Healthy Or Unhealthy Coping Strategies: What's the Difference.
Raremark Foundation
A foundation that promises to promote positive behavioral change in regard to Sickle Cell.
Coping strategies (referred to interchangeably as coping mechanisms or coping skills) are behaviors that are designed to help us manage the negative emotions associated with difficult events, situations, relationships, and more. Coping mechanisms may be learned both consciously or unconsciously.?
Learning and implementing healthy coping strategies is a routine part of successful sickle cell crisis management and mental health treatment and as a result, discovering new coping strategies are often assisted by a health provider or caregiver. But some healthy coping strategies can be also self-taught, particularly simpler behaviors or habits we can adopt to help maintain our mental and physical health.
Coping mechanisms can assist us in handling our pain, stress, anxiety, and more, by offering ways to maintain or even improve our emotional well-being and ability to function normally.?
It’s also important to make the distinction between positive and negative coping strategies; even though both seek to reduce negative emotions, only positive coping strategies help guide us toward long-term well-being. In comparison, negative coping strategies often only help us temporarily escape unpleasant feelings in the short term, but then leave us feeling worse off later.?
Unhealthy coping mechanisms might include
These unhealthy ways of coping may even develop unconsciously, and sometimes we aren’t fully aware of their effects until we have the guidance and insight of a mental health provider, or continue to mature and develop.
Positive coping strategies on the other hand are designed to help us healthily adjust and respond to different scenarios in our lives. Positive coping strategies are often a core component of different therapeutic methods, especially psychotherapy approaches like cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and dialectical behavior therapy (DBT).?
Other techniques, such as acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), or mindfulness-based cognitive behavioral therapy (MB-CBT) also rely on the implementation of positive coping strategies. Positive coping skills differ from subconscious or unhealthy coping strategies in that they help us respond productively to:?
Healthy coping strategies can be separated into different groups, based on the nature of the coping strategy itself.
What Are the 5 Types of Coping Mechanisms?
Coping mechanisms are often broken down into the following five distinct categories:?
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Social support: This type of coping mechanism is all about seeking out resources and support provided by a social network to help us cope with the stress of all kinds. Social support may take the form of financial aid, support groups, or someone simply lending a friendly ear when we need to vent.
Problem-focused coping: This coping type focuses on changing specific situations, sometimes by directly removing stressful things from our lives. For example, in a warrior's case, the problem might be intense work stress, abrupt weather changes, or diet. Problem-focused coping helps us to start making positive changes.?
Spiritual coping: A somewhat broad term, this type of coping mechanism encompasses spiritual and religious responses to grief, stress, anger, and many other unpleasant emotions. Religious coping may be used to help empower us to overcome unhealthy habits or thought patterns that go against our spiritual or moral compasses, as well as to make sense of tragedy or loss.
Meaning-making: This coping type is related to the process of re-evaluating situations to find a more positive understanding of the factors at play, the outcomes, and the lessons that can be learned from past failures and other scenarios.??
Emotion-focused coping: This form of coping helps manage emotions when we don’t want to change a situation, or when the circumstances are beyond our control. A good example of this would be processing the grief created by the loss of a loved one; it wouldn’t make sense to turn off our grief, nor can we bring the loved one lost back. Instead, we give ourselves the time, space, and understanding to grieve—and do our best to realize that the difficult emotions caused by the event will pass.?
These five types of coping strategies all share one thing in common: They’re the basis for?healthy coping strategies.?Healthy coping strategies for dealing with anxiety, pain, stress, and other emotions can include:?
Exercise has been proven to help fend off the effects of many mental and physical health conditions.
Healthy diet. Following a healthy diet, something that’s been shown to support long-term mental health
Meditation can be used to identify harmful thoughts, work through unpleasant emotional states, and more.??
Talking through difficult emotions and situations with a loved one is a way to let off steam, hear advice, and request support when it’s needed.?
Identifying and replacing harmful thoughts is a way to prevent difficult emotions like anger, fear, or anxiety from building, also known as cognitive reframing or restructuring.
Practicing good sleep hygiene, which involves ensuring that we stay well-rested and position ourselves in the best way possible to get a good night’s rest (i.e. excluding caffeine before bed, limiting blue light exposure from electronics in the evening hours, or gentle stretching). Progressive muscle relaxation and paced breathing exercises are also great ways to wind down before bed.?
The best way to improve your ability to cope with the different situations as a sickle cell warrior is to confide in a caregiver, counselor, therapist, or psychiatric provider, but the initial steps can be accomplished on your own, with or without their assistance. When we feel stressed or overwhelmed, it’s tempting to neglect important areas of our life and zero in on our problems with excruciating detail but the unhealthy strategy isn't the way to go.?