Coping skills, also known as coping mechanisms, are methods to deal with stressful situations. When faced with stress, the methods and the process we indulge in to navigate through these stressors is called ‘coping’, and since there are various styles to cope, we term this collective bunch of coping styles as ‘coping styles. However, the answer to the question ‘what are coping skills’ isn’t as simple.

This is because of individual differences: each individual will have a different coping mechanism, and not all coping skills suit everyone; some may prefer using problem-focused coping, while some pay prefers avoidant coping. Because each style is so different, studying coping mechanisms becomes a bit of a difficult task. Understanding what are coping skills is only the first step of this journey; figuring out which coping skill suits you best and which coping strategy helps you manage stress is a process of trial and error; it takes a lot of practice and perseverance.

Coping involves adjusting to the negative impact and feelings brought about by life events while trying to see life positively. Sometimes, changes can cause a lot of stress in your life, and learning to deal with it can help prevent you from getting involved in self-sabotaging and self-harm. No matter the difficulty and newness of changes, we need to learn to adjust and adapt to them; by doing so, we learn not to let the change overpower us, which helps avoid self-esteem problems and depression. At times, because our body is so overwhelmed by all the changes, it may lead to us falling physically ill.

Stressors can come in various ways – they may be acute, like moving to a new home or prolonged, like chronic pain and illness. Acute stressors may lead to physical and mental problems and how people cope with them decides how fast they can move on from the pain.

Before dwelling on understanding which coping skill is the most suited for you, you need to learn about the types of coping skills. But, before uncovering that, here’s a little bit of psychology behind the answer of ‘what are coping skills? 

I. A Little About Coping Mechanisms

‘What are coping skills?’ this question has been answered by various fields of psychology in different ways.

In psychodynamic psychiatry, coping mechanisms are called ‘defence mechanisms. Defence mechanisms are unconscious mental processes that protect people from anxiety, stress, and loss of self-esteem. They are a normal part of development as long as they aren’t used inappropriately; if used excessively or inappropriately, they may indicate pathology.

According to Albert Bandura’s social learning theory, people’s ability to cope with stressful situations falls under their self-efficacy, which is an individual’s belief in their ability to reach their goals.

Margaret Chesney revised Bandura’s social learning theory; she came up with a scale to measure coping self-efficacy, which she described as one’s judgment about self-efficacy; so how dependent you are on your self-efficacy determines how you face and cope with stress.

So, as can be seen, there’s no single way to answer the question of what coping skills are; just like individual differences in using them, every field of psychology will have a different way of defining them, and each of these fields will also have their subtypes; psychodynamic psychiatry, for example, gives us types of defence mechanisms including regression, projection, reaction formation, repression, and sublimation.

This article, however, focuses more on the generic categorization of types of coping skills, and even though these are various in number, we’ll focus on three main ones – problem-focused coping, emotion-focused coping and social support-focused. Name a few other coping strategies; there is a religious coping strategy, meaning-making strategy, appraisal-focused coping skills and occupation-focused coping skills. We also discuss the different angles of coping skills; for example, avoidant coping deals with the fact that people avoid dealing with their stressors, and proactive coping is more of a future-oriented coping skill to provide you with the needed skills to deal with stressors in the future.

Since we now have a bit of clarity about ‘what’ are coping skills, let’s move to types of coping strategies.

II. Types Of Coping Skills

Coping skills are strategies used by people to manage stressful situations. Stress management plays a big role in your mental health status – coping mechanisms are allies in making sure that stressful situations don’t harm you more than you give them the power to. How people cope determines their perspective towards stress and life.

There are many coping styles, and you can learn to decide which coping style suits you better after understanding what coping skills are. We know what coping skills are, but the fact that there are healthy and unhealthy subtypes of each type of coping skill sometimes comes as a surprise. So, it is important to distinguish between healthy and unhealthy coping strategies under each type of coping skill.

This section will cover the major types of coping skills and the unhealthy and healthy coping skills that fall under each type. It’ll also briefly answer the question ‘what are coping skills from a different angle by briefly discussing a few other types of coping skills.

1. Problem Focused Coping Skills

1.1) What Is Problem-Focused Coping?

