What coping skills can I use to help manage my emotions?
What are coping skills?
Coping skills are practices that help you manage intense thoughts, feelings, and sensations. Negative thoughts, feelings, and sensations aren’t bad, but they can be overwhelming.
When negative experiences start to overwhelm you, you might try to ignore them or distract yourself from them. Maybe you scroll on your phone for hours or focus all your energy on work. Perhaps you lash out and start an argument with your partner or you try to numb your feelings with drugs and alcohol. You might also ruminate on your negative experiences -- you think about them so much that you can’t think about anything else. These are called maladaptive coping behaviors. They can help you feel better in the short term, but they don’t usually help you feel good or take care of your mental health in the long run.
When should I use coping skills?
You should consider using a coping skill when negative thoughts, feelings, and sensations are getting in the way of life or when you notice an urge to use a maladaptive coping behavior. For example:
- You keep having worried thoughts about an upcoming performance review at work. You can’t think about anything else or pay attention to other things that are important to you.
- You’ve been feeling sad lately, and you realize you haven’t responded to texts from friends and family for several days.
- You did something that upset someone you care about. You feel guilty and have the urge to numb your feelings with drugs or alcohol.
- You’re irritated by a car alarm that won’t stop going off, and you catch yourself about to snap at your partner.
Coping skills won’t get rid of chronic mental health symptoms like sadness, worry, or irritability, but they can help you get through uncomfortable and stressful moments without doing something that could make you feel worse in the long run.
Where can I find coping skills to use when I need them?
If you don’t feel better right after you use a coping skill, that’s okay. You might need to stick with one coping skill for a while or try a few different coping skills before you feel better. You can use the following resources to find coping skills that work for you:
- NAMI Blog: Five Schizophrenia Coping Skills I Can’t Live Without the author shares about five coping skills that help provide relief from their illness.
- NAMI Video: 5 Mental Health Coping Skills do you have a mental health toolkit? In this video, NAMI volunteer Britt shares what positive coping skills are and how to develop a mental health toolkit so that we don't fall into negative coping strategies. Additionally, she discusses what specific skills she uses to cope.
- TIPP coping skills (temperature, intense exercise, paced breathing, paired muscle relaxation) are taught in Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) to help you quickly calm overwhelming emotions by changing your body chemistry.
- Unconventional Coping Skills is a list of creative activities to help you cope with overwhelming thoughts and emotions.
- Your Life Your Voice is a service of BoysTown that provides teens with tips and coping techniques to help with tough situations. Their website features an interactive list of 99 coping skills and strategies.
- Specific coping skills called grounding activities can be especially helpful for coping with feelings of anxiety. Grounding activities help you focus on the present moment to reduce anxious thoughts and feelings. Check out healthline’s 30 Grounding Techniques to Quiet Distressing Thoughts article to learn more.
- If you enjoy listening to guided meditations to cope with overwhelming emotions, you may find the following YouTube playlists helpful:
Hours of operation Monday-Friday, 10 a.m. – 10 p.m. EST
Call: 800-950-NAMI (6264)
Text: 62640
Webchat: www.nami.org/help
Email: helpline@nami.org