Understand Your Coping Strategies and Break the Shame Cycle
This time of year can feel heavy for so many people.
The days are darker, the weather makes it harder to go outside, and routines get disrupted with different work and school schedules.
The holiday season can also stir up old emotions and expectations, whether you celebrate them or not.
Even if life is “fine” on the surface, your body may feel more tired, more on-edge, more overwhelmed, or more tempted to fall back into old, comfortable patterns.
If you’re making choices right now that you don’t feel proud of — overeating, numbing out, withdrawing, overspending, drinking more than usual, or just feeling unlike yourself — you might start to feel frustrated.
But let me reassure you: you’re not broken. You’re simply human.
And you’re doing the only things you know to do to feel safe. You’re just trying to cope.
What Coping Strategies Really Are
Before we go any further, it’s important to understand what coping strategies actually are.
A coping strategy is anything you do — consciously or unconsciously — to help your mind or body feel better in a moment of stress, discomfort, or overwhelm.
Coping strategies can be:
Physical (eating, drinking, pacing, tapping your foot)
Emotional (crying, numbing, shutting down)
Behavioral (scrolling, binge-watching, working late, avoiding)
Relational (seeking reassurance, people-pleasing, withdrawing)
Some coping strategies are supportive and regulate your nervous system. Others are maladaptive, meaning they bring relief in the moment but often create more stress later.
But here’s the key: Every coping strategy — even the harmful ones — is an attempt to reduce distress and increase safety.
It’s your body saying:
“This is too much.”
“I don’t know what to do.”
“I need comfort right now.”
You’re not choosing a behavior because you’re weak or irresponsible. You’re choosing it because, at some point in your life, that behavior worked to help you feel better, even if only for a moment.
Coping strategies are not character flaws, even though that’s what they can feel like. Whether they are helpful or not, they are simply survival patterns.
And once you understand them as survival patterns, it becomes much easier to shift out of shame and into self-understanding.
Reframing Coping: Everything You’re Doing Makes Sense
Every single coping strategy, even the messy ones, is an attempt to comfort yourself.
Allow that to sink in.
Scrolling for hours?
Your brain is looking for escape and predictability.
Snapping at your partner or kids?
Your system is overwhelmed and trying to release pressure.
Pouring a drink at the end of the night?
You’re reaching for something to soften the edges of a hard day.
None of these behaviors mean you don’t care. And none of them mean you lack discipline.
They’re simply your best attempt, in the moment, to regulate discomfort with the tools you’ve had available up until now.
That doesn’t mean you have to give in or stay stuck, or that you should make excuses for these behaviors. Instead, shift how you view these behaviors. Seeing them as failures or a moral flaw only feeds shame, and shame is what is actually keeping you stuck.
This was a tough lesson for me to learn. Coming from a family of addicts, I learned to hate the behavior. And while I thankfully never struggled with substance abuse, I for sure had maladaptive coping strategies, even some that I still fall back into.
When I’m sad I want chocolate. When I’m overwhelmed I just want to numb out in front of a screen. When the world feels like too much I just want to escape into a book or show and forget about everything else.
And for short stints that’s not so bad. But when you start neglecting the important life things and find yourself stuck in procrastination, it so easily builds into “what is wrong with me?! Why can’t I just get it together?!”
And while those thoughts can motivate you short term, long term they just feed that shame loop.
The Shame Loop: Why “I Hate This About Myself” Keeps You Stuck
Here’s the part we don’t always want to look at: The more shame you feel about a behavior, the more likely you are to repeat it.
Unhealthy shame isn’t a moral compass — it’s a freeze response. Your nervous system collapses inward, making you feel small, wrong, and powerless. And in that state, the brain reaches for the quickest form of comfort it knows.
This creates the cycle so many people get caught in:
Stress or emotional trigger
Coping behavior
Shame
More dysregulation
More coping
More shame
And it’s not necessarily because you’re doing anything “wrong,” but because shame activates the same stress chemistry you were trying to escape in the first place.
You can’t shame yourself into healing. Shame only reinforces the very patterns you want to change.
We get stuck in these loops because shame keeps us in what’s familiar — even when that familiar thing is hurting us. The shift begins when we stop viewing the behavior as the problem and begin understanding why it’s there in the first place.
Gabor Maté’s Perspective: It’s Not the Behavior — It’s the Pain Beneath It
Gabor Maté has a line I come back to often: “The question is not ‘Why the addiction?’ but ‘Why the pain?’”
He teaches that every compulsive behavior — from emotional eating to workaholism to substance use — is a solution to an underlying unmet need.
Maybe you needed comfort or connection. Maybe you needed safety, soothing, a break, or a sense of control.
Your behavior makes sense in context. It’s evidence that a part of you is hurting, not that you’re a bad person.
This does not mean it’s okay to minimize the impact of the behavior. But what you are trying to do is interrupt the cycle. As long as you view yourself as “bad” for reaching for comfort, the more you reinforce the very patterns you’re trying to escape.
