2 Types of Coping Skills

Written by Ashley Grob, LCSW

We have all heard of coping skills and use them regularly, sometimes without even recognizing what they are.  Coping skills, healthy or unhealthy, serve the same purpose; they are meant to make us feel better.  Think of the activities you engage in when stressed, this is a good indicator of your coping skills.  Do you call a friend, take a shower, go for a walk, have a drink, clean your space, listen to music?  In the early stages of recognizing our coping skills, it is less important to focus on what is healthy and unhealthy and more important to just label what works.  What is it that makes you feel best? 

Once we have established what we do, we look into what type of coping skills we engage in.  This is where the 2 types of coping skills come into play.  Most coping skills can fall into these 2 categories, Distracting and Self-Soothing. 

Self-Soothing
The best way to identify if your coping skill is self-soothing is to explore if your activity engages any of your 5 senses, taste, hear, sight, smell and touch.  A self-soothing coping skill is useful when working through a problem, trying to calm her mind and body, and generally feeling relaxed.  Often we may use more than one sense.  An example would be having a cup of coffee or tea, this would engage in taste and smell.  Another example would be listening to music, this would engage in hearing and if you include dancing, this would engage touch.  The purpose of self-soothing would be to relax you while still working through the problem that caused the need for the coping skill.  

Distracting 
A distracting coping skill is just as it sounds, something that would distract your mind and thoughts away from the problem.  This could be engaging in a sport, meditation, watching a movie, working, or cleaning are a few examples.  The purpose of distraction would be to get your mind off of the problem to calm yourself.  While some of these activities may overlap with self-soothing, the difference is recognizing the purpose of these coping skills is to distract.  Sometimes we need time away from working through a problem.  This is when a distracting coping skill would be useful.  The purpose is not to avoid the issue, but rather take a mental break to refocus ourselves so we can work through the issue properly.  

The final step in finding the best coping skill would be to identify if the skill is healthy or not.  Some unhealthy self-soothing and distracting coping skills would be under or over eating, alcohol, drugs, smoking, over or under sleeping.  Although these activities may make us feel better, they are often temporary and lead to further issues, mainly around mental and physical health concerns.  With this new information, which form of coping do you strongly lean towards? 

If you are still unsure or are struggling to identify healthy ways to cope, reach out to one of our therapists to explore this further.  We all need tools to cope, Feeling and Healing can help you identify your tools.