Psychology of Coping Skills

Coping Skills are methods that everyone naturally uses to deal with problems in everyday life.

We all use coping skills as a part of our basic psychology. This is possible since we all have an ongoing conversation in our own head all of the time. This is our “self-talk”. Within our self-talk, we can have any number of thoughts at any given time.

It is useful to organize these many thoughts into three categories:

1. Positive thinking
2. Neutral thinking
3. Negative thinking.

By making a distinction between these categories of thinking, we are able to recognize when we are engaged in negative thinking. We can then choose to interrupt our negative thinking which is usually to our benefit since by dwelling on negative thoughts, we become anxious, angry, depressed or we doubt ourselves.

Therefore, negative thoughts make us feel bad and these bad feelings can lead to unhealthy, even dangerous behavior. Since we can make a distinction between positive, neutral and negative thoughts, we can decide how we want to talk to ourselves.

We actually have the power to manage our thinking or self-talk, which in turn, affects how we feel and how we behave. Thus, it is best to catch a negative thought before it gets down into a negative feeling or emotion, or worse, gets down into a negative behavior.

Since negative thoughts can be intrusive and repetitive, managing them is easier said than done. So, we need methods to help us manage them. Coping skills are the methods that we need and, in fact, they are the methods that we use naturally. Our named and defined coping skills makes it possible to use coping skills more deliberately in your everyday life.