Healthy Coping Styles - The Water Wings to Life

Healthy Coping Styles 

Healthy coping styles are incredibly important in healthy, happy, fulfilled, and balanced living. I personally, don’t believe that they are talked about often enough, given how crucial they are in day-to-day living. We all experience difficult times, stress, or discomfort in some form throughout life and this is where healthy coping styles come in handy! I like to think of coping styles and the skills that come with them as the raincoat you wear for a rainy day, but emotion-wise.  Or water wings in difficult, painful, and uncertain life situations.  Coping styles help you maintain comfort in a way that doesn’t negatively impact or limit your functioning. Coping styles help you keep life balance, comfort, and self-optimization in the midst of whatever curve ball life has thrown your way.  However, if we have healthy coping styles down pat to manage these difficulties, stress, and/or discomfort in healthy and effective manners, then a lot of times we turn to some form of a band-aid or long-term distraction to dull or numb the negative feelings. This is a large cause of various forms of addiction, and poor mental health.

Below, I have added various different forms of healthy coping styles that can be used in times of need!

Problem Focused Coping refers to strategies that involve acting upon the environment. This includes creating a to-do list, engaging in problem-solving, establishing healthy boundaries, time management skills, and healthy conflict management.

Emotion-Focused Coping is a type of stress management that attempts to reduce negative emotional responses associated with stress. This is generally done through meditation, journaling, acceptance, forgiveness, talking through emotions, and therapy.

Social Support Coping refers to the psychological and material resources provided by a social network to help individuals cope with stress. This is generally characterized by a coffee break with a friend at work, a quick chat with a neighbor, a phone call to a loved one, or volunteer work

Religious Coping refers to the use of religious beliefs or practices to help cope with or manage stressful life situations, physical illness, stress, and depression. This type of coping style generally includes 12-step groups, seeking spiritual support, prayer, seeking support from clergy or congregation members, active religious surrender, and more.

Meaning Making refers to how individuals construe, understand, and make sense of life events. The meaning-making theories assume that people hold global meaning, which provides people with a motivational framework to interpret/perceive their life experiences. This type of coping style is often characterized by using dark humor as a form of acceptance, radical acceptance, mindfulness, positive re-interpretations, and seeking primary information sources to help process and understand the troubling variable within their lives.