As adults, there are often times the flow of life lessens true internal sustained attention opportunities. Coping mechanisms, or “coping skills,” are learned by the interaction with an environmental condition which is why the idea of “play” is important to instill early in development.
Do you ever remember being told to “go play?”
This idea is what stimulates interaction with an environment. By following the natural curiosity of movement, children learn and perceive a growing environment that must simultaneously be ignored and engaged.
Coping skills developed through trial-and-error processing allow an individual to maintain stasis when faced with external sustained attention challenges. As adults in a fast-paced world, the ability to further suppress this need to achieve balance is necessary for the effective functioning of the default network mode (DMN) to generate original thought.
This means that coping mechanisms are not only natural but necessary. One of the most effective and immediate coping skills I have personally found to be effective is to go outside and literally take off my shoes in the closest patch of natural earth, be it grass, rock, or water.
“Grounding: Practice deep breathing or exercise which allows you to do something to get your body to settle down” (Charlotte CBHC, 2020).
The nature of human mobility directly connects the body to this concept. The connection between the vibrations of an individual’s electromagnetic energy with the earth is transferred with an ability to be distributed into a larger space from self to ground. This lessens the pressure of reverberations and breathing brings much-needed oxygen back into the bloodstream to achieve stasis.
While this form of grounding may not be a solution for everyone, using healthy coping mechanisms is a vital component of the human-centric design for interaction that leads to experience.
Here are a few ideas from Charlotte CBHC that may be helpful for your journey:
References
Charlotte Behavioral. (2020, July 16). Coping skills. Charlotte Behavioral. Retrieved November 9, 2022, from https://www.cbhcfl.org/coping-skills/
Human Centric Designs 