Sometimes it’s impossible to eliminate anxiety, stress, grief, depression, and other strong emotions. In those cases, we use coping strategies to help ease the distress and manage the situation, but some of us don’t know how to develop coping skills. That’s why we created this list of 100 coping skills you can start today!
Before we get to the list of coping skills, it’s important to understand what coping is (and what it isn’t). Why? Because not all coping is healthy.
What are Coping Skills?
Life happens. Maybe you had a terrible day at work. Maybe your date stood you up. Maybe your coffee tasted awful this morning and it through your whole day off (or is that just me?). Regardless of what happens, coping skills can help you manage, minimize, and tolerate the negative emotions you will inevitably experience.
But that doesn’t fully tell you what are coping strategies…it just tells you the outcome. Coping skills are the methods and techniques that people use to handle stress, grief, and anger. They aren’t a miracle cure, but they can certainly feel like it sometimes.
The truth is that coping skills aren’t anything mysterious and most of us cope without thinking about it on a daily basis. However, not all coping skills are the same. Some coping strategies are helpful, but others are ineffective, unhealthy, or even make our stress worse.
Healthy vs Unhealthy Coping Skills
Knowing the difference between healthy vs unhealthy coping skills is important because healthy coping will reduce your stress, anxiety, and depression while unhealthy coping may have the opposite effect, at least in the long term. While our list of coping skills will only give you healthy options, let’s identify some unhealthy coping strategies here that you should avoid.
- Drinking alcohol or using other substances: People have been using alcohol and drugs to cope for centuries, but that doesn’t make it healthy. It may numb the pain temporarily, but is not a long-term solution and can put you at risk of addiction and poor decisions.
- Excessive Sleeping: Sleeping too much is a form of avoidance, which means you aren’t dealing with your emotions. While most of us like to sleep a little extra on the weekend, it can become a problem when you sleep through your whole day, miss out on relationships and work, and sleep for the purpose of coping.
- Overeating: People eat to cope all the time… and not just to cope with hunger. You may feel like eating junk food when you experience a stressful situation, but it’s unhealthy and can lead to physical health problems in the future.
- Others include avoiding, venting without addressing the problem, excessive shopping or spending, and gambling.
How to Develop Coping Skills
There are different types of coping. Proactive coping, for example, is a way to manage future stress, anxiety, and other strong emotions, whereas reactive coping is used to deal with emotions that you are currently experiencing. Learning how to develop coping skills that are healthy and effective typically involves both proactive and reactive coping.
To develop coping skills, the first thing you need to realize (after knowing to avoid unhealthy coping techniques) is that everybody is different. You have your own stressors, problems, and challenges. In addition, the coping strategies that work well for someone else may not work well for you.
That’s why it’s important to not only try different healthy coping strategies for anxiety, stress, and depression but to also stick with them for a little while. Some may work almost immediately, but others may take a few days or weeks to start boosting your well-being.
Finally, when you are learning how to develop coping skills, remember that you are in charge of your emotions. While many of us act like our emotions control us at times, that doesn’t have to be the case. Part of learning to cope as an adult is understanding that you control how you respond to uncomfortable emotions.
100 Coping Skills You Can Try Today
With this list of coping skills, you can start living a better life right away! Some are proactive while others are reactive, so it’s good to use several options to see what’s right for you. We organized them to make it easy to find the best coping strategies for anxiety, stress, depression, grief, and anger just in case you are looking for something specific, but most of them will work for any emotional distress.
Coping Skills for Anxiety
- Meditate or practice mindfulness (Learn how here!)
- Go for a walk
- Use the 3-3-3 rule
- Close your eyes and take three deep breaths
- Use a fidget ball
- Do something productive
- Start a journal
- Draw or doodle (even if you can only draw stick figures!)
- Slowly count to 10
- Practice yoga
- Play with pets or kids
- Take a mental health day
- Play calming music
- Watch a fun movie
- Call a friend or loved one
- Go for a jog
- Go bird watching
- Visit a museum
- Clean your room
- Write down your thoughts
- Identify anxiety triggers and develop a plan to avoid them
- Touch several different textures and fabrics to ground yourself
Coping Skills for Stress
- Write it out
- Read a book
- Take a bubble bath
- Improve time management
- Try the Emotional Freedom Technique
- Drink chamomile tea (or any tea!)
- Set clear goals
- Take a 10-minute break
- Make a to-do list
- Break down your tasks into manageable parts
- Take a warm shower
- Practice progressive muscle relaxation
- Plan a date/vacation/day out
- Light a candle (or two!)
- Play basketball
- Remind yourself of the day, month, and year
- Stand up and stretch
- Write down the reasons your stressors won’t matter in a day, week, month, or year
- Bake some cookies
- Chew gum
- Visualize a peaceful place
- Practice aromatherapy
- Get a massage
Coping Skills for Depression
- Force a smile or anticipate a laugh
- Name 3 things you’re grateful for
- Talk to a friend
- Exercise
- Spend time in nature (helps with anxiety and depression!)
- Try a new hobby
- Listen to a positive song
- Play a board game with friends
- Go outside and get some sun
- Use positive self-talk
- Give someone a hug
- Play an instrument
- Establish a daily routine
- Pamper yourself (do your hair, wear nice clothes, do your makeup, etc.)
- Redecorate or reorganize your room
- Plan a whole day without your phone
- Try acupuncture
- Take a class on a topic you’re interested in
- Write something positive about yourself for every letter of the alphabet
- Plant a flower
- Imagine how the negative situation could end up being a positive influence on your livelihood or well-being
- Cuddle with a stuffed animal
- Read motivational quotes
- Go to the zoo
Coping Skills for Grief
- Talk to a friend
- Focus on what you learned from the loss
- Write down the ways that your loved one lives on through you
- Acknowledge you are still in the grieving process
- Make your loved one’s favorite meal
- Write a poem
- Think of a good memory
- Write a letter to your loved one
- Tell someone you love them
- Look at old photographs
- Recite the serenity prayer
- Go to a support group (or join one online)
- Write down the word temporary 20 times
- Let yourself cry without judgment
- Tell someone how you feel
- Try to change irrational thoughts (like, “I can’t go on without them” or “I will never feel happy again”)
Coping Skills for Anger
- Step away from the situation
- Try the Emotional Freedom Technique
- Stomp on the ground
- Rip up a piece of paper
- Write down a calming word 100 times
- Watch a funny video
- Imagine what your anger and situation would look like in cartoon
- Count backward from 500
- Drink some cool or cold water
- Imagine your anger as redness leaving your body and blue calmness taking its place
- Tell yourself you’ve got through this before and you will do so again
- Scrunch your toes
- Push up against a wall with palms flat
- Play a video game
- Go for a swim
Conclusion
Learning how to develop coping skills is a huge part of improving well-being by managing powerful emotions. We really hope that this list of 100 coping skills for anxiety, stress, depression, grief, and anger, but if you need a little extra help, MindBar offers exceptional resources for boosting mental health, maintaining healthy relationships, practicing mindfulness, and, of course, coping. Click here to sign-up for MindBar today!