How can you develop effective coping skills for chronic illness?

1 What are coping skills?

Coping skills are the thoughts and actions that you use to deal with stressful situations. They can help you adapt to your circumstances, overcome obstacles, and achieve your goals. Coping skills can be positive or negative, depending on how they affect your health and happiness. Positive coping skills are healthy, constructive, and supportive. They can help you reduce your stress, improve your mood, and cope with your symptoms. Negative coping skills are unhealthy, destructive, and harmful. They can increase your stress, worsen your mood, and interfere with your treatment. Examples of positive coping skills are relaxation, exercise, meditation, humor, and social support. Examples of negative coping skills are denial, avoidance, substance abuse, self-blame, and aggression.

2 Why are coping skills important for chronic illness?

Coping skills are especially important for chronic illness because they can influence your physical and mental health outcomes. Research shows that positive coping skills can help you improve your immune system, lower your blood pressure, reduce your pain, and prevent complications. They can also help you prevent or treat depression, anxiety, anger, and other psychological problems that often accompany chronic illness. Positive coping skills can also help you enhance your self-esteem, confidence, and resilience. They can help you find meaning and purpose in your life, despite your limitations and challenges. On the other hand, negative coping skills can have the opposite effects. They can worsen your physical and mental health, impair your functioning, and lower your quality of life.

4 How can you cope with coping challenges?

Developing effective coping skills for chronic illness can be a challenging process. You may find yourself lacking motivation, feeling overwhelmed by negative emotions, and struggling with low self-efficacy or social pressure. To help you cope with these challenges, here are some tips: be compassionate and patient with yourself; recognize your strengths and successes, and treat yourself with respect; seek and accept support from those around you; join a support group to share your experiences and find peer support; and use problem-solving and cognitive-behavioral techniques to identify and challenge negative thoughts and beliefs. With these strategies in place, you can take steps towards developing the coping skills you need to manage your chronic illness.

5 How can you evaluate and improve your coping skills?

Evaluating and improving your coping skills is an ongoing process that requires reflection and feedback. To do this, you can keep a coping journal to track and review your coping skills and outcomes, seek feedback from others, and experiment with different coping skills. A coping journal can include the date, the situation, the coping skill, the outcome, your feelings and thoughts, and a rating on a scale of 1 to 10. Feedback from your health care provider, therapist, coach, mentor, or support group can help you identify your strengths and areas for improvement. Trying new or different coping skills can help you expand your repertoire and discover what works best for you. By assessing, setting, choosing, learning, practicing, coping, evaluating, and improving your coping skills, you can enhance your physical and mental health.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?