Toughness vs. Comfort: which strategy works?

This evening, my parents had laid out some old newspaper pages on the coffee table, just to line the table as we ate dinner. I wasn’t interested in the Chinese drama they were watching so I had a glance at the article just under my bowl: 8 tips to boost your mental wellness. Step 1. Reframe the situation. You’re not stuck at home, you’ve been given a great opportunity to get some time to refocus.

My immediate reaction was to cringe – like, this is a kind of jail, we are living in a pretty terrible, fear-inducing scenario. Some of the other tips were in the same vein: Try to get along with the people in your house by being polite to them and appreciating them more. What about people in abusive homes, or a case where you’re the only one in your family reading the article?

Underlying that article was a perspective that goes like this: stop whining. Stop being weak about your situation. Get up and fight. “Your body is not free, but your mind is.” I don’t like that perspective. I prefer the alternative, that of empathy, don’t stress yourself out, it’s okay to take a break. But is that the right perspective? Isn’t it true that “hard times make strong men”?

This is all the same vein of that stupid, perpetual “Boomer vs. Millenial” debate, but I also see it as a kind of East vs. West debate – a really simplistic way to put it, and by East I really just mean Chinese, but regardless it’s the same kind of debate. In Singapore, a country largely influenced by Confucian ideals, mental health is barely reaching the surface of attention. Welfare is much less of a thing here – unmarried single mothers in Singapore have no access to any grants available to widowed or divorced mothers, and can’t even get government housing until they’re 35 like other singles. In the US, a long list of grants are available to all single mothers, unmarried or not.

When I think of this whole toughness vs. comfort debate, my psychology brain implicitly associates it with the punishment-reward dichotomy. And current knowledge suggests that punishment is not very good. Children who receive harsher parenting and punishments tend to have worse emotion regulation, leading to more child aggression. Groups may be more productive and better achieve goals when members are rewarding each other for cooperating rather than punishing each other for being selfish.

This is the narrative I think we want to believe in, that kindness and compassion is all that we need and should strive towards, but is it entirely true? Psychologists, in particular, tend to have a human-centred empathy that often leads them to being attracted to the profession in the first place. And they produce the evidence that backs up the narratives we want to see, which are usually written by Western millenials. It was exceptionally hard to find commentary supporting punishment, or at least not assuming that reward was really the best way to go, when I was trying to find some devil’s advocates. Most articles read as “we used to think punishment was good, but not any more ha ha ha!”.

It sounds like I’m going to start spouting some real conservative nonsense about now, and I’m not going to, I promise, but I wanted a more nuanced view. People have been using punishment for as long as human existence. Animals punish each other. We also generally believe that it’s a good thing to punish assholes, for example, for both our sake and the asshole’s.

Punishment itself is not unitary – there is just and unjust, there is helpful and unhelpful. There is a really nice quote from writer Michael Eric Dyson about corporal punishment in the black community: “The point of discipline is to transmit values to children. The point of punishment is to  coerce compliance and secure control, and failing that, to inflict pain as a form of revenge.”

In response to the quote, you could argue that although discipline may have noble goals, it may not succeed. To that I respond with this. Psychologist Diana Baumrind posits three types of parents: authoritarian, authoritative, and permissive. Permissive parents are more lax and libertarian. Authoritarian parents are strict and cold, whereas authoritative parents are strict and warm, the difference being not in the number of rules set or how firm one is about enforcing them, but that authoritative parents are forgiving, offer guidance, and are emotionally present. They don’t shelter you from problems, and they may in fact ‘create’ those obstacles in the first place, but they guide you to solving them. Various studies suggest that using an authoritative parenting style leads to more well-adapted, well-liked, and successful children.

I make these links to parenting because here is the situation: we are fumbling around, effectively infants in a new lockdown-world, with no ideas about how we should best live our lives. We don’t know how to define the problem in front of us because it’s too abstract and large, and we don’t know how guilty we should be feeling about how productive we are. We need learn how to parent ourselves through this situation, and it’s important to know how best to do that.

Perhaps the best way to deal with a problem isn’t to accuse yourself for not knowing how to solve the problem, or to scold you for thinking that the problem exists in the first place. A good parent wouldn’t deny that there’s a problem or dismiss the difficulty of it. And therein lies my issue with the 8 tips I read about in that newspaper – it just felt like the writer was trying to tell you that it’s all in your head. It’s not. It’s not!

The problem is real. We are physical beings. We have limbs and organs and muscles and studies have shown that movement can greatly affect our mental abilities. And we have brains that are hyper-sensitive to potential dangers, which right now must be going through the roof!

The answer, though, probably isn’t to sit around and pity myself and play games all day, as I feel like I’m very close to doing. Gaming is nice for me when I have a goal, like if it’s to build a specific house idea I have in the Sims or win a few games in Overwatch. But if I don’t put limits on myself I quickly find myself spiralling into a potato-like feeling. A lot of leisure things I thought were ‘restful’ turned out to be draining, and it turns out being too lax without imposing some structure to my life wasn’t the answer.

We tend to be able to find energy from knowing that there’s a way out of the problems we face. It’s crucial to not feel helpless and pessimistic about the situation. It’s not very possible to tell the virus to stop what it’s doing, or to will the world into an instant healthy state, and news that this situation will stay for a while can be depressing. But now you need to show yourself the way to surviving, and thriving, in your new environment. And maybe that will take some experimentation.

I’ve found it’s been very helpful to try to feel productive even in non-work-related things. To do something productive in some sense gives you the confidence and nice healthy feeling that you’re living and fulfilling something. That’s probably why many people (also me) have turned to baking, the feeling of having a tangible delicious thing that you’ve made with your hands. That’s why the moment I thought of writing this blog post I immediately jumped at the opportunity to make something.

And what if you don’t have the energy or space, and no one, not even yourself, can afford to be around to guide you like a warm but firm parent?

Then give yourself the energy as much as you can by resting, and don’t feel bad if you can’t get up for a while. Lean on your friends and family as much as you can. There are various resources online if you require mental health aid, or help with groceries, and please feel free to reach out to me if you need help. But trust yourself, and soon you will regain that strength.

We hear a lot about delayed gratification, or how you sometimes need to delay your immediate wants so that you can work to achieve a bigger future goal. Sometimes, and especially now, that also means delaying the work to give yourself time to recover.

It’s not about punishment vs. reward, or toughness vs. comfort. You do need both. But you want to make sure you underlie your actions with a deep sense of empathy for yourself.