Coping Skills List: 60 Healthy Ways to Handle Stress

Coping skills are the things you deliberately do to get through stress or a painful feeling without making it worse: breathing slowly, taking a walk, calling a friend, writing the problem down, making a plan. A useful coping skills list mixes two kinds, skills that change the problem and skills that help you handle the feeling when the problem cannot change yet.

Start here, based on how you feel right now:

When the feeling is driven by a thought you cannot shake ("I'm going to get fired," "they hate me"), a thought record walks you through the CBT version of checking it: the situation, the thought, the evidence on each side, and a more balanced thought you can actually believe.

Coping skills vs coping mechanisms

People use the terms interchangeably, but there is a useful difference:

• Coping mechanism is the broad term for any way you respond to stress, including automatic habits that hurt you, like drinking, avoiding or snapping at people.
• Coping skills usually means the healthy strategies you pick on purpose and can practice.
• Defense mechanisms are something else again: mostly unconscious ways the mind keeps painful feelings out of view, like denial or projection. The Defense Mechanisms Test shows which ones you lean on.

Researchers also split coping into problem-focused coping, which acts on the situation (planning, taking action, getting practical help), and emotion-focused coping, which works on how you feel about it (seeking comfort, finding a more helpful way to see it, acceptance). One of the most widely used coping questionnaires is built around this split, and it also flags a few responses that are arguably less useful, such as giving up on the problem and mentally checking out.^[1] You need both kinds. If you can fix it, fixing it beats feeling better about it. If you cannot, emotion-focused skills are what get you through.

The coping skills list: 60 skills by type

Calm your body

1. Breathe in for 4 counts and out for 6 to 8, for two minutes.
2. Try box breathing: in 4, hold 4, out 4, hold 4.
3. Splash cold water on your face or hold something cold. DBT, a skills-based therapy, teaches this as a fast reset for intense emotion.
4. Walk briskly for 10 minutes.
5. Do 20 jumping jacks or climb stairs.
6. Tense and release each muscle group with progressive muscle relaxation.
7. Follow a short vagus nerve reset.
8. Drop your shoulders, unclench your jaw, loosen your hands.
9. Take a warm shower.
10. Lie down and put one hand on your chest, one on your belly.

Ground your attention

11. Name 5 things you see, 4 you can touch, 3 you hear, 2 you smell, 1 you taste. The grounding exercise guides you.
12. Describe the room out loud in detail.
13. Count backward from 100 by sevens.
14. Hold an ice cube or smell something strong, like peppermint or coffee.
15. Press your feet into the floor and notice the pressure.
16. Name the feeling in one precise word.
17. Listen to one song and follow only the bass line.
18. Notice three colors around you and name every object in each.

Work with the thought

19. Ask: what is the evidence for this thought, and against it?
20. Ask: what would I tell a friend who thought this?
21. Spot the thinking trap. Cognitive distortions lists the common ones.
22. Replace "always" and "never" with what actually happened.
23. Ask: will this matter in a week, a month, a year?
24. Write the worst case, the best case and the most likely case.
25. Set a 15-minute worry time and postpone worries until then.
26. Say the thought as "I'm having the thought that...," which puts a little space between you and it.

Solve the problem

27. Write down exactly what the problem is, in one sentence.
28. List every option, even bad ones, then pick one.
29. Break the task into a first step that takes under five minutes.
30. Do the brain dump: get everything out, then sort it.
31. Ask someone who has solved this before.
32. Decide what you will not deal with today.
33. Set one boundary that removes a recurring stressor.
34. Make the phone call or send the email you are dreading.

Get support

35. Call or text one person and say how you really are.
36. Ask for help with one specific task.
37. Spend time with someone without talking about the problem.
38. Join a support group for what you are going through.
39. Hug someone, or a pet.
40. Tell someone what you need: advice, a distraction or just listening.
41. Book an appointment with a doctor or licensed therapist.
42. Talk it out loud, even to an empty room or a voice memo.

Express it

43. Write freely for 10 minutes without editing.
44. Cry if it comes.
45. Write the letter you will not send.
46. Draw, paint or make music about the feeling.
47. Scream into a pillow or in the car.
48. Dance to one loud song.

Distract on purpose

49. Watch a familiar comfort show for one episode.
50. Do a puzzle, a crossword or a game that needs focus.
51. Clean or organize one small space.
52. Cook something that takes attention.
53. Read a chapter of a novel.
54. Go somewhere different for an hour.

Comfort yourself

55. Wrap up in a blanket with something warm to drink.
56. Talk to yourself the way you would talk to a friend in this spot.
57. Put on clothes that feel soft.
58. Eat a real meal.
59. Go to bed early.
60. Remind yourself: this feeling is strong, and it will pass.

Distraction is a legitimate skill when used for a set time, to get through a wave. It turns into avoidance when it becomes the only thing you ever do with a problem.

Coping mechanisms that backfire

Some responses feel like coping in the moment but make things worse. A meta-analysis of 114 studies found that rumination had a large link with symptoms of anxiety, depression, eating disorders and substance problems, and that avoidance and suppression also had substantial links.^[2] Problem solving, reappraisal (looking at a situation in a different, more helpful way) and acceptance went the other way: people who used them more tended to have fewer symptoms. In a separate set of studies, people who habitually reappraised felt more positive emotion and less negative emotion, while people who habitually hid their feelings felt less positive emotion yet more negative emotion, and had worse relationships.^[3]

If you are hurting yourself to cope, or thinking about it, that is a sign you deserve more support than a list can give. Please talk to a doctor or licensed therapist, and if you might act on those thoughts now, call or text 988 for the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.

How to pick the right coping skill

1. Rate the feeling from 0 to 10. At 7 or above, most people find it very hard to reason their way out of a feeling. Start with the body list: breathing, cold water, movement. Come back to the thought once you are at 6 or lower.
2. Ask whether you can change the situation. If yes, go to problem-solving. If not, or not yet, go to grounding, support, expressing or comfort.
3. Ask what you need: calm, comfort, company or a plan. Then pick from the matching section.

The idea that there is a zone where you can think clearly, and zones above and below it where you cannot, is explained well in the window of tolerance. For the bigger skill set of handling strong feelings, see how to regulate your emotions.

Build your own coping plan

The worst time to choose a coping skill is in the middle of the feeling. Make a card now, on paper or in your phone:

• My early warning signs: for example, a tight jaw, snapping at people, not sleeping.
• Three body skills that work for me: for example, a walk, a cold shower, box breathing.
• Three people I can text: with their names written out.
• One place I can go: a park, a car, a friend's porch.
• One thing I will not do: for example, "No texting him after 10 p.m."
• When to get more help: for example, "If I've felt like this most days for two weeks, I book an appointment."

When coping skills are not enough

Coping skills help with everyday stress and with getting through a hard moment. They are not meant to carry you through months of depression, panic attacks, trauma symptoms or a situation that is not safe. If you are using coping skills all day just to function, or nothing on this list touches the feeling, a licensed therapist can teach structured approaches such as CBT or DBT that build these skills in a more systematic way.

Track it: learn which skills actually work for you

The skills that work are personal, and you only find out by noticing:

• Log it in one line: what happened, the feeling and its 0 to 10 rating, the skill you used, the rating afterward.
• Use tags. A mood tracker lets you tag days with what you tried, so after a few weeks you can see which skills show up on your better days.
• Check your default style. The Coping Style Test shows how you usually handle stress, and the Distress Tolerance Test shows how long you can sit with a hard feeling before you need to escape it.

For a closer look at tools for stress specifically, coping tools for stress covers what works and what does not.

Sometimes the hardest part is knowing where to start when you are already overwhelmed. Say out loud what is going on and how you usually react, and Lovon can help you pick one skill to try tonight.