When you look underneath the behavior at what that behavior was trying to provide, that’s when you can truly address it at the root.
The Nervous System Lens: Your Body Is Trying to Protect You
Your coping patterns often mirror your nervous system state:
Fight: irritability, snapping, controlling, frustration
Flight: overworking, staying busy, perfectionism, rushing
Freeze: numbing, shutting down, procrastinating, comfort TV
Fawn: people-pleasing, over-accommodating, saying yes when your whole body is saying no
These responses happen automatically. Your body is using the survival patterns you developed along the way. Coping mechanisms are simply extensions of these states.
We are wired for safety. Our most basic drive is survival.
We all have coping strategies we use every day, but many of us were never taught healthy ones. We learned maladaptive strategies from caregivers, friends, or simply from whatever was available at the time.
At the core, we were just trying to feel safe, trying to find comfort.
When you can name the reality of what’s happening in these moments, something shifts. You move out of self-blame and into self-understanding.
You Can’t Just “Stop.” You Have to Replace
One of the biggest mistakes people make is trying to remove a coping strategy without giving the nervous system something else to reach for.
The brain will always choose comfort over willpower. Always.
So the goal isn’t to just take something away — it’s to offer something better. Something that truly soothes your nervous system and supports you long term.
If you can understand that what you’re truly after is not that behavior but some comfort and safety, that’s when you can replace that behavior with something better.
Here are some ideas for some positive, helping coping strategies:
A grounding technique
A sensory reset
A few minutes of movement
Stepping outside for fresh air
Journaling what the urge is trying to communicate
Reaching out to a trusted friend
Using a nervous system “safety menu”
Creating a replacement ritual (tea instead of wine, stretching instead of scrolling)
Or something as simple as a bubble bath or listening to music
The goal is not to be perfect. You just need to give your system new options. You’re still seeking comfort, but with understanding and compassion and true care.
Ask yourself: “How can I give myself comfort in a way that I feel good about later?”
Creating new patterns is hard. Really hard. This is the way you’ve soothed yourself and found safety, even if it was dysfunctional. So the idea of changing it or taking it away is going to make everything in you start to panic. This is why compassion is so crucial.
Compassion Is the Turning Point
This is the part that truly creates change:
Compassion softens shame.
Safety grows in the absence of shame.
And from safety, the behavior starts to lose its grip.
Instead of asking, “Why can’t I stop doing this?” ask, “What am I needing comfort from right now?”
Instead of, “What’s wrong with me?” try, “What pain is this trying to soothe?”
Talk to yourself the way you’d talk to a child who is overwhelmed and reaching for what’s familiar. That child doesn’t need punishment. They need safety.
And so do you.
Look back at when the behavior started. What were you needing comfort from at the time? What other options did you have? Can you show compassion to the part of you who was simply trying to survive?
Compassion can feel scary, especially if you’ve been using self-disgust as a motivator. It can feel like if you’re gentle, you’ll start making excuses and never change. But it’s actually the self-loathing that keeps you stuck.
Ask yourself:
How well has viewing yourself that way worked in the past? It might push you short term, but it never creates long-term change.
What if compassion opened a new pathway? What if self-kindness is what finally allows you to move forward?
Practical Steps: What to Do When You Notice the Pattern
Here are gentle steps to try the next time you feel yourself reaching for an old coping strategy:
Pause and name what’s happening (“I’m overwhelmed.” “I’m lonely.” “I’m overstimulated.”)
Identify what need the behavior is trying to meet
Offer a small replacement strategy (movement, breathing, warmth, connection, rest)
Reflect without judgment
Celebrate the smallest micro-shifts, even if it’s just putting off the behavior.
Small shifts compound.
Small shifts change lives.
Small shifts rebuild trust.
Remember: change won’t happen perfectly. Setbacks will happen. When they do, come back to this process again. Give yourself the grace to be imperfect — and then simply start again.
Creating new neural pathways is just like creating new pathways in the woods. The well-worn pathways are easy to walk down. The new ones are clunky. There’s debris in the way, you’re climbing over things .. It's uncomfortable and takes a lot of focus and attention. But the more often you walk down that new pathway, the more it’ll get worn down until it’s easy to walk down, and the old pathway will become overgrown.
It’s a process. Give yourself the space to complete the process.
An Invitation to Be Gentle With Yourself
As you move through this season — with all its heaviness, beauty, pressure, and emotion — I want you to remember this:
You are not broken.
Your coping strategies are not character flaws.
They are signs that you’ve been navigating stress with the tools you had at the time.
And as you learn new ways to comfort and support yourself, everything will begin to change. Allow for gentleness. Allow for real safety. You deserve tools that help you feel like you again.
And if you want support in learning these tools, practicing them, breaking patterns gently, and surrounding yourself with a community that understands…
Rooted + Rising is where we do this work — step by step, week by week, with live support, monthly themes, and a growing library of nervous system tools, all guided by compassion and science.
Because nothing changes through shame. Everything changes through safety.
