Everyone goes through emotional stress, like work frustration or relationship problems. But if you have a mental health disorder, it can be challenging to stay calm and make healthy decisions.

Coping skills are the strategies you use to manage your emotions and situations. Some coping methods are healthy, while others can be harmful to your mental and physical health.

1. Identifying the Stressor

Coping skills are strategies you use to manage the stressors and negative emotions of life. There are two main types of coping skills: problem-focused and emotion-focused. Problem-focused coping focuses on changing the situation, while emotion-focused coping focuses on changing how you feel about a difficult situation. Unhealthy coping techniques can include drinking to cope, avoiding the situation, and using avoidance behaviors that create more stress than they relieve.

Healthy coping mechanisms can soothe or distract you from frustration, help you tolerate distressing thoughts and feelings, and enable you to take action. They can also increase your resilience to handle future stressful events.

Your therapist may encourage you to identify your existing coping skills, as well as new ones that you can practice outside of therapy. Taking a supportive class or attending a support group are good examples of healthy coping skills that can provide accountability, positive reinforcement, and a support network. They can also be a safe place to share your feelings with people who have similar experiences and will understand.

2. Identifying the Problem

Coping skills can help you deal with negative emotions, decrease stress, and establish or maintain a sense of internal order. They can be either adaptive (positive) or maladaptive (negative). Some examples of healthy coping strategies include deep breathing, meditation, exercise, and writing. Unhealthy coping mechanisms, on the other hand, distract from stress and can cause physical and emotional harm. They can include things like drug abuse, self-harm, anger outbursts, and isolation.

Identifying the problem is an important part of finding the right addiction coping skills for you. You can use a coping worksheet to rate the severity of each of your problems, including whether or not they are related to your substance abuse. This will help you determine which coping skills are most relevant to your addiction treatment plan. Generally speaking, people do best with a wide variety of coping strategies. This is because skills that work for one type of situation or emotion may not necessarily be effective when you’re in a different situation or feeling.

4. Practicing the Solution

If the problem is an emotional response, such as anxiety or depression, therapy can provide help. Behavioral therapies like CBT can teach clients how to deal with their emotions and thoughts in healthier ways. Children with traumatic experiences may need family therapy, such as TF-CBT, to learn how to cope with their feelings in a healthy way.

Coping skills can be healthy (adaptive) or unhealthy (maladaptive). Healthy coping mechanisms empower a client to change a stressor or adjust their emotional response, while maladaptive coping mechanisms distract from a problem and lead to physical and emotional harm. In order to practice healthy coping strategies, it can take some time to build them into one’s life. It can also be hard to break old habits. This worksheet is designed to help a client identify their current coping mechanisms and encourage them to start new ones. It will also help them understand the difference between healthy and unhealthy coping behaviors.