Going through the Motions: The Difference Between Coping and Actually Being Ok

WRITTEN BY ALICIA KOCH, FOUNDER OF THE LEGAL BELLETRIST 

Functioning beautifully is the ultimate human camouflage. Isn’t it?

We live in a culture that routinely confuses compliance with health. If you’re hitting your professional targets, replying to messages within minutes, keeping your household running and maintaining a polished public profile, the world assumes you’re flourishing. That’s true whether you’re a corporate leader steering an organisation, a professional managing a crushing workload, or a parent balancing work and family. But there’s a vast, frightening distance between coping and actually being OK.

Coping is surviving the storm. Being OK is knowing how to live when the rain stops.

When we exist in high-stress, high-achievement environments, our survival mechanisms become so sophisticated that they start to look like competence. Trust me, I know how it feels to master this performance. You might be managing a clinical cocktail of major depression and severe anxiety, waking up with a racing heart before the alarm even sounds, your chest tightening as you glance at an inbox that never sleeps.

You might be nursing the burning, swollen joints of an autoimmune condition, calculating exactly how many steps you can take before your mobility fails, while silently begging your knees to co-operate for one more hour. You might be navigating the quiet, exhausting grief of going entirely no-contact with parents or close family members, carrying a heavy trunk of family trauma while pretending long weekends are joyous rather than emotionally treacherous.

Or perhaps you’re simply drowning under the pressure of perfectionism, caring for an unwell family member, or balancing a workload that treats human boundaries as optional suggestions.

Whatever the flavour of your particular hell, you’ve probably mastered the art of going through the motions. You’re a masterpiece of functionality – orderly, reliable and structured. But beneath the surface, you may feel exactly like the title of that melancholy 1991 Roxette song: Watercolours in the Rain. You’re running, performing, and executing, but your internal sense of self is bleeding out, washing away into an indistinguishable grey smudge. Like watercolours in the rain…

To move beyond this state of quiet desperation, we’ve got to dismantle the illusion of high-functioning survival and understand why our best coping strategies might actually be keeping us sick.

The Autopilot Paradox: Why High Functioning Is a Trap

In psychology, there’s a fundamental difference between an adaptive coping mechanism and genuine psychological wellbeing. Coping mechanisms are behavioural or cognitive tools used to manage internal and external stressors. They’re emergency brakes. They’re not a destination.

When you operate in a state of chronic trauma, severe stress, or systemic physical pain, your brain defaults to a highly efficient autopilot. This is often driven by a psychological state known as languishing, a term popularised by sociologist Corey Keyes. Languishing is the empty space between depression and flourishing. It’s a life of quiet stagnation, where you feel hollow, empty, like a mere shell.

For a high achiever, languishing doesn’t look like staying in bed with the lights off. It looks like this –

• Perfecting a complex project or presentation while feeling absolutely nothing inside.
• Using perfectionism as armour so no one can see how close you are to cracking.
• Isolating yourself from peers because maintaining the “everything is fine” facade requires more energy than you possess.

The trap for high-functioning people is that their coping mechanisms work too well. They get you across the finish line, but they can leave your psychological landscape completely barren. You’re ticking the boxes of adulthood and success, but objective markers of success don’t equal subjective satisfaction. If your coping strategies have become a permanent lifestyle, you’re not living. You’re just postponing the breakdown that’s not too far behind.

Diagnosing Your Camouflage – Coping vs Being OK

How do you distinguish between someone who is genuinely well and someone who is simply an expert at psychological stagecraft?

You look past output and pay attention to your internal landscape.

The following outlines how identical external behaviours stem from entirely different psychological states –

This table is the author’s own synthesis, informed by the wellbeing frameworks discussed above, particularly Keyes’ languishing/flourishing model and Seligman’s PERMA model.

If you look at this table and realise your entire life is built on the middle column, congratulations – you’re a world-class coper. You’re also running on fumes, and the watercolour of your identity may be dissolving in the downpour.

Why Sucking It Up Is Bad Science

Our culture loves the myth of grit. We’re told to push through, control our emotions, and leave our personal struggles at the door. Put our “big girl panties on”. But modern psychological frameworks, such as Martin Seligman’s PERMA Model of positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning and achievement, show that true wellbeing needs a holistic ecosystem, not isolated achievement.

When you suppress severe anxiety, block out physical pain, or bury the complex grief of family estrangement just to look steady, you incur a massive allostatic load (allostatic load refers to the cumulative “wear and tear” on the body and brain caused by prolonged or repeated exposure to chronic stress. It represents the physiological cost of adapting to repeated challenges, which can eventually lead to organ dysfunction and chronic illness). The stress response system remains perpetually activated, wreaking havoc on your nervous system and potentially exacerbating autoimmune conditions such as arthritis.

