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healthy coping strategies

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Take a Break!: Tips on taking a mental reset after a stressful day

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Take a Break!: Tips on taking a mental reset after a stressful day

After a stressful day it can be difficult to turn off our negative thoughts and feelings. It can be easy to bring stress home after a long day at work, an argument with a friend, or whatever it may be that brought you down. It is important to take care of yourself after a stressful day by checking in with yourself and allowing a mental reset. Taking a mental reset can help in better managing your stress and not allowing it to continue the remainder of the day into the next. The following are ten tips and strategies you can use to help unwind after a stressful day:

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Care in 2022: Self-Care Techniques As We Grow and Learn

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Care in 2022: Self-Care Techniques As We Grow and Learn

We hear the term self-care often. With many stressors in our personal lives and around the world, impacting all of us, the idea of self-care is even more prominent as the world changes and shifts. You have probably heard about many strategies to cope, such as: taking a walk, taking a nap, writing down positive thoughts and others. Let’s explore additional self-care strategies you might try.

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I.M.P.R.O.V.E.: A DBT-based Skill for Emotion Regulation

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I.M.P.R.O.V.E.: A DBT-based Skill for Emotion Regulation

Dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT) is based on a dialectical module which helps one to find the middle path or gray thinking with cognition and behaviors. When you think in a "all or nothing" way, you take on unnecessary stress and tension in life. DBT helps you think in terms of "all or at least something".

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Practice Makes Perfect: The Importance of Regularly Practicing Strategies to Manage Anger

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Practice Makes Perfect: The Importance of Regularly Practicing Strategies to Manage Anger

Anger is a healthy emotion, but often we worry it isn’t. Focused on the behaviors anger can lead to, we often avoid thinking about and tackling why we are feeling angry. We all experience anger, from frustration with a co-worker to full-blown anger in a breakup or another scenario. Amongst varying degrees of anger, it’s helpful to have strategies that support regulating these emotions, so that you are not impacted negatively.

By practicing coping strategies daily, to reduce and manage anger, we can find ourselves better able to manage stressors as they arise. Here are a few daily practices to try that can support this.


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Coping for All Occasions: Why a Self-Care Tool Kit Is Crucial

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Coping for All Occasions: Why a Self-Care Tool Kit Is Crucial

We know we all need to engage in self-care. It makes us feel good, it helps us destress, and we know that there are long-term benefits for our mental and physical health. However, in difficult moments, it’s often difficult for our brains to remember all the self-care activities we know as our nervous systems take over and attempt to fight or flee. Thus, developing a self-care toolkit for any moment can be helpful. By having these on hand, you can use them anytime you feel stress or need something to help you regroup.

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The Calm During the Storm: Coping Strategies to Weather Any Storm

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The Calm During the Storm: Coping Strategies to Weather Any Storm

As the pandemic has raged on, various communities have experienced struggles in our country and others, political tension has risen, and other nations have experienced hardships, the uncertainty and unpredictability of things can lead to feeling many symptoms of anxiety.

While many have established strategies to cope with some of the above factors, like wearing masks, the emotional toll these events have taken on us is large. The way we handle the difficult emotions that have developed as a result of this time period is important, as they can continue to negatively impact ourselves and others.


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Using Compassion to Destress

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Using Compassion to Destress

How do we develop compassion? There are a few ways. Try to schedule time to implement self-compassion each week. Once a day, every few days, tailor a schedule that works best for you and dedicate a few moments to note these stressors and diligently preclude self-admonishment with self-kindness. Then increase the time periods in your compassion calendar to include these measures of mindfulness.

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Four Easy, Mindfulness Techniques to Use Throughout the Holiday Season

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Four Easy, Mindfulness Techniques to Use Throughout the Holiday Season

With the holiday season approaching, as stress and anxiety heighten, it can be helpful to develop more coping strategies to get through particularly difficult moments throughout your day. Mindfulness meditation can be an extremely helpful technique to reduce your stress and anxiety.However, you can engage in these practices even without any formal meditation throughout your day. Below are a few ways to incorporate mindfulness into your daily life allowing you to feel more focused, calm, and at peace.

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Dealing with Zoom Fatigue

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Dealing with Zoom Fatigue

Zoom calls have taken over. A few meetings in the morning, virtual learning, seminars over Zoom, a doctor’s visit over Doxy.me and FaceTime dates with family and friends. As social distancing continues, people move from video platform to video platform throughout the day. The unintended impact of this on mental health may be what’s being referred to as “Zoom fatigue” or the “feeling of tiredness, anxiousness, or worry from one video call to the next”.

