Individual Coping Skills
How can listening to/writing music be used as a positive coping skill?
Listening to/writing music can be relaxing, can help take your mind off of stressors, and is a way to express your emotions/feelings.
How can helping another person be used as a positive coping skill?
Helping others can improve our mood and make us feel good about ourselves.
Positive coping skills help you deal with stress in healthy and productive ways, while negative coping skills provide temporary relief and momentary distraction but can actually make stress worse over time.
What is TRUE?
A tool that can help you maintain your stress if it's squeezed.
What is a Stress Ball?
Throwing/breaking things when becoming angry is a healthy way of expressing your anger.
What is FALSE?
How can exercising/participating in leisure activities be used as a positive coping skill?
Exercising increases your energy, mood, focus, self-esteem, and decreases your stress, depression, and chance of heart attack or other health conditions. Participating in leisure activities provides an opportunity to have fun, relax, and socialize with peers.
How can socializing with others be used as a positive coping skill?
Socializing with others decreases feelings of loneliness, stress, and isolation, and increases feelings of enjoyment and happiness.
All stress is bad stress.
What is FALSE? Stress can be positive or negative. Positive stress, otherwise known as good stress, is the type of stress response that we feel when we get excited (e.g., starting a new job, buying a home, etc).
This technique involves slowly inhaling and exhaling.
What is Deep Breathing?
When feeling angry or stressed, it is better to just hold on to your anger/stress so that you do not blow up.
What is FALSE? (holding in your anger/stress may actually cause it to get worse and you to explode).
How can drugs be used as a negative coping skill?
Dependence- With repeated drug or alcohol use, the brain becomes dependent on the substances to remain in balance, and difficult withdrawal symptoms occur when the substance wears off).
Temporary- While using drugs can provide instant relief, the effect will only last while under the influence.
Emotional Numbness- Suppressing your emotions/feelings with drugs instead of dealing with them will tend to get worse than better.
How can distancing yourself from others be used as a negative coping skill?
When you distance yourself from others, your problems may seem to build up. You may have more negative thoughts/feelings like sadness, fear, and loneliness.
Eating and sleeping are always healthy coping skills.
What is FALSE? (Emotional eating and over sleeping can have negative effects and be used as unhealthy coping mechanisms)
What involves the tensing of the muscles then releasing for relaxation?
What is Progressive Muscle Relaxation?
Joe and Jack got into an argument after Joe said some harsh words to Jack, which led to them fighting. What coping skills might they have used to avoid the argument/fight all together?
Possible answers: communicate effectively, tackle the problem, or remove self from situation, etc.
How can avoidance behaviors be used as a negative coping skill?
Avoidance behaviors often have the opposite effect than what is desired. While in the short run you may experience a temporary sense of relief, in the long run, avoidance actually leads to increased anxiety, stress, etc.
How can resorting to anger/aggression when faced with an interpersonal conflict be used as a negative coping skill?
Anger is a COVER-UP EMOTION! We tend to resort to anger in order to protect ourselves from or cover up other vulnerable emotions (e.g., sadness). It is better to express and effectively communicate your true emotions/feelings, and act on it in a more positive and respectful way.
All stress is out of your control.
What is FALSE? (Stress can be self-induced, as a result of uncontrolled thinking or mismanagement of things in a person's control).
What involves imagining a relaxing destination and picturing yourself there for relaxation purposes?
What is Guided Imagery/Visualization?
I am getting frustrated in class and am going to use my coping skills to turn my mood around. How do I know that my coping skill is a healthy one?
What are the 3 Laws of Coping Skills (they don't hurt me, others, or property/break the rules)?
Give an example of an unhealthy coping skill and explain why it's unhealthy. Then give an example of a healthy coping skill and explain why it's healthy.
Healthy coping skills: listening to music, exercising, finding humor, reading a book, talking to mental health, etc. (Positive = these are all productive ways of coping and provide long-term beneficial effects)
Unhealthy coping skills: self-harm, substance abuse, withdraw/isolation, fighting, bottling feelings up, etc. (Negative = these are all quick fixes but may actually make a situation worse in the long run)
How can participating in group therapy be used as a positive coping skill?
-Provides a space to talk to and hear from others, who share similar experiences, about problems or stressors.
-Allows you to express your emotions/feelings and feel connected to others.
-Helps to broaden your perspective and think about things from a different angle.
-Improve social/team building skills, learn new strategies, etc.
Listening to music, avoiding stress, and going for a walk are all examples of positive coping skills.
What is FALSE? (Avoiding stress might seem like a great way to become less stressed, but this isn't necessarily the case. More often than not, confronting a problem or dealing with a stressor is the only way to effectively reduce the stress it causes).
A practice of serious thought about one's character, actions, and motives, which allows us to acknowledge what choices were good, which were bad, and how we can improve ourselves.
What is Self-Reflection?
What is something important to know about yourself when your body starts to give you signs of experiencing stress?
TRIGGERS! (Everyone has different stress triggers - If a person can recognize their own signals of stress, they will be better able to manage them).