We all develop a wide range of coping mechanisms over the years. Some people use journaling or talk therapy, while others may prefer to focus on work or otherwise keep themselves occupied.
And while distraction and escapism have a place in helping us cope, they aren’t an ideal way to deal with an issue in the long term, especially because you rarely have the opportunity to actually work through it after the fact.
The seemingly innocent habits we’ll get into here may, in fact, be numbing you to the life you’re living, rather than encouraging you to change it to something more positive.
1. Remaining silent when something bothers you.
While this approach might help you avoid confrontation or conflict, it’ll continue (or even escalate) if it isn’t aren’t curbed as quickly as possible. Even worse, this behavior will undoubtedly wear away at you over time.
Because instead of engaging with the people in your life, you begin to switch off and actively disassociate from any type of socialization. While ultimately unhelpful, it’s entirely understandable, particularly if any reasonable solution you’ve tried has been met with drama, anger, resistance, and even retaliation.
This type of behavior is extremely common in both unbalanced romantic relationships and workplace dynamics.
One good example is an annoying manager who stirs up drama and refuses to listen to their team, thereby creating more unnecessary work and blaming it on those beneath them.
In a situation like this, you might have remained silent for the sake of remaining employed while you searched for something better.
But if you aren’t searching for something new, and you’re simply numbing out, you aren’t really living your life: you’re enduring it, and possibly making yourself unhappy and unwell as a result.
2. Distracting yourself to disassociate.
If you’re stressed, depressed, or otherwise having a difficult time of it, you may be doing everything you can to distract yourself from the reality of your life rather than actually living it.
For example, some people spend endless hours scrolling on their phones, while others might binge-watch several seasons of Supernatural or play video games for days at a time.
While behavior like this can be effective short-term for coping with life stress, anxiety, grief, and several other difficult emotional dwarves, they’re also stealing the precious moments of your life that you have left.
Before you know it, you’ll blink and realize that several years have passed and you barely remember doing anything at all. That’s because you didn’t actually live those years — you just existed your way through them.
3. “Just a couple of drinks.”
I don’t drink anymore, but for several years I used alcohol as a means of numbing myself to both the daily stresses I was subjected to and the heavy physical labor I was doing.
It’s very easy to accept a few drinks to get through the grind, but the amount that you need to drink in order to maintain your buzz increases incrementally, and everything becomes more and more difficult from there.
I started to lose touch with who I was, and the strain of bad hangovers made life and the hard labor I was doing even more challenging to complete.
This, of course, led to even more drinking in order to relax, which snowballed into worse hangovers that needed more alcohol to endure, and so on.
What may seem like “just a couple of drinks” now can spiral into significantly more before you know it, and your life trickles away like sand without you even noticing.
I speak from experience when I say it’s amazing how much more you appreciate life’s beauty and wonder when vision isn’t clouded by a drunken haze.
4. Being completely focused on other people’s lives.
Something that can seem very altruistic and seemingly innocent is being utterly fixated on other people’s lives. It’s very easy to become a stranger to yourself when all you do is try to help others.
It takes an enormous amount of energy to counsel others through their difficulties, especially if they keep making the same poor life choices. And as such, doing this on a regular basis leaves you without enough energy in the tank for your own endeavors.
If you’re constantly martyring yourself by helping your community, being your friend’s personal therapist, or looking after family, it’s more than likely that you’ll put less energy into your own life (including the things that bring you joy and fulfillment) because you’re trying to be everything to everyone else.
What’s more, you need to consider whether this is truly an altruistic act, or whether your involvement in other people’s lives is serving another purpose: namely avoiding your own.
5. Buying unnecessary things.
The phrase “retail therapy” was coined to describe buying unnecessary things as a means of feeling happiness, albeit temporary bursts of it.
The reason being that the act of buying (and receiving) cool things releases little blips of dopamine that make you feel happy and satisfied. Furthermore, you have something new and cool to enjoy for a little while… until the shiny newness factor wears off and the dark emotional storm clouds start roiling once again.
While this may seem innocent, you may end up spending a lot of money in your attempt to soothe your frayed spirits.
Before you know it, you might rack up a ton of credit card debt or put your relationship in jeopardy because you’ve spent the rent money on clothes, toys, or whatever else will now take up space in your home.
6. Workaholism under the guise of a strong work ethic.
Although this is essentially a distraction, it’s often in the guise of pursuing a goal — like saving for your retirement, or simply passed off as being “conscientious.”
As a result, it’s often seen as an innocent, even positive habit. Essentially, it’s the easiest to disguise as harmless and beneficial. Because of this, you may not notice just how much your workaholism is damaging you (or your family).
When you’re busy working, you’re not thinking about all the details of your life that are upsetting, frustrating, or scary to you.
There’s no time or energy for any of that: all of your mental processing power is going towards earning money and being responsible for your loved ones.
The problem here is that you’ll keep your nose to the grindstone, barely looking up for ages, and suddenly realize that you’ve missed out on your kids’ childhood, your marriage, basically, the most important years of your entire life.
7. Getting immersed in fiction.
When a person develops an intense passion for something, they can become both obsessed with it and fiercely protective of it.
I’ve seen this behavior in young people who obsess over a particular Anime and end up not only cosplaying it, but getting cosmetic surgery to look like their favorite character.
Some individuals may strive to make their homes look like their favorite TV show or film set, while others may choose historical re-creation.
If you fall into any of these categories, there’s a good chance you’re having quite a bit of fun while enjoying escapism from very real, scary things going on in your life. And this can seem harmless. But the problem with this is that you have to come back to “real life” eventually, and that can be devastating.
As a result, you might become numb to your everyday existence even more fiercely until such time as you can head off to cosplay land with your friends once again.
8. Creating a cult of personality online.
One thing that a lot of social media aficionados forget is that influencers curate everything they share online: very little of it is actually real. Everything is filtered, put through lenses, posed, and prettified in order to portray the illusion of ideal existence, if not perfection itself.
If you’ve been curating your dream life online, then you aren’t living in the real world. You’re simply taking well-angled photos and videos to share with your adoring audience.
They may not even know what you really look like because of the masks or filters you’re putting on.
And while this isn’t a malicious practice, it’s certainly a way to avoid the life you’re actually living.
9. Over-planning your dream.
Living in daydream land about the life you’ve always wanted to live may seem innocuous, but once again it’s a method of numbing out to the life you’re living, rather than embracing it and inhabiting it fully.
You may be doing this as a form of procrastination, as living in the realm of possibility is a lot more pleasant than doing the grunt work needed to make it a reality.
Alternatively, you may know that you’ll never be able to do what you dream of, so you’re choosing to live in your head rather than this more uncomfortable realm.
Final thoughts…
If you’re a fan of Icelandic indie-folk, you’ll know Seabear’s song “I sing I swim,” which includes the lyrics that “human skin can be hard to live in.”
Pretty much everyone who has ever lived has agreed with this sentiment on some level, and these “unprecedented” times — full of upheaval and uncertainty — are certainly causing suffering and anxiety to many.
Although you may be tempted to numb yourself out to make the experience more tolerable, and those distractions seem innocent, there’s a very good chance you’ll regret not embodying your life more fully when you look back upon it in the future.