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The Power of Connection: Social Supports as a Tool to Improved Mental Health

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The Power of Connection: Social Supports as a Tool to Improved Mental Health

Part of our ability to problem-solve and identify coping strategies in the moment, is the ability to analyze feelings in the moment and rethink negative thoughts. However, this isn’t as easy as it sounds. When experiencing negative thoughts and emotions, we often need the help from others, our support network, to cope. Have stable people in our support networks is crucial for our overall mental health.

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Skills for Managing Anxiety: Diaphragmatic Breathing

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Skills for Managing Anxiety: Diaphragmatic Breathing

One of the best ways to reduce anxiety is using a tool all of us have in our tool belts of skills all of the time: breathing. However, while breathing is something we all do, every day, there are certain types of breathing that help reduce anxiety and the more you practice them, the easier it is to use in difficult moments. Diaphragmatic breathing is one technique that can be beneficial for reducing anxiety.

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Frozen in Fear: Understanding the “Freeze” Response within Anxiety

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Frozen in Fear: Understanding the “Freeze” Response within Anxiety

Everyone has heard of the concept of “fight or flight” before. We know that when we perceive a threat exists (whether real or imagined) our sympathetic nervous system awakens. We’ve all had those moments where we experience a surge of adrenaline and our heart beats fast, our breathing quickens, muscles tense, etc. In this moment, our brains are evaluating whether the danger is real or not and whether you will stand up to it (fight) or run away (flight). However, there is a third option to the fight or flight response that we don’t talk about as often and this is “freeze”. We will explore this response, the benefits of this, as well as ways to reduce the impact this has on our bodies and minds.

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Supporting Mental Health for Healthcare Workers

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Supporting Mental Health for Healthcare Workers

Studies report that healthcare workers are and will continue to experience psychological distress along with symptoms of anxiety and depression, managing the many stressors they face on the frontlines and how this impacts their daily lives. How can we support healthcare workers? Here are a few strategies to care for you or a loved one’s mental health at this time, especially if you are working on the frontlines.

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5 Positive Ways to Utilize Technology During COVID

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5 Positive Ways to Utilize Technology During COVID

It’s easy to get sucked into a Netflix marathon or an eight-hour video game run. However, we know that sometimes too much screen time can have a negative impact on mental health so we are constantly told to to watch our screen usage. The problem is that during the COVID-19 pandemic, when we are told to remain socially distant from others, we are often using technology and having more screen time than is typical, in order to remain connected with others, which is positive. So how can we utilize technology in positive and healthy ways as we remain socially distant?

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The Importance of Managing Emotions

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The Importance of Managing Emotions

Thinking about expressing emotions to others can bring up feelings of uncertainty and fear. Many of our behaviors, both conscious and unconscious are learned early in life. Thus, if emotions associated with these behaviors were not validated growing up, it can feel overwhelming to try and share them as adults. Additionally, witnessing behaviors and behavioral patterns from important figures in our lives conditions us to develop beliefs about our emotions. For many of us we may have grown up in homes where no one discussed their feelings or in a home where certain feelings were linked to being “bad” or “good”. This can lead to difficulties in understanding how to regulate your emotional experiences. No matter what you may or may not have learned, it’s important to understand your feelings and emotions, including how they manifest in your body. Here are a few things that are important to keep in mind when we think of emotions.

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Self-Soothing vs. Self-Care: Strategies for Reducing Stress

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Self-Soothing vs. Self-Care: Strategies for Reducing Stress

Stress can occur any day, throughout the day. We all want to be our best selves regularly whether this is in work or our personal lives. Self-care practices can help us ensure we are on our A-game however there are times where we may not be able to get those practices in. There are times where we have so much stress that our bodies and minds shift to survival mode. In these times it is important to have self-soothing, survival skills to get through stressful events, distressing periods, and move forward.

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How Having a Plan Can Help Get You Through A Pandemic

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How Having a Plan Can Help Get You Through A Pandemic

It remains uncertain how long this pandemic will last or the true impact it will have. Additionally, we still know little about the virus itself and how it impacts our daily lives moving forward. We still need to figure out what concerns we should have, as there are so many unknowns. However, what we do know right now is that everyone is impacted by this pandemic. Thus, it is time for us all to come together for a common goal, and utilize positive coping strategies to work through the present moment and any negative feelings that arise. This notion also gives comfort as we know we are not alone, we are all experiencing this.

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Managing Stress (And Not Avoiding It)

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Managing Stress (And Not Avoiding It)

In the moment, it can feel much easier to avoid something that makes us stressed or uncomfortable, rather than tackling it head on. However, active coping that aims to address a problem head on, as a way to alleviate stress. Active coping can look like talking through problems to alleviate relationship stress, reframing a situation in order to view the positives of it, or budgeting to reduce financial stress amongst other ways of coping. No matter what active coping approach you take, the ongoing benefits lead to a happier and healthier sense of being.