Why some people seem to cope better than others

A comment I often hear from clients is that they know they’re not coping with a challenging situation as well as other people, and they feel inadequate in some way. And whilst it’s natural to compare ourselves with others, it’s not necessarily useful to do so.

For a start, you have no idea what’s going on in someone else’s head. They may appear to be cool, calm and collected on the outside, but they could be really churned up on the inside.

I remember years ago, I parked my car on a snowy slope in the car park at work and, as I shut the door, the car slid down the slope towards a ground floor office. A colleague who’d just got of her car, saw what was happening and, without thinking, stepped in front of my car intending to stop its 1 ton weight. I screamed and she leapt back just in time for my car to hit a kerb and come to an abrupt halt inches from the office window. We both carried on with our working day and I remember a friend asking me how I was later that morning. She was really shocked when I said I still felt a bit shaken up. She’d seen me go about my work and had assumed I was totally OK. So, even though it looked like I was my normal self, my brain was struggling with the shock.

So, when you see other people coping with a difficult situation seemingly much better than you are, remember that you don’t know that for a fact. As my hypnotherapy lecturer used to say, ‘You can’t possibly know what’s going on in someone else’s head. Stop hallucinating.’

Of course, it may well be that you’re genuinely not coping as well as the other person, but again, that’s a meaningless comparison. You’re not the same as the other person, you haven’t had the same life experiences, you’ve learned to respond to situations in a way that’s unique to you and that may or may not be helpful this time around.

Maybe the current event reminds you of a similar event in the past that didn’t end well.  Perhaps the other person has had specific training in dealing with the current circumstances. Maybe you didn’t sleep well the previous night and that’s impacted on your resilience and perspective. Perhaps you’re under the weather and your cognitive functions are impaired. There could be a whole host of factors that mean your colleague is better equipped to deal with the situation, and that has nothing to do with you and your resourcefulness. The flip side is that, although you may not be coping as well as you’d like, the chances are you’ll be coping better than someone else would in the same circumstances.

The point is, we all do the best we can in any given situation. But how I respond will be different from how you respond and we’ll both be different from how someone else responds. There’s no set formula. And there can never be one, because we’re all unique with our own unique personal history.

And if you think about how our brains are structured, it’s no wonder there can be so many different responses to the same situation. We each have around 96 billion nerve cells in our brains. Each of those nerve cells can have up to 10,000 connections to other nerve cells, so there are trillions of connections in our brains. There is no way your brain can be identical to anyone else’s on the planet, so there’s no way you’re going to respond in the same way.

It's the reason why, when you come away from a work meeting, you have a different recollection about what’s been agreed from some other people present at the same meeting. You’ll each draw your own conclusions based on your own beliefs, desires and expectations of the meeting. The event was the same for everyone, but there could be many different interpretations.

So, it’s not what happens to you that determines whether you sail through life or struggle with life’s inevitable setbacks. No, it’s how you respond to what happens.  And how you respond is entirely dependent on how your brain is wired, based on your previous experiences.

But the good news is, you can learn to cope better with life’s ups and downs. For a start, you can get the basics sorted, like getting enough sleep, eating nutritious food, and allowing yourself enough downtime. And once you do that, you can begin to mould your brain by changing the connections between your nerve cells. You’re not stuck with your current connections. With the right guidance, you can retrain your brain to see challenges as opportunities to grow.

You can absolutely cope with whatever life throws at you, once you’ve learned to look after your basic wellbeing and kept your brain in trim. Just like playing the piano, coping with life is a skill that you can learn. You just need to put the effort in to create the life you want. One where you can be confident you have the resources and resilience you need to rise above any challenge that comes your way.

And once you have that level of confidence, your fear and anxiety over what the future may hold disappear.