What are coping strategies and how to choose the best one to deal with stress
Miscellaneous / / April 03, 2023
It depends on whether you become stronger or break.
What are coping strategies
The coping strategy is way adapt to stress and endure difficult life events while maintaining a positive sense of self and emotional balance.
For the first time this concept appeared in the works of the American psychologist Richard Lazarus. He defined coping strategies as cognitive and behavioral efforts that people make to cope with increased internal and external demands in difficult situations.
Each person has their own set of habitual ways to deal with stress. True, not all of them help equally well, and some can even be dangerous in the long run.
For example, if a person is fired from his job, he can send out resumes to other companies, take a short vacation to recuperate, communicate with loved ones more often for emotional support. Or watch TV shows all day long, pretending that the problem does not exist, quarrel with friends, do not answer calls out of shame, go on a binge.
These are all coping strategies, but while some of them really help to overcome difficulties, others only plunge you deeper into the abyss of stress.
Julia Kaminskaya
Psychologist of the online service Zigmund. Online
Often we inherit coping strategies by copying the behavior of our parents, and we learn some along with traumatic experiences. It is habitual for one person to avoid attention, intimacy, conflicts, negative emotions. Another in stressful situations will use the opposite coping - to attract attention and even provoke other people, take on increased responsibility, try to be perfect, control, lead and impose intimacy when it is inappropriate.
What kind of strategy a person uses depends on his personal characteristics, experience and specific events.
What coping strategies exist
Currently allocate over 400 strategies that you can divide into several categories.
Problem solving oriented
This category includes coping strategies that are used to change the situation itself:
- Active coping - specific actions to overcome the stressor or reduce its impact.
- Planning - concrete reflections on how to cope with stress, thinking over steps to overcome the problem.
- Suppression of competing activity, preoccupation with the problem - Refusal of other activities to solve a stressful situation.
- Rest - waiting for the right opportunity to act.
- Seeking Social Support - for example, advice, financial assistance or useful information.
Focused on regulating emotions
These coping strategies help you deal with emotional responses to problems:
- Finding Social Support for Emotions Reach out to loved ones for moral support.
- Positive revaluation - the ability to turn the situation in such a way that stressful events can be interpreted as beneficial. For example, see divorce as an opportunity to meet your love.
- Radical Acceptance - the ability to recognize the reality of a stressful situation, without closing from it and without deceiving oneself.
- Withdrawal and avoidance - Refusal to believe that the stressful event happened, and attempt to live as if it does not exist.
- self control - an attempt to track and contain their emotions in response to stress.
- Appeal to religion - an attempt to find solace in religious practices.
- Humor - an attempt to cope with negative emotions through laughter.
Non-adaptive strategies
There are also several popular coping strategies that may not have the best effect on a person’s life:
- Spilling out the negative - an attempt to focus on experiences and express negative emotions.
- Lack of involvement in activities - unwillingness to cope with the stressor, even if this will lead to the refusal to achieve the goal.
- Lack of involvement in thoughts - any action to distract from the stressor. The most common of them are watching videos, daydreaming, sleeping.
- Use of chemicals - taking alcohol or illegal drugs to improve the emotional state.
- social care - distancing from other people.
Such strategies interfere with solving the problem, reduce self-esteem and cause suffering.
How to choose the best coping strategy for dealing with stress
There are no universal coping strategies that would suit every person and come in handy in every situation. To choose the best approach, it is important to consider several factors.
Focus on personality traits
It is important that the strategy is not only adaptive, but also suitable for you.
In one study checked, as personality traits according to the model "big five» will affect the choice of coping strategies. It turned out that extroverts and people with high conscientiousness scores are conscientious, Competent and disciplined - often prefer to actively solve problems and apply positive revaluation.
But participants with high levels of neuroticism — restless, shy, and prone to negativity — resort to emotion-focused and support-seeking strategies.
When choosing methods to deal with stress, it is important to evaluate how they are right for you. For example, one person may benefit from a self-control strategy to help calm down and take action, while another will receive only increased anxiety and nervous breakdown.
Take into account the peculiarities of the situation and change strategies
Since life situations are different, the same productive strategies can be more or less winning. Therefore, it is important not only to choose adaptive methods, but also to develop a flexible approach to their application.
In one study discoveredthat when people are not in control of the source of stress, such as during an epidemic, adaptive emotional coping helps better than problem-solving strategies.
Julia Kaminskaya
A positive reassessment strategy can come in handy, for example, in the event of a serious illness. However, at the moment of disaster, coping can be more advantageous, aimed at changing behavior, rather than managing emotions. The conflict avoidance strategy works best if you are facing an aggressive or mentally ill person. person, but becomes destructive if it is difficult for you to defend your boundaries and rights in everyday life. questions.
The importance of the right choice of strategies is also confirmed in scientific research. For example, in one experiment, people who are flexible in their coping choices had mental health benefits over those who have simply learned adaptive coping techniques. In the first, the condition immediately improved with depression and the results were maintained for four months after the completion of the experiment.
Same discovered in another study, abandoning non-working coping strategies and choosing the most appropriate methods effectively reduced symptoms of stress and helped with depression.
How to change your coping strategies
The first thing to do is figure out what coping strategies you are currently using. Since the response to stress is largely automatic, you will have to be as mindful as possible to notice your habits.
Julia Kaminskaya advises first of all to analyze several stressful situations and write down those actions that you consider ineffective.
For example, these may be avoidance strategies: eating, drinking, fantasizing. Or copings of overcompensation: excessive perfectionism, provocative behavior.
There are many psychological questionnaires for determining coping strategies, for example Lazarus test, compiled back in 1985 or later coping behavior test in stressful situations.
These tools can give you a rough idea of your stress management techniques, but don't rely entirely on them, as the results are quite general and may not match reality.
After you write down your coping strategies, it is worth evaluating the short-term and long-term effects of them.
Julia Kaminskaya
For example, in the short term perfectionism allows you to achieve praise, appreciation, and alcohol reduces the level of anxiety. In the long run, perfectionism can lead to burnout, and alcohol can lead to alcoholism. Such an analysis will be an additional motivation for changing the strategy.
Every person has resources to deal with stress. Analyze your strengths and select effective methods that will lead to positive consequences.
Also, a very effective tool for changing coping strategies is the development of awareness. This is the ability to notice one's state, including thoughts, emotions and their bodily manifestations.
For example, in one experiment, 14 days of mindfulness meditation helped students to develop flexibility in choosing copings. Through these practices, they have learned to understand what works best in a particular stressful situation.
Try meditation practice - it will help you better understand your coping strategies and change them to more adaptive ones.
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