Problem-focused coping helps change stressful situations by removing them from your life. For example, suppose you are in a toxic relationship. In that case, you can try as many relaxation exercises, mindfulness skills, and calming techniques as you want. Still, since the issue lies in the other half of the relationship, it is best to activate problem-solving and remove the toxic relationship entirely.

1.2) What Are Healthy Coping Skills Under Problem-Focused Coping?

As stated, changing the situation is what problem-focused coping is all about, and there are many ways to do this. Here are a few healthy ways to do it.

• Asking for a friend or a professional to support you.
• Creating task lists/ to-do lists.
• Healthily establishing boundaries.
• Engaging in problem-solving.
• Leaving the situation entirely.
• Practicing time management.

1.3) What Are Unhealthy Coping Skills Under Problem-Focused Coping?

Surprisingly, there are also unhealthy coping skills under problem-focused coping. Here are a few to mention and, more importantly, to avoid.

• Drinking Alcohol And Consuming Drugs: Drinking alcohol and using drugs may be a temporary resort for your stress, but it won’t reduce it. Drugs and alcohol can instead bring up new problems in your life since alcohol is a depressant, and using drugs can put you at risk for developing substance abuse disorders.
• Indulging In Overeating: Depending on food to reduce stress can lead to an unhealthy relationship with food. Going to the other extreme and refusing to eat will also only help in causing stress to the stressful event that is already present.
• Oversleeping: Sleeping, just like drinking alcohol, is a temporary solution to your problems, regardless of when you do it. It doesn’t matter if you sleep late to avoid waking up early or just taking a small nap; when you wake up, the stressful events will still be there.
• Avoiding The Problem: If you’re using a to-do list but never completing it, this leads to procrastination and converts a healthy coping strategy into an unhealthy coping skill.

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So, yes, unhealthy coping skills can make the stressful situation disappear, but only temporarily; so, don’t try to resort to them to reduce stress because you might just end up doing things to create stress instead.

2. Emotion-Focused Coping Skills

2.1) What Is Emotion-Focused Coping?

Emotion-focused coping is helpful when you don’t want to change the situation and know that the outcomes are out of your control, so you decide to take care of your feelings. For example, if you are nervous about public speaking and have to present in class to be in the moment, you can tell yourself that you can do this and practice relaxing activities when you panic.

2.2) What Are Healthy Coping Skills Under Emotion-Focused Coping?

Emotion-focused mechanisms help you deal with your feelings positively and healthily. Healthy coping strategies soothe you and help you tolerate stressful situations. Here are some healthy emotion-focused coping skills to help boost your mental health and emotional well-being.

• Indulge In Self Care – Taking a long bath occasionally, reading a book, booking a spa appointment – these relaxing activities can help people cope.
• Find Engaging Hobbies: Listening to music, coloring, drawing – anything which helps you reduce stress can help you feel more relaxed.
• Exercise: Exercising regularly, yoga, and engaging in team sports can help boost your emotional well-being.
• Focusing On One Task: Paying attention to only one task at a time instead of multitasking can help you feel more in the moment and reduce stress.
• Practice Mindfulness Skills: Skills like meditation and gratitude journaling can help reduce the impact of a stressful situation.
• Progressive Muscle Relaxation: Focusing on each muscle group slowly and attentively can help you become more aware of the physical sensations around you.

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2.3) What Are Unhealthy Coping Skills Under Emotion-Focused Coping?

Unhealthy emotional coping skills are often hard to notice since they are mostly internal; they occur within your mind, so it’s tough to stop them unless you seem mental health treatment for emotional well-being. Here are a few things you might be doing if you’re following an unhealthy coping skill of emotion-focused coping.

• Avoiding Negative Feelings And Thoughts Completely: People cope in different ways, and each has its pros and cons, but these conscious attempts of absolutely ignoring negative events and feelings lead to the suppression of emotions, leading to more stress.
• Worrying Excessively: To know what are coping skills is to use them in your daily life and avoid overreacting to small issues; worrying intensely and for longer periods doesn’t do you any good.
• Catastrophizing: Jumping to conclusions is a self-defense mechanism called ‘catastrophizing’; simply speaking, people who catastrophize are the ones who ‘cope’ by assuming things and jumping to conclusions with no valid basis reality.