Relentless positivity and stoicism can also stop us from accepting the full, authentic range of human emotions. True wellbeing isn’t a permanent state of happiness. It’s the psychological agility to experience pain, anxiety, or sadness without letting them hollow out your sense of purpose.

Shifting from Survival to Authenticity – Practical, Evidence-Based Steps

If you’re tired of running through life like watercolours in the rain, you need to pivot intentionally from survival mode to resilience and, eventually, flourishing. I’ve found that healing doesn’t mean quitting your job or letting your standards collapse. It means upgrading your internal operating system with practical, verified psychological strategies.

The Peer-to-Peer Reality Check

Let’s be entirely real for a moment, peer to peer. I’m not speaking to you from some serene, high-vibe mountaintop where anxiety doesn’t exist and joints never ache. I’m right here in the trenches with you. I know what it’s like to sit at a desk while your nervous system screams that the building is on fire, even though you’re only looking at a spreadsheet. I know the dark absurdity of staring at a flight of stairs and calculating whether your psoriatic arthritis will allow you to reach the top, or whether you should simply announce that this staircase is now your permanent residence – “My old enemy! Stairs!” (said in the voice of Po from Kung Fu Panda).

And let’s talk about those wonderfully festive family holidays. There’s a specific, darkly comic absurdity in sitting through seasonal small talk while your brain runs a background programme reminding you that you haven’t spoken to your biological family in years. If you listen closely to the corporate chatter around you, you’ll realise we’re all participating in a mass performance piece. We buy the planners, download the meditation apps that gently ping us to just breathe while everything falls apart, and pretend that a green smoothie can cure systemic trauma or a genetic joint crisis. It’s a joke.

But here’s the comforting twist – admitting that the performance is exhausting doesn’t make you weak. It makes you human. You don’t have to wait until you’re fully cured of anxiety, arthritis, or complicated grief to start feeling OK. Being OK doesn’t mean pain disappears or your life becomes magically tidy. It means you stop letting the performance consume your entire identity. It means looking at the rain, accepting that you’re getting a bit wet, and refusing to let your whole self dissolve into the pavement.

There Is Light at the End of the Tunnel

Admitting that you’re merely coping is not weakness. It’s strategic honesty. You can’t care for others, lead effectively, or manage an organisation if your own internal infrastructure is held together by willpower and masking tape.

I want you to know this – you can be a brilliant professional, an exceptional leader, or a deeply dedicated parent while openly acknowledging that life can be complicated, painful, and hard. You can manage severe anxiety, navigate chronic physical limitations, and heal from family trauma while remaining reliable. There is light at the end of this tunnel, but you’ll reach it more sustainably when you stop pretending everything is perfect.

So, start small. Cancel one unnecessary obligation. Tell one safe person the truth. Take one proper breath before answering the next message. Write one honest sentence you never have to show anyone. Step out of the downpour where you can, put down the burden of performative perfectionism, and build a life that doesn’t just look good from the outside, but feels steadier, kinder, and more liveable from the inside.

And if those small steps feel too heavy to take alone, you don’t have to force yourself through them in silence. Reach out to Frieda Levycky of Braving Boundaries. Think of it less as asking for help and more as letting a steady, supportive friend walk beside you while you work out what the next kind, manageable step could be. Sometimes the bravest thing isn’t doing everything by yourself. It’s letting someone safe sit with you while you begin.

(Sources used and to whom we owe thanks – Keyes, C.L.M. (2002) ‘The Mental Health Continuum: From Languishing to Flourishing in Life’, Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 43(2), pp. 207–222. This source supports the article’s discussion of languishing, flourishing and the distinction between merely functioning and genuine wellbeing; Seligman, M.E.P. (2011) Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being. New York: Free Press. This source supports the article’s reference to the PERMA model and the idea that wellbeing depends on more than achievement alone; Pennebaker, J.W. (1997) ‘Writing About Emotional Experiences as a Therapeutic Process’, Psychological Science, 8(3), pp. 162–166. This source supports the article’s recommendation of reflective and expressive writing as a practical resilience-building tool; Farber, S.K. (2016) ‘Expressive Writing for Physical and Mental Health’, Psychology Today, 28 March. This source provides accessible supporting context for the article’s discussion of expressive writing and its relationship to mood and physical health; Waldinger, R. and Schulz, M. (2023) The Good Life: Lessons from the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness. New York: Simon & Schuster. This source supports the article’s discussion of the Harvard Study of Adult Development and the importance of high-quality relationships for long-term health and wellbeing; Waldinger, R. and Schulz, M. (2022) ‘The Good Life’, Harvard Medicine Magazine. This source provides an accessible summary of the Harvard Study of Adult Development and the authors’ central finding that relationship quality strongly predicts health and wellbeing across the lifespan and University of Pennsylvania Positive Psychology Center. ‘PERMA™ Theory of Well-Being and PERMA™ Workshops’. This source provides a concise institutional explanation of Seligman’s PERMA theory and its five building blocks: positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment).