A Comprehensive Guide to Coping Skills: Understanding How to Manage Uncomfortable Emotions

Stress is a state of mental tension or worry resulting from our body’s natural response to external stressors, challenges, or threats.

In 2024, 90% of US adults reported losing sleep at night due to stress related to thoughts around health and the economy, around 75% reported experiencing a physical or mental symptom of stress in the last month at the time of the survey, and job stress reportedly cost over $300 billion annually in absenteeism, turnover, productivity, and medical, legal and insurance costs. In short, stress is a problem affecting millions of people impacting both their physical and mental health. 

Learning to manage your stress is important and can help you feel better physically and psychologically. The best way to learn to deal with stress is to develop coping strategies. Coping strategies or skills are tactics used to help deal with stress and can vary in success from person to person. Read on for our comprehensive guide to coping skills and how to manage uncomfortable situations. 

Photo by Jan Kopřiva on Unsplash

What are coping skills?

Coping is the effort we make to manage situations we have deemed harmful or stressful. Stress is often associated with negative life changes such as losing a job, money issues, or the death of a loved one, however, even positive changes such as getting married or having a child can be stressful.

All types of change can be stressful as it requires us to adjust and adapt. The best way to cope with these stressful changes is to have an array of coping strategies and skills available to apply to different problems or situations. Some examples of coping skills are:

• The ability to establish and maintain appropriate boundaries with other people.
• Practicing relaxation strategies such as meditation, deep breathing, and mindfulness exercises. 
• Completing regular physical activity and exercise. 
• Making to-do lists and setting regular, achievable goals. 
• Directly attempting to change the source of stress. 
• Distancing oneself from the source of stress. 
• Maintaining emotional composure, or the reverse, expressing emotions.
• Challenging your previously held beliefs that are no longer adaptive. 

Regular exercise can help increase your capability to manage stress. Photo by Geert Pieters on Unsplash.

The importance of learning how to cope

Experiencing changes due to stress can often lead us to feel as though we are not in control of events, or even our lives. This perception can lead to feelings of low self-esteem, anxiety, depression, and in some cases, physical illnesses may manifest if stress is not managed. If you do not learn how to cope with stressors, you may experience:

Physical health issues

Chronic stress can lead to serious health problems such as heart disease, high blood pressure, and obesity. Stress can also manifest as headaches, muscle tension, increased heart rate, and stomach aches.

Mental health issues

Persistent stress can lead to anxiety, depression, a lack of concentration, and lower tolerance levels.

Everyday life issues

Stress can impact everyday life and create difficulty in completing simple tasks. It can also lead to challenges in personal relationships, and impact your productivity and focus in the workplace.

Problem-based vs emotion-based coping skills

When it comes to coping skills there are many different types, but the two key ones are problem-based and emotion-based. Learning to distinguish between the two can help you to determine the best coping strategy to handle the particular situation. 

Problem-based coping 

Problem-based coping is best when you need to change your situation, generally by removing the stressful triggers from your life. Examples of problem-based coping are:

• Being in an unhealthy relationship, and choosing to end the relationship. 
• Addressing work-related issues by discussing them with a manager or coworker to improve performance.
• Having a problem, and developing a plan or to-do list to address it.
• Setting boundaries with people in your life who create stress. 

Emotion-based coping 

Emotion-based coping is best when you need to take care of your feelings but do not want to change your situation, or when circumstances are beyond your control. Examples of emotion-based coping are:

• Grieving the loss of a loved one and managing your emotions relating to this (given you cannot change the circumstance).
• Journaling to express your feelings healthily.
• Practicing mindfulness meditation to help you when experiencing stress.
• Talking openly with a close friend or family member for social or emotional support.
• Using positive reframing to address negative emotions associated with an issue.

Healthy coping vs unhealthy coping

If you are feeling sad, nervous, lonely, irritable, or angry, having proper coping skills like those outlined above can help you healthily deal with these emotions by either soothing you, distracting you, changing your mood, or helping you tolerate the stress. 

There are also, however, unhealthy ways that many people use in an attempt to cope with stress. While these strategies often provide the user with temporary relief, they do not provide a healthy, long-term solution for coping with stress. Some unhealthy coping techniques include:

• Excessive alcohol or drug consumption to temporarily numb the pain. 
• Undereating or overeating are very common coping strategies that lead to an unhealthy relationship with food. Food consumption can be an attempt to regain control, which is often lost when dealing with stress, but it is extremely unhealthy long-term.
• Oversleeping is another strategy that provides temporary relief as it allows you a way to avoid facing an issue. It does not, however, resolve it.
• While avoiding stressors can be a healthy coping skill, it can easily become unhealthy if you begin to avoid the problem altogether. If you are experiencing financial issues for example, avoiding facing the problem is not a healthy way to manage it. 

Strategies to develop healthy coping skills

Adding stress-reducing activities to your day-to-day lifestyle can go a long way to helping your overall approach to coping with stressors. Getting enough good quality sleep, eating a balanced diet, exercising, taking brief breaks for yourself, making time for fun activities during the day, and avoiding caffeine and alcohol can all help improve your mindset and get you in the ideal state to execute coping methodologies. 

If you are struggling to enact coping skills on your own, it is important to reach out to a mental health professional who has an online counseling degree or similar qualification to help you develop and practice healthy coping skills.