September Editorials: Coping Skills

At some point or the other in life, we all undergo a lot of stress, anxiety, anger

and so on. In order to combat these feelings in a proper way, there are numerous

coping skills that we can adopt.

Coping skills are a great way to minimize, tolerate and deal with stressful

situations. Managing our stress is a great way to feel better physically and

psychologically and it can deeply impact our ability to perform our best in

whatever work we do.

Emotion-focused coping skills include-

1) Exercise- it’s a great way to get your mind off of our feelings and it gives us

the benefit of maintaining a healthy body as well.

2) Give yourself a pep talk- sometimes, standing in front of a mirror and telling

ourselves about our good qualities can work wonders in helping us feel

much better than before.

3) Meditation- at times, all we need to do to get out of a stressful situation is

to take out some time for our self and meditate. This helps to keep our

mind calm and it works great to get over the stress that we may be feeling

Emotion-based coping is helpful when you need to take care of your

feelings when you either don’t want to change your situation or when

circumstances are out of your control.

Problem-based coping skills include-

1) Work on managing your time- time management helps us complete

tasks faster and with more efficiency.

2) Ask for help- don’t hesitate to ask others for support when you feel

stuck in a certain task, or ask others what you can do to improve your

performance.

3) Establish healthy boundaries- sometimes telling others what you feel is

not right is the correct way to deal with a problem. For example, telling

your friend that you won’t talk to her if she makes fun of you.

Problem-based coping helps us to deal with stressful things we face, by

changing the situation we are in.

Coping skills help us lead a better and much healthier life.

-Nandini Gupta