Everyone deals with stress and anxiety. Stress and anxiety are biological imperatives that keep you alive. For example, it is heightened adrenaline and stress that might cause you to pause when you hear an unfamiliar sound and wait to determine if that sound is an intruder in your home or your trash cans being knocked over outside by a raccoon.
What happens when things get out of hand or if you don’t have coping mechanisms?
Coping Strategies for Dealing with Stress and Anxiety: Why They Matter
While stress and anxiety historically were useful tools in keeping you alive, today, many people experience heightened levels of stress and anxiety in non-threatening situations. This can cause elevated resting cortisol levels, depression, mental health disorders, and compromised physical health, particularly immune health.
You can use stress and anxiety coping strategies to help you manage these emotions in your everyday life. These strategies can help you build tolerance to stressful situations and enable you to perform at your best mentally and physically.
For example:
If Margaret doesn’t develop coping skills to learn how to tolerate stressful situations in daily life, simple changes or disruptions like missing a flight, not reaching a deadline, or having the car break down can cause unnecessarily high distress and emotional impairment that disrupt daily function.
If Thomas doesn’t learn healthy stress and anxiety coping strategies, then when things get stressful at work or with his family, he might turn to harmful coping techniques like avoidance or substance abuse.
Different Stress and Anxiety Coping Strategies
We all have different ways of handling stress. Some people like to take comfort in quality family time or time spent with pets, while other people like to focus on hobbies.
When you are struggling with high stress or anxiety levels, you need positive coping mechanisms that help you pragmatically tackle problems and manage your emotional response to things outside of your control.
Problem Solving
The first set of coping strategies is more practical. This is a problem-centered approach where you focus on the causes of your stress and anxiety within your control.
You can’t control the death of a loved one, but you can control whether or not you stay in a job with an abusive workplace or whether you rely on drugs and alcohol to cope with anxiety.
The source of your stress or anxiety might be somewhat within your control. You might not be able to control financial strain, but you can learn how to budget and control your reaction to that stress.
Meditation
Meditation is a useful coping strategy for stressful situations. Elevated concentrations of cortisol are a natural reaction to high stress levels. However, elevated daily cortisol levels can have several harmful effects on your mental and physical well-being.
A meta-analysis reviewed cortisol or stress levels in several samples. This research concluded that there was a measurable change in cortisol levels using blood samples when individuals practice meditation, especially at-risk sample groups like those who are struggling with substance abuse or mental health disorders.
Yoga
Similar studies have concluded that yoga on its own was an effective antidepressant, lowering cortisol levels. Research has indicated that no level of experience with yoga is necessary to reap a significant decrease in cortisol levels and anxiety. Even those with no experience who participate in basic yoga poses on a regular basis are able to control stress levels and anxiety as well as alleviate depressive symptoms significantly more effectively than antidepressants.
Getting Professional Help
If you are still struggling with stress or anxiety and are interested in learning new coping skills, The Differents can provide co-occurring treatment that offers personalized coping strategies for dealing with stress and anxiety.
Our luxury drug rehab in Nevada provides partial hospitalization programs and intensive outpatient programs in Reno, both of which incorporate therapies like:
- Yoga
- Holistic treatment
- Outdoor therapy
- Massage
- Meditation
- Sound bath
- Energy work
- CBT
- EMDR
- IV Infusions
With a staff-to-client ratio of 1:3, we focus on cultivating creativity at our private addiction treatment center in Nevada, offering individuals stress and anxiety coping strategies in addition to a deeper understanding of the causes of these emotions.
Stress and anxiety are regular parts of life. If you are working on recovery for substance abuse or co-occurring mental health disorders, you have control over your stress levels and the impact anxiety has on emotional and physical health through coping methods.
Contact our team today to learn more about our services and how they can help your stress and anxiety levels.
