When you are down and depressed, sometimes you need to kick yourself in the butt and start moving your energy as an emotional coping strategy. That moving your energy potentially gets you unstuck. It gets you out of stagnancy and a defeat mindset.
At other times, you will have to stay with the depression and listen into it. That listening into it can help you see why your energy is invested into shutdown.
Understanding Emotional Coping: How Shutdown and Depression Can Be Safety Mechanisms
Shutdown helps you to cope with excessive anger, sadness, or anxiety. If you would constantly be with the emotional overwhelm, you would blow your fuses. Hence, depression and shutdown is a safety mechanism.
Shutdown helps you to cope with excessive anger, sadness, or anxiety.
Possibly, you will need both actions; fight activation to start moving your energy again and introspection and meditation to address why you are in shutdown in the first place.
Finding a Middle Ground: The Art of Balancing Action and Introspection for Effective Emotional Coping
What I often see happening is that people stay in the fight-activation phase without the introspection/meditation aspect.
What happens then is that you get locked into an overcoming mindset which can go on indefinitely.
The movement of opposites comes into play here where you have a part of yourself you don´t agree with i.e. being depressed, being overweight, being poor, being lazy, and so on and so forth. Then, there is another part you create as a reaction to that of you shouldn’t be fat, lazy, depressed, poor, you name it.
What ensues is a continuous battle of overcoming that initial negative image you have of yourself and working towards its opposite.
The Importance of Introspection and Meditation in Resolving Trauma and Negative Self-Image Cycles
This battle can become never ending as it lacks introspection and meditation to resolve the initial conflict and the layered emotions, which make up your trauma that lies beneath. As a result, you create an identity on top of your initial hurt.
The art is to find a middle ground between action and meditation/introspection.
You need to get active, set intentions, push yourself, create achievable goals, work on improving your lifestyle and your sleep-eat-work-exercise patterns.
Avoiding Escapism and Addiction: Tips for Effective Emotional Coping Strategies
You just have to be careful that getting too focused on achieving only can become another form of escape and avoidance. Another form of addiction.
If you can move in between the two of activation and rest. Fighting for something and then listen, be open, meditate, ponder, go deeper, resolve, you won’t get stuck into the movement of opposites.