3. Social Support Coping Skills

3.1) What Is Social Support Coping?

The link between the question of what are coping skills and the answer to social support skills isn’t surprising – social support involves acts that communicate caring and love. It helps validate the other’s words, feelings, and thoughts. Seeking support for your mental health can help you facilitate adaptive coping skills and make you feel less stressed out or alone.

3.2) What Are A Few Types Of Social Support Coping Strategies?

Seeking support for your needs is a task that requires courage since we often want to seem independent and self-reliable, but it is important to remember that asking for help doesn’t make you any less strong. Here are types of social support.

• Emotional Social Support includes affirmations and positive regard. Feeling validated and heard makes people value themselves more.
• Informational Social Support involves informing people by sharing advice about something they’re struggling with; if people get information about something causing them stress, they feel more motivated to find ways to reduce stress.
• Tangible Social Support includes sharing resources such as monetary gifts like loans and acts of service like cooking them a meal.
• Belonging Social Support involves providing social belonging, which means feeling included in friend groups and spending time with people who feel the same way.

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4. Proactive Coping, Avoidant Coping, And Active Coping Skills

As stated earlier, the answer to ‘what are coping skills’ isn’t simple – it is very layered and provides different angles for the question. Accordingly, there are coping skills based on present and future obstacles.

4.1) Proactive Coping

Research describes proactive coping as assessing future goals and stressful situations and setting practices to manage them successfully. Proactive coping is a process by which you prepare for potential future stressors and try averting them altogether.

Aspinwall and Taylor (1997) have also described the process in five stages –

1. Resource Accumulation
2. Recognition Of Stressors
3. Initial Appraisal
4. Preliminary Coping Efforts
5. Use Of Feedback

4.2) Active Coping

Active coping is more of the main type of coping skill. Active coping means dealing with the problem directly and not resorting to other sources for indirect help. Processes like time management, stress management, and problem-solving fall under active coping.

There are two main types of active coping:

1. Active-behavioral Coping addresses the problem directly.
2. Active-cognitive Coping is when you change how you think about the stressor.

4.3) Avoidant coping

Avoidant coping also termed as avoidance coping, avoidance behaviors, and escape coping, is a maladaptive coping mechanism in which a person changes their behavior to avoid thinking or doing difficult things.

Avoidant coping is one of the most common ineffective coping mechanisms, which doesn’t help reduce stress. It can create more stress and anxiety. Avoidant coping doesn’t help solve problems; unlike proactive and active coping, it doesn’t minimize future stress. Additionally, practicing avoidant coping can create conflict in social support systems and make you feel more lonely.

Coping Mechanisms – What To Remember About Them

Answering what coping skills are is a task that requires a lot of time and effort. The multiple layers of the question, the distinction between the types of coping skills, individual differences, and the negative impact of certain ineffective coping mechanisms – there are all these layers you need to uncover to start understanding defense mechanisms. Then you need to find the most suitable one for you.

It’s a very long process to find the coping methods best suitable for you, and it may be overwhelming because of the number of coping skills available for you to choose from. However, there are always the basic skills that help at least alleviate your mood for a while. These coping strategies include playing team sports, relaxing activities like exercising regularly, participating in self-care and relaxing exercises, and calming techniques to reduce the negative impact of human behavior, which leads to stress.

Check out this article to learn about easy ways to relax after a stressful day: 7 Easy Ways To Relax After A Stressful Day.

Learning effective coping skills and reverting to these certain coping strategies can help reduce stress. Since learning the best way to cope with stress is a process that takes some time, busying yourself with activities that make you feel active can help take your mind off the stressful situation and remind you of the good things in life.

The next time you are stressed, try resorting to healthy coping skills instead of maladaptive coping mechanisms; instead of drinking alcohol, try speaking to a friend. Your small conscious choices make a lot of difference in your mental health. Keeping your mind healthy is the first step to overall great health and learning to use coping skills in your day-to-day life is crucial to good mental health. Learning what coping skills are and then applying them to your stressful situations can help you lead a healthy, emotionally stable life.

Last Updated on January 24, 2024 by Steffy Michael