Coping Mechanisms, Or How to Stay Afloat When Your Boat is Upside Down

Emotional upheaval sucks.

Whether a death, a break up, a move, an accident, or just some strong emotional event or change, coping with yourself and daily life afterwards can be a seriously hard endeavor. 

One of the things that I learned while working in a behavioral health unit at a hospital is that using negative coping methods after experiencing large life events can get you in a lot of trouble. (We all know what negative coping methods look like, but just in case you are playing dumb, drinking large amounts of alcohol after bad days is a negative coping method.)

So, now that my boat seems to have flipped upside down far out to sea, I've been looking into coping methods so that I don't just tread water near the site of the accident but get back to shore and start rebuilding. 

Here are a bunch of ones I have learned and some of which I am currently doing:

• Exercising regularly
• Eating regularly 
• Sleeping - which is sometimes really hard
• Praying - After all, I am an Episcopal seminarian
• Writing - pain seems to make me into a poet, and writing out how you honestly feel is cathartic 
• Replacement therapy - which is usually used for those addicted to nicotine, but in my case involves holding a rock instead of my phone
• Art therapy - working on art projects 
• Treating yourself with kindness and gentleness
• Setting straight what you can control in your life
• Baking - I usually do a lot of this one. And speaking of which, the pickles from the last post worked, but they do not quite taste as I was expecting them to taste. I think I am going to make another batch with a different recipe.

While looking up some new ways to keep swimming instead of treading water, I found the University of Minnesota's 101 Strategies For Coping With Stress page. 

Swimming in deep waters is not a new sport. Humans have been dealing with being thrown in the deep end for ages. While swimming in deep water really only means you can't touch the ground, it don't mean you can't enjoy the waters. It just takes a little more effort. 

Just keep swimming, swimming, swimming...

A little water + dry Math = Fun, Vivid Math

'"Vividness" in Mathematics'
http://scienceblogs.com/evolutionblog/2013/02/14/vividness-in-mathematics/

Of course I choose the article this morning about mathematics and literature. Mathematics in conjunction with other subjects is awesome. Mathematics does not get the credit and attention it deserves. Coming from the girl who double majored in college in Mathematics and Religious studies. However, I do think all of the men in the article make a good observation about the state of mathematics in the United States. Math is presented and taught in dry little lines of pure notation and you really have to stretch your own imagination to understand or figure out what is important and useful about the mathematics beyond the problems given. While I really disliked my integrated math program in middle and high school, the greatest thing about that program was that the mathematics was presented in vivid ways. The problems were vivid and obviously showed what good the mathematics would do for you. I remember the calculus projects I did in high school where we had to figure out the volume of a Hershey kiss and a Reese's peanut butter cup by calculating the area under the curves, after of course figuring out the curves, so that we could figure out how many of each we could pack on a trip. The project was a little in depth for normal practical application, but it was fun and we saw calculus in normal areas of life beyond parabolas and limits. I think a little vividness in mathematics would help expand the way that people think about mathematics and why it is an important subject to learn, especially on higher academic levels. I am not totally sure about this, but it seems that teachers and textbooks do a better job of making math vivid for younger audiences, but when you get into high school and college, especially college, the vividness of what mathematics does is somewhat lost. Mathematics does take a certain way of looking at the world and a dedication in some areas to abstract notions, but even if mathematical ideas could be better taught with vividness, people may not be able to do the mathematics themselves, but they would have a better understanding of some natural phenomena. My senior mathematics thesis sealed this idea for me in that lots of people understand the idea of what I did and learned about, the recreation of the grid beyond MC Escher's Print Gallery print using math, though they could not do that themselves. In every case that I have explained it, people walk away with a little more appreciation for what mathematics can do.

Obviously I like math. I don't like its bad reputation and that people do not think it connects to anything else. I just connected it to food and art. Just ask me sometime to connect math and religion. I always have fun with that. ;)