Taylor Swift’s Coping Mantra and How to Find Your Own
Taylor Swift shared her personal coping mantra during a Recording Academy conversation, and psychologists explain how to craft a short, truthful phrase that helps manage stress and anxiety.
Taylor Swift has a simple psychological trick for getting through stressful moments, and mental health experts say it can work for anyone. During the Icon Sessions, a conversation presented by the Recording Academy’s Songwriters & Composers Wing in August, Swift revealed that when she feels overwhelmed by her circumstances, she repeats a specific phrase to herself: “You chose this. You chose this every day. You could have opted out of this any day before it got unmanageably big.” She decided not to opt out, she said, because she loves what she does that much.
Even for people who are not performing in stadiums worldwide, the frustration of being trapped by something you chose is familiar. It might be the job you once desperately wanted, the committee you volunteered to lead, or the dinner party you insisted on hosting. Clinical psychologist Jill Stoddard of Newburyport, Mass., says distress often peaks when people feel powerless or as if something is being put upon them. Reminding yourself that a situation is a choice you made, and that choices come with difficult consequences, can restore a sense of control and empower you to move forward.
The coping mantra is a short, deliberate phrase you can reach for when your brain starts sprinting toward the worst-case scenario. Dr. Jasmine Sawhne, a psychiatrist in Los Angeles, explains that stress leaves little room for nuance. When the body is in fight-or-flight mode, reasoning your way out of a problem is not realistic. A mantra gives an overloaded brain something simple to grab onto and buys a moment to decide what to do next.
Finding a mantra that actually helps requires more than picking a pleasant phrase. “Everything will be OK” is a promise about a future you cannot see, and an anxious brain may reject it before you finish the sentence. Alison McKleroy, a San Francisco therapist and author of The Self-Compassion Journal, says predicting that everything will work out is a form of fortune-telling from a cognitive behavioral therapy perspective. The same applies to affirmations like “I am confident” when you do not feel confident. Instead, a useful mantra states a choice that is within your control. Swift’s mantra is essentially a decision made out loud: I am choosing to keep doing this, difficult parts and all.
Stoddard takes a slightly different but equally reality-based approach. When she is crushed by too much to do and too little time, she tells herself, “I’ll get it done. I always do.” It works because in her case, it is true. The best mantra is simple, specific, memorable, and true. This is not an exercise in blowing sunshine at yourself, Stoddard says.
To find your own mantra, Joanna Hardis, a Cleveland-based therapist and author of Just Do Nothing: A Paradoxical Guide to Getting Out of Your Way, suggests asking a sharper question: “What do I need to remind myself when I get uncomfortable?” Rather than choosing a generic mantra for stress, identify your brain’s favorite way of making stress worse, then find a phrase that interrupts it. If you tend to predict disaster, McKleroy suggests “I can’t know that yet” or “I don’t have a crystal ball.” Sawhne, who runs a bicoastal psychiatry practice and has two children under 5, often catches herself mentally juggling five problems at once. Her mantra, “I don’t have to solve everything right now,” reminds her that urgency and importance are not the same thing. McKleroy, who tends to over-research and complicate projects, tells herself “Let it be simple.”
Keep the mantra short enough to say in one breath, ideally about four words. When stress hits, cognitive bandwidth is limited, Sawhne says, so you need a few words you can pull out of your back pocket as soon as your nervous system fires. Shorter also means fewer words to obsess over. Hardis’s own mantra, “Discomfort, not danger,” passes the one-breath test with room to spare.
The mantra is meant to help you keep going while the feeling is still there. Nearly two decades ago, Hardis underwent exposure therapy for an intense fear of flying. When the plane hit turbulence, she would tell herself, “This may suck, but I can handle it.” She still uses that mantra. During rough turbulence on a recent flight home from visiting her daughter, she found herself saying it again. In the past, she would have stared out the window, listened for every ominous noise, and asked a flight attendant if the plane was OK. This time, she calmly repeated her mantra and kept reading. The fear was still there, but it did not dictate her next move.
