Coping Skills for Mental Health and Wellbeing

Coping skills are strategies that help people deal with mental health challenges in order to achieve positive mental health and wellbeing. Coping skills take many forms. People can use their own personal coping skills to take charge of their thoughts, feelings, and actions, and when they do, they find that they experience mental health and even begin to thrive.

Coping skills don't necessarily remove stress or eradicate challenges like mental illness, but they go a long way toward helping people function well despite challenges.

Coping skills can include such things as:

• Noticing tension and taking deep breaths to reduce it
• Catching negative thoughts and replacing them with healthy ones
• Setting and maintaining appropriate and healthy boundaries between you and others
• Relaxing with aromatherapy
• Destressing with soothing activities like coloring, reading, etc.
• Eating healthy
• Sleeping the right amount
• Finding things that make you grateful
• Creating little moments of joy in each day

Coping skills are choices, and they're habits. To achieve mental health and wellbeing, it can be helpful to build a toolbox of strategies and use them regularly. The more you use your coping skills, the better they'll work for you in overcoming difficulties and achieving mental health and wellbeing.

Related Articles Dealing with Coping Skills and Mental Illness

• Mental Health 101: Developing Coping Strategies
• Fighting Flashbacks: Coping Skills for the Symptoms of PTSD
• Impulse Control and New Coping Skills in Addiction Recovery
• Coping Skills for Adults with ADD, ADHD
• Self Injury Self Help: Self Help Coping Skills for Self Harm
• Eating Disorder Coping Skills—Mobile Edition!
• Creative Coping Skill for Binge Eating Disorder: Art Therapy
• Coping Skills for Anxiety: Ways to Cope with Anxiety
• Alternative Coping Skills for Bipolar Disorder

Your Thoughts

Today's Question: Today’s Question: What coping skills do you use for mental health challenges and how effective are they? We invite you to participate by commenting and sharing your feelings, experiences and knowledge on the HealthyPlace Facebook page.

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