Key Coping Skills For Your Recovery

What are coping mechanisms?

Coping mechanisms are strategies to manage emotions thoughts and behaviours, and are used if psychological distress is experienced. In the case of addiction – cravings, urges and negative emotions can cause enormous stress, which can jeopardise a healthy recovery process. The use of positive coping mechanisms is a powerful way to deal with stressful situations and challenges when going through your recovery.

There are positive coping mechanisms which are an effective method to improve overall mental health and help to maintain sobriety, however, there are also negative coping mechanisms which aren’t effective in recovery and can also cause negative consequences.

Healthy coping mechanisms are referred to as adaptive coping skills, whereby maladaptive coping skills are considered a negative way to manage stress.

Coping skills to prevent relapse

Addiction is complex condition that can include elements of neurological dysfunction, impacting psychological and social aspects of a person’s life. Many psychological factors are involved in relapsing and also preventing that from happening. Many research studies explored which factors can be associated with effectively preventing relapse and identified coping skills as a powerful example.

Recognising difficult situations and negative patterns of coping can help make changes in challenging situations by applying new effective ways of coping. Everyone is different and everyone’s recovery includes different psychological elements. Finding the right coping skills for your unique recovery helps to make a big difference in maintaining sobriety.

Examples of coping strategies

Healthy coping mechanisms include:

• Connection and Community: One of the most important strategies to cope with stress includes asking for help and using your support network. Talking to friends and family about your experience within recovery is a powerful way to reduce stress levels and also cravings.
• Physical activity: Regular exercise was found to naturally decrease stress levels and can help you to improve your general well-being. It doesn’t matter which type of exercise you chose, getting physical in moderation helps to cope with addictive behaviours.
• Relaxation: There are various ways to reduce stress by using relaxation techniques. Meditation and mindfulness have shown to be very effective coping skills, whereby listening to music or breathing techniques are also good ways to deal with negative emotions.

Unhealthy coping mechanisms include:

• Escape: Often people struggling with addiction, try to escape their stressful experiences. Spending most of the day sleeping is a common example of escaping stressful situations and fears.
• Avoiding the problem: Ignoring the problem and trying to avoid it is one of the most common defence mechanisms. This can also be called anxious avoidance, whereby the fear of the problem becomes bigger and bigger and results in increased stress levels which negatively affects your recovery.
• Engaging in unhealthy behaviours: Behaviours such as drinking, using substances or compulsive spending are seen as unhealthy behaviours to release stress. These behaviours result in negative consequences in the short and long term.

How can Right at Home support your recovery?

The highly skilled Addiction Support team of Right at Home Central London aims to improve everyone’s individual recovery journey. Our Recovery Support Workers are trained to identify unhealthy coping mechanisms and support each client to find new healthy coping strategies to improve their overall well-being.

It can be difficult to manage so many different aspects of maintaining sobriety alone. However, Right at Home provides the unique opportunity to work collaboratively on solutions and teach coping strategies, which can be used if more stressful situations arise in the future. Our aim is for you to have the coping strategies that let you stay independent in the long-term without the need for our help.

Right at Home Central London’s Addiction Support Service is the ideal solution for anyone who wants to become more independent and find new and healthy ways to cope with substance abuse problems.

Learn more about our Addiction Recovery Support Service here