Best 5 Emotion-Focused Coping Techniques for Stress Relief

There are two main types of coping strategies for managing stress: those that are problem-focused and those that are emotion-focused. Generally speaking, the goal of problem-focused (or solution-focused) coping methods is to get rid of or work around the stressors themselves.

Emotionally oriented coping strategies, on the other hand, help you develop less of an emotional response to stress. They modify your perception of these events, which changes their influence on you.

Anxiety, fear, sadness, and rage are just some of the negative emotions that can be managed through emotion-focused coping strategies.2 When dealing with a stressful situation in which you feel helpless, it may be helpful to adopt this stance.

Solution-focused coping strategies are often considered by many to be the most effective means of dealing with stress. If we eliminate the sources of stress in our lives, we won't have to train ourselves to cope with pressure in the future.

However, eliminating all sources of stress from our lives is unrealistic. Some aspects of our work, relationships, and ways of living are just more likely to present difficulties than others. Even if we could, it would be counterproductive to our health to completely remove all sources of stress.

Benefits of Emotion-Focused Coping

One reason emotion-focused coping strategies can be helpful is that they allow us to alter our perception of stress in order to lessen its impact. Among the many advantages of emotional-centered coping are:

There's no need to hold out for comfort: By focusing on our feelings, we can get through tough times without worrying about altering external circumstances. It's possible for us to achieve peace with the circumstances we're in right now.

It helps alleviate long-term stress by doing the following: By allowing the body to recuperate from what may have been excessive stress, this can help reduce chronic stress.

New perspectives on lifelong stress and their implications for training in stress management. It can help us make better decisions by clearing our minds so that we can focus on the problem at hand and find answers that may have eluded us before because of our emotional state. Since people under stress don't always make the best decisions, concentrating on improving one's emotional state before tackling the situation at hand can be helpful.

Meditation

Focusing one's mind and heightening one's sensitivity are essential tenets of meditation. Brief periods of meditation have been demonstrated to increase emotional processing, among other psychological advantages.

Relaxing your body through meditation is another way to counteract the effects of stress. It's worth the time and effort to meditate since meditators respond to stress less strongly than the general population.

Journaling

Keeping a journal is one method for dealing with overwhelming feelings. As such, it can serve as a therapeutic means of releasing pent-up emotions. It can also help you come up with creative answers to challenges you're facing.

Keeping a journal also encourages the development of more upbeat emotions, which can reduce anxiety. As an added bonus, it's a terrific method for dealing with negative feelings and stress.

Reframing

Cognitive reframing is a method for altering one's interpretation of past experiences. If you're finding a certain situation particularly upsetting, for instance, trying to reframe it may help you see things in a new light.6

Reframing anxious thoughts involves doing the following.

Keep track of your mind: When you pay closer attention to your thoughts, you can see how they shape your feelings.

Don't take negative beliefs at face value; instead, aggressively dispute them. What do you think? Can the issue be viewed from different angles? 

Change your mind about the negative: When you catch yourself thinking negatively, intentionally switch to a more constructive thought. 

The ability to change one's perspective on a situation is sometimes the deciding factor in whether or not confronting it causes undue stress.

Instead than "tricking yourself out of being stressed" or trying to ignore the reality of the situation, reframing strategies focus on finding positive outcomes and alternate viewpoints.

Cognitive Distortions

Cognitive distortions are illogical ways of thinking that can heighten anxiety, hinder good judgment, and foster pessimism.7 Emotional reasoning is one such cognitive distortion that leads people to infer meaning from their emotions rather than data. This might lead to unreasonable behavior, making it harder to find solutions to problems.

In order to break these patterns, we must first become aware of how the mind influences what we see, including the stories we tell ourselves about our experiences and the ways in which we may unwittingly contribute to our own issues.

You can learn to detect and understand when people (and yourself) are engaging in common cognitive distortions if you familiarize yourself with these patterns.

Positive Thinking

There are some lenses through which an optimist must view the world in order to optimize their agency and awareness of their choices. Both of these can lessen your perception of stress and give you a sense of control over situations that could otherwise feel overwhelming.

Keeping a positive outlook might help you deal with the pressures of daily life. When you have a more optimistic view of the situation, you're less likely to let your emotions get the best of you and make rash judgments out of panic.