Coping strategies are the techniques a person uses (often unconsciously, or only partly consciously) in order to deal with difficult situations and states, especially those the person judges to be excessive or to exceed their personal resources.

All of us are in exactly such a situation right now — an excessive one, to put it mildly.

Coping strategies are aimed at adapting a person better to the demands of the environment, at allowing its impact to be weakened or softened, avoided, or grown accustomed to.

Several factors affect how effective a coping strategy is:

the degree of threat to the personality

the availability of the necessary resources

and their success.

There are three groups of coping strategies:

the strategy of actively solving the problem, drawing on one’s own resources;

the strategy of seeking social support;

the strategy of avoidance and maladaptive behaviour, in which a person evades solving the problem by resorting to auto-aggression, psychoactive substances, alcohol.

Coping strategies aimed at actively resolving the problem situation:

Active steps to remove the source of stress

Planning one’s actions in the problem situation that has arisen

Seeking help or information from those around one

Appraising the situation in terms of its positive sides and relating to it as one episode within one’s life experience

Acknowledging the reality of the situation

Passive coping that helps one adapt to a stressful situation:

Seeking sympathy and understanding from those around one

Reducing activity on other matters and problems and focusing entirely on the source of stress

Waiting for more favourable conditions in which to resolve the situation

Emotional reaction within the problem situation

Denial of the stressful event

Psychological distraction from the source of stress through entertainment, sleep and so on

Refusal to resolve the situation

We have already written about avoidance strategies above.

The choice of coping style is influenced by the features of the situation and by real or imagined control over it, as well as by the features of the personality.

What is certain, however, is that in a highly critical situation our habitual behavioural patterns intensify many times over (even tenfold).

And unfortunately we are far from always in command of how exactly we will react to a stressful event, or of whether the strategy chosen will really help us cope with the situation or will instead make it worse.