Coping skills and coping strategies
for better emotional health

Everyone has some coping skills and knows some coping strategies – but these might not be the most effective or positive. Sometimes people don't learn good coping skills as children and then never know any different. Sometimes they have always relied on a few strategies and then find that these don't work as well as they'd like. Whatever the reason, if you struggle to cope and feel like you're just keeping your head above water, learning how to cope in a more useful and positive way will help you every day, including when life throws the worst at you.

Some benefits to learning more positive coping skills:

• Reduce symptoms of stress, anxiety, and depression (including physical symptoms like nausea, headache, and tense muscles)


• Reduce the impact upsetting events have on you


• Reduce harmful behaviors, like alcohol abuse, lashing out at people, and rumination


• Improve your ability to function in both daily life and stressful situations

People who have good coping skills are resilient and have a variety of coping strategies that they feel comfortable using and that help them to deal with problems. These are transferable across situations and can be used in all areas of life.

Photo credit Enid Yu

Types of coping

There are two main categories of coping – emotion-focused coping and problem-focused coping. Generally, problem-focused coping is seen as healthier, but both can be useful. The trick is to know how to use both emotion-focused and problem-focused coping skills, so you can match your coping methods to the situation instead of panicking or giving up.

Emotion-focused coping includes strategies like distraction, numbing feelings, or talking to a friend about how you're feeling. These can be passive or active strategies but what they have in common is that you're trying to change, control, or manage your emotions, not the situation that has caused the emotions.

Problem-focused coping includes strategies like confronting someone who has hurt you, looking for a job if you're upset about being unemployed, or getting work done when the size of your workload is causing you stress. These are mostly active strategies which are aimed at changing the situation that has caused the negative emotion.

While you should always try to deal with the problem rather than just the symptom when you can, sometimes that's unrealistic and sometimes emotion-focused coping strategies are a better choice than problem-focused coping strategies. It's when you habitually suppress and avoid your problems and emotions that your emotional health will suffer.

Situations where emotion-focused coping can work the best:

• When there is no action that you can take to help the situation, i.e. the situation is necessary and can't be changed, or it's caused by something that is out of your control
• When you must be able to function to get through a crisis and can't afford to take the time to deal with your emotions
• When you have made a decision to delay action (e.g. your partner says something that upsets you at a party, and you discuss it later rather than fight in public). This is only good if you actually do take action later!

Categories of coping skills

There are several different categories of coping skills and coping strategies that are available to you. Coping with anything is easiest when you have a large repertoire of coping methods – you can then use whatever method is most appropriate to the situation instead of feeling like you don't know what to do, or defaulting to one of a few strategies in any stressful situation. We all know someone who responds to feeling bad or stressed about anything by going out and partying, or isolating him/herself, or becoming rude and confrontational, or whatever other (probably not very healthy) strategy. You can avoid this by keeping your options open when it comes to coping methods.

Here are some categories of coping methods:

• Cognitive – e.g. mindfulness, self talk


• Social – e.g. talking it out with a friend, joining a support group


• Behavioral – e.g. going for a walk, doing something distracting


• Relaxing – e.g. having a hot bath, listening to soothing music


• Active – e.g. pick an item on your to-do list (doesn't have to be related to the problem you're coping with) and get it done, break the problem into smaller steps and do one of them

As with anything else involved in improving your emotional health, it's really important to practice positive coping. Soon it will become automatic – you'll find yourself coping in a healthy way with situations that would have seriously distressed you in the past. But if you've gotten used to using the same few coping strategies all your life, you'll have to consciously decide to use others for a while. Try them out and find which work best for you!

Read about how to deal with stress for a more in depth look at coping strategies for stress, or learn more about coping with emotions, dealing with anxiety, or coping with depression.

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