Hi, I’m Ilia Jones, licensed professional counselor in Suwanee, Georgia, and I want to talk to you about coping strategies. Many people come to therapy and one of their main goals is to develop more coping strategies. A coping strategy is defined as a thought or behavior that people can use in order to manage stress or manage a negative emotion.​

So, sometimes that can be problem solving. You can learn coping strategies where you learn how to solve more problems, so therefore it will be less stressful. Another type of coping strategy is something that will help you decrease the negative emotion and that can be meditation, that can be exercise, that can be sometimes finding a distraction.​

There are other types of coping strategies which is where you change the meaning of the stressful situation or find a different way of looking at it. For example, if you are sick, a coping strategy may be to look at and talk to other people that have a similar illness and think about how that’s going to make you stronger or how you’re going to be able to get through that. It can be a “look at the bright side” kind of situation. It can be having a different perspective.​

Another type of coping strategy is also learning and believing that you have the confidence and the ability to tolerate and get through and wait until the stressful event is over and know that you’re going to be okay later, but that maybe you do have to go through the stress and you do have to have the negative emotions right now, but you can still feel better about it because you know and you feel confident that you can get through it. So, these are all different kinds of coping strategies that you can learn in therapy. I hope this information is helpful. Please like or subscribe if you want to see any more of my content.​