Learning how to cope with your emotions well is one of the secrets of a truly happy life! In this article, you will learn 3 simple coping strategies for your emotions to feel better in the moment – and overall!
Learning How to Cope with Emotions is Part of a Happy Life
Emotions – even if they’re uncomfortable – are a part of being alive. When you fully accept this truth, it becomes much easier to cope with them.
However, one of the biggest barriers to coping well is your feelings about your feelings!
Commonly, feelings like anger, fear, insecurity, sadness and loneliness are judged. This is understandable yet only makes you feel worse and struggle to cope in healthy ways.
#1 Way to Cope Well with Your Emotions: Accept All Your Emotions are Ok
To cope well, you must first accept the truth you will experience a wide range of emotions as a human being. Because you are alive, you will experience both comfortable and uncomfortable emotions which include anger, insecurity, resentment and sadness. While it’s understandable we want to avoid uncomfortable emotions, it’s not possible.
Related: 4 Practical Tips to Learn How to Be Nice to Yourself
Accepting your emotions allows you to cope with your emotions. After all, your feelings about your feelings often make uncomfortable situations worse. For instance, if you don’t “want” to be mad at your friend so you ignore your anger, you may end up resenting them to the point that you feel you must end the relationship. On the other hand, if you accept your anger, you can then figure out how to process it – and what to communicate.
Giving Yourself Grace
Letting go of self-judgment for your emotions is a practice but it’s worth it.
Related: What is Self-Compassion?
Accepting your emotions involves giving yourself grace or being self-compassionate. When you are self-compassionate, you speak kindly to yourself. And you acknowledge that even if you’re uncomfortable, or learned certain emotions aren’t “ok,” it’s understandable to feel whatever you feel.
If You Suppress Emotions, They Get Worse
Sadly, many of us learned that it’s not ok to experience certain emotions growing up (or any emotions for some). This has naturally led to an epidemic of people who cope with their emotions by numbing them, suppressing them or denying them. Yet one of the truest things of human psychology is that what we “resist persists” (commonly attributed to Carl Jung).
This means that when we avoid feeling our emotions they linger around – and often intensify. Many people have experienced trying to suppress anger with someone and yet despite these intentions they find themselves snapping or yelling at the person over something completely unrelated.
The first step to coping well is accepting any and all feelings you may have. They don’t make you “good” or “bad” – just human!
#2 Way to Cope Well with Your Emotions: Being Mindful of What You Feel
The next step to coping well with your emotions is learning to truly feel them. As stated before, many people numb their emotions, in part, due to discomfort and self-judgment. Therefore, coping well involves letting yourself feel the physical aspects of your emotions.
All emotions have corresponding physical sensations such as butterflies in your stomach when you feel anxious or heart ache when you’re sad. Noticing these sensations enables you to feel what you’re feeling in a balanced way. You don’t suppress your feelings making things worse or intensify them such as listening to depressing music when you’re sad.
This skill of feeling your emotions physically with simple awareness is called, Ride the Wave, in Dialectical Behavior Therapy.
Being Aware of How You Literally Feel
When you notice an emotion, practice being mindful of it. Mindfulness means putting your full attention on it without judging it as “good” or “bad.” Rather simply note your physical sensations with curiosity and an open mind. If you’re angry, for example, notice where you feel these sensations. Perhaps your jaw has tightened or you feel hot. Just notice this.
You cannot practice mindfulness incorrectly. Any time you shift from awareness of your sensations to judgment, anxieties, obsessive thoughts, or ruminating on the past you simply come back to the sensation. It’s ok if you want to resist feeling just keep going back to being mindful of your