Coping strategies are the ways that we deal with stress, anxiety, or negative events that come up in our lives. When we experience events or feelings that we perceive as negative or stressful, we naturally want to react in ways that help us adapt or feel more comfortable. The coping strategies we choose can either be helpful or harmful to our overall stress levels, depending on whether they’re healthy or unhealthy ways of coping.
For parents, stress can become a regular part of the day, since life with kids can often feel chaotic and unpredictable — but it’s important to remember that kids model much of their own behaviors on their caregivers. If parents tend to resort to more unhealthy coping strategies, their kids will learn to do the same when they experience stress. On the other hand, if parents make an effort to model healthy coping strategies for their children, they’ll be more likely to cope in healthy ways as they get older.
What are unhealthy coping strategies?
Some coping strategies can feel like a quick fix, or the easy way out. If you’re like many parents, you don’t want to rock the boat so you push down your feelings and may cope with them in unhealthy ways. However, while these strategies may temporarily reduce your stress in the moment, they will make it even worse in the long run.
For example, isolating yourself during a high-stress time can feel easier than forcing yourself to socialize or talk about what you’re going through. However, that isolation can make your problems feel bigger, while choosing to spend time with loved ones can actually release some of that stress even when you don’t feel like being social.
Here’s a list of some of the most commonly used unhealthy coping strategies —
- Keeping yourself busy constantly
- Bottling up your emotions
- Toxic positivity, or denying the existence of your stress
- Overthinking and overanalyzing
- Isolating yourself from loved ones
- Substance abuse and smoking
- Overeating or turning to unhealthy food options
- Spending money impulsively
If you identify any strategies from this list that you commonly turn to in difficult times, simply being aware is a great first step towards healthier coping. Once you’ve identified your less healthy coping strategies, you can start practicing being mindful about how you react to stress, and work towards balancing out any unhealthy strategies with some healthier ones.
What are healthy coping strategies?
Most of us learned unhealthy coping strategies in our childhoods, either because we did whatever we needed to do to survive a toxic or unsafe environment, we wanted to be liked or considered a “good” kid, or simply because we never learned better strategies from the adults in our lives.
It’s never too late to learn (and model for your own kids) healthier ways to deal with stress, discomfort, and big emotions. Healthy coping strategies are ones that lower our stress levels overall, rather than just in the moment. That means replacing things that feel good temporarily but aren’t actually good for us in the long run (unhealthy coping skills) with things that might take a little more effort at first, but are good for our minds and bodies, and our overall stress levels (healthy coping strategies).
Here’s a list of some of the most commonly used healthy coping strategies —
- Meditation and deep breathing
- Journaling
- Offering forgiveness
- Having a good laugh or cry
- Talking with a therapist or loved one
- Finding the good in a bad situation
- Exercising or moving your body
- Picturing yourself in your happy place
While these strategies may take a little more effort than their less healthy counterparts at first — the upside of using healthy coping strategies is that they have longer-lasting effects than unhealthy ones. That means that the more you use healthy strategies to cope with your stress, the less stress you will have, which means the less you’ll need to use coping strategies in the first place.
