As therapists, an important part of what we provide to our clients is coaching and education on coping skills. This term is used a lot to describe a growing set of cognitive, behavioral, and/or emotional tools that allow for mood management and overall increasing quality of life by building new habits and responses to one’s environment. When people hear the term coping skills they may envision someone taking slow deep breaths or going for a walk outside. These are examples of fantastic skills to use and regularly help many people. However, some people, including some of those who seek therapeutic services, can perceive the idea of coping skills as a waste of time or “not real therapy”. These are sometimes folks who struggle with buying into their own influence over their daily lives or simply struggle profoundly with motivation. No matter what the reason, if one sees new and effective ways of coping with daily life stressors as valuable, then this can make treatment very difficult.
Sometimes to help a client understand this concept, I ask them to envision a beautiful ornate jewelry box as well as an old sock bunched up in the back of their sock drawer. Then I ask them what difference it might make to them if they store their expensive and personally valuable items in the jewelry box vs the old sock. This helps them understand that if we treat coping skills like they deserve to be in an old sock, then that will correlate with how effective they can be; versus if they are regarded as deserving a purposeful and pleasing display, then they tend to yield clearer and more desirable results. So, what does keeping your coping skills in a metaphorical jewelry box look like? Well, it starts with intention and mindfulness. One must be actively coping rather than passively coping. This makes a clear difference in most goal-oriented efforts such as playing a board game that requires strategy. Typically, the mindful and intentional players do better than the ones paying less attention to the events of the game. The same is true for coping skills. If they are something you do reactively or with limited effort, then you will be denying yourself of their full benefits.
One could say that this is simply the Placebo Effect taking place in which the mind’s convictions play a role in what the mind perceives despite some of the facts. To this point I would say 2 things: Firstly, that the placebo effect is how many mental health challenges persist. When one is convinced of future stressors or an undesirable perception of their life, the effects of these convictions may manifest despite the facts. So, if buying into your coping skills is “just the placebo effect” then why can’t one use it to improve their quality of life when it is being used to weight it down. The second point is that most coping skills use facts and logic as their foundation and are grounded by much research. For example, in a 2018 study it was found that paced breathing techniques were clearly correlated with multiple psychological and neurological changes that also led to increased levels of relaxation, pleasantness, alertness, comfort, and vigor as well as reductions in symptoms of anxiety, depression, anger, confusion, and physiological arousal (Zaccaro A, Piarulli A, Laurino M, et. al. How Breath-Control Can Change Your Life: A Systematic Review on Psycho-Physiological Correlates of Slow Breathing. Front Hum Neurosci. 2018 Sep 7;12:353. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2018.00353. PMID: 30245619; PMCID: PMC6137615.).
If you struggle with the idea of buying into the use of coping skills to manage your moods and thoughts to improve your quality of life, feel free to reach out and talk to a therapist about the background and research behind the use of coping skills. Approaching new strategies with an open mind is important because one of the most foundational coping skill you will ever have is the commitment to coping in the first place.