Have you ever reflected on your capacity to manage stressful events or situations? It may or may not be something you have thought about, but becoming aware of and improving your coping skills may be the difference between positive and negative health outcomes, relationships, and mental health in general. However, it can take some effort to let go of unhealthy coping. In this blog, we will reflect on coping: what it is, what it does, and how to improve it.
Definitions
As always, we can start off by defining our term. According to the National Institute of Health, “Coping is defined as the thoughts and behaviors mobilized to manage internal and external stressful situations.” This article makes the distinction that these are conscious efforts to reduce or tolerate stress, different from defense mechanisms, which are unconscious responses. “Maladaptive coping refers to coping mechanisms that are associated with poor mental health outcomes…”. In simpler terms, we can think of coping as a spectrum that goes from healthy to unhealthy coping strategies.
Healthy vs. Unhealthy Coping
Examples of unhealthy coping include avoidance, self-harm, and emotional suppression. Examples of healthy coping can include things like mindfulness (link mindfulness article?), problem-solving, and seeking social support. We may come to find that we have been using mostly unhealthy coping strategies in our past. This may not be entirely our fault, as coping mechanisms are learned in childhood. Depending on how dealing with stressors were modeled to you, we may have grown up in an environment that was more or less conducive to healthy coping. It may be the case that, in the absence of being taught, we may have developed coping mechanisms that helped us survive in childhood (which is great!), but are no longer serving us in adulthood. While we can thank our brain for doing its best to keep us safe, we can also acknowledge that, in adulthood, we might be better equipped to better understand coping and are now responsible for learning better ways to cope. The good news is that it is never too late to learn.
Learning to Cope
The best approach is to identify your unhealthy or ineffective coping strategies and start by slowly incorporating healthy coping skills into your daily life, practicing the ones that help you most often. This is a trial-and-error process, as each coping strategy works differently based on the person and the situation. Overall, it is helpful to remember that this is all in an effort to eventually replace unhealthy coping mechanisms with healthy ones, and it may take time. It is important to be patient with ourselves as we are learning new skills. We should not expect ourselves to abandon coping mechanisms that helped us survive for so long right away, leaving us with no way of coping. While, of course, we do want to let go of unhealthy coping mechanisms, we also want to acknowledge that this may be difficult to do, especially when our old ways of coping have become habits.
If you’d like to talk to a counselor about healthy coping strategies, reach out!
