start to worry. Am I in the right place? Did they forget? Are they okay? As the uncertainty increases, you start to feel anxious.

You fidget. You feel butterflies, maybe a little uncomfortable. Eventually, you pull out your phone to get reassurance by texting your friend, where are you? When they respond, just parked, your worry and anxiety is washed away and you feel better. Now, if you sat with that discomfort and uncertainty, you'd strengthen your resilience to anxiety. There's a network in our brains that's like a muscle. It gets a workout every time we sit with anxious sensations and worrisome thoughts, but most of us don't sit with it. Instead, we look for reassurance and instant relief by texting. So just like the pigeon that learned to count,

our smartphones can train us to become more anxious every time we use them to seek reassurance. The danger of our coping mechanisms is that they make sense at the time, but they go undetected until we hit a perfect storm, a time in our lives when it seems like everything is going wrong and the energy in our internal batteries becomes depleted. For example, let's say over the past six months, Natalia's friends have treated her horribly.

She got cut from her soccer team, and our family dog died. This perfect storm depletes her internal battery to 40%, and she no longer feels like herself. When she gets a bad report card, Natalia will revert to another coping mechanism, to work harder through a tough time. This has helped her succeed in the past, but with a depleted battery, she just can't get things back on track. This reinforces negative thoughts.

What's wrong with me? Oh, nothing is working. I'm such a loser. I'm such a loser. Every time Natalia has these thoughts, the self-critical muscles in her brain become stronger, her self-confidence crashes, and her depression grows. If Natalia is like most of us, what can we do to break these patterns and improve our self-confidence? Well, if it was physical fitness, we'd all have to start moving more. The mental fitness equivalent is to talk more.

The issue is that there's still a lot of stigma attached to mental health. We tend to keep our struggles to ourselves because we're afraid that we'll be seen as weak or incapable. We need to change this narrative by talking more about the issues in our lives. By talking, we uncover our unhelpful coping mechanisms, and that awareness is the first step to unlearning them. Now here's the sobering truth.

Mental health is complicated and nuanced. You are all unique, and your behaviors have been shaped over a long time. So I can't tell you what's best for you in your situation without knowing more about you. Instead, I hope to inspire you to take the time right now to learn more about yourself. And you can start by asking yourself these two questions. First, what do you do when you feel stressed, anxious, or sad? And second, have these feelings gotten better or worse over time? If the answer is worse, then you're relying on an unhelpful coping mechanism. Just like the pigeon that learned to count, our brains have an amazing capacity to build new connections and unlearn unhelpful habits by trying something new.

It could be learning new strategies, like sitting with your anxiety, breathe to take the edge off, or my favorite, balance your thoughts to become more self-confident. It all starts with us talking more about our own patterns of insanity and admitting that we all have them, even us 90s grunge psychologists. Thank you. Support for this show comes from Airbnb.

If you know me, you know I love staying in Airbnbs when I travel. They make my family feel most at home when we're away from home. As we settled down at our Airbnb during a recent vacation to Palm Springs, I pictured my own home sitting empty. Wouldn't it be smart and better put to use welcoming a family like mine by hosting it on Airbnb? It feels like the practical thing to do, and with the extra income, I could save up for renovations

to make the space even more inviting for ourselves and for future guests. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca slash host. That was Andrew Meekie speaking at TEDxSURY in 2024. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at TED.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Autumn Thompson, and Alejandra Salazar.

It was mixed by Christopher Faisy-Bogan. Additional support from Emma Taubner, Daniela Balarezo, and Will Hennessy. I'm Elise Hugh. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening. Looking for a fun challenge to share with your friends and family? Today, TED now has games designed to keep your mind sharp while having fun. Visit TED.com slash games to explore the joy and wonder of TED Games.