Managing our mental health is a vital part of a healthy lifestyle. In dark and challenging times, we need the support system and coping skills to manage the stress, grief, and pain. While this is no easy task, it is vital to your well-being. Here is why it is important to have healthy coping skills.
Strengthens Your Relationships
You need like-minded, supportive people who share your worldview and can help you navigate your changing ideas of the world after a difficult incident. When you lose a loved one or experience stressful life changes, you need healthy coping skills that encourage you to seek support from others rather than turn into yourself. Isolation, stress, and sadness can lead to significant problems.
Suppose you lose a dear family member in a tragic incident. Coping with wrongful death in your family can prove quite difficult, especially since you are all going through similar loss. You may have churning feelings of indignation, injustice, grief, and sadness that you can only sort out with others.
Builds Lifelong Resilience
Resilience is a person’s ability to bounce back after a difficult experience. This involves recovering and thriving in the aftermath of a disaster. It is nearly impossible to achieve this without healthy coping skills. Resilience requires a strong will, strengthened by others. You cannot press on without the proper support.
But once you live through a disaster and grow from it, you come out more resilient. You have a nuanced experience of the world that can account for the traumatic and troublesome. When something bad happens to you, your worldview and support system will not crumble.
Minimizes Physical Health Risks
Everyone copes with challenges—the only difference is in the how. Negative coping strategies involve things like abusing substances, isolating oneself, critical self-talk, and reckless behavior. While many of these actions may take away the stress in the immediate moment, they do not solve the problem.
Each of these negative coping mechanisms puts your body in harm’s way and injures your self-esteem. While you may experience enormous difficulty trying to break out of these patterns, turning to healthy coping skills will keep you safe and steady along the road of recovery.
There is a deep connection between mind, body, and spirit, so remember why it is important to have healthy coping skills. The way you spend your energy and time in crisis will determine your outcome on the other end of the tunnel. Reflect on how you handle stress and find better ways to cope with your challenges today.
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