Emotion-Focused Coping Strategies For Stress

Stress has unfortunately become a part of everyday life. We are in a constant battle with our daily challenges and tasks and stress just rolls with all of this together. In fact, according to yearly surveys, 51% of adults claim to be stressed in life, and 61% of adults feel anxious daily.

Talking of stress you can’t stop but think about stress management strategies. If you google stress management strategies, you’ll get N number of things that you can do to relieve your stress. But what we fail to understand is that not every stress management strategy might work for you.

Stress management or coping strategies can be divided into two types. Some coping strategies are problem-focused and some are emotion-focused coping strategies. Problem-focused strategies encourage you to solve problems to relieve stress.

Emotion-focused coping strategies focus on your emotions during stressful situations and how mastering your emotions can help in relieving stress. Today, we are going to look at 5 emotion-focused coping strategies for stress.

Shall we get started?

1. Meditation

I am sure you must have read a million and more times that meditation is good for you. But meditation also requires a definition depending on how and when you choose to use it. Meditation can help you navigate your thoughts, emotions, and feelings. If you find yourself stuck in stressful situations quite often and it has started to affect your mental and emotional health, it’s time to take some steps. And meditation can be just the thing for you, it is one such emotion-focused coping strategy that simply helps you calm.

2.Journaling

In my understanding, the best way to journal for stress relief is to just sit down and write about your concerns. I do it the most, I journal my thoughts and emotions when I find myself drowning in stress. Journaling is an emotion-focused coping strategy that helps you in recognizing suppressed emotions. Journaling helps you understand your emotions and makes what you’re feeling even clearer.

3.Reframing

Reframing comes from a very therapeutic point of view. Many therapists use reframing as a tool to rectify your maladaptive thoughts and actions. Emotion-focused coping strategies like reframing help you get a new perspective and let your emotions fall back into place. All you’re supposed to do is reframe your stress-provoking thoughts and emotions with productive and adaptive thoughts and emotions. For example, “Failing at this exam will ruin my life” reframe it with “Now I know what I’m bad at and need to start working on it for the next attempt”

4.Questioning cognitive distortions

There are a lot of cognitive distortions that we can fall victim to. Most of these cognitive distortions play a vital role in making an individual feel stressed. Cognitive distortions can directly attack your emotions therefore an emotion-focused coping strategy is what you might need. When you’re stuck in a stressful situation and your negative thoughts and emotions make it even worse. That’s when you’re supposed to question them, you are not your thoughts so recognize your cognitive distortions and question those thoughts to break out of stress.

5.Positive Thinking

I’m sure you’re sick and tired of having people tell you to think positively. I think it is the most used advice people give. But no matter how irritating it might make you feel, positive thinking is way more powerful than you might imagine. Just keep constantly reminding yourself of all the positive things you want to happen. It works, it honestly does, just think about the positive so that you in a way manifest positive things.

That’s All Folks!

I’m sure you can find more emotion-focused coping strategies for stress relief but these 5 emotion-focused coping strategies are the ones I can swear by. They don’t require much practice barring meditation and all these are so handy that you can practice them any time of the day.

If you have been struggling with dealing with your stressful emotions try these easy-to-do emotion-focused coping strategies. Do it for at least a month and I’m sure you’ll see the difference.

I hope this blog about emotion-focused coping strategies is helpful, interesting, and informative. Do share the blog with your friends and family so that we all know how to deal with your emotions especially when you’re stressed.

Thanks for reading.

Take care and stay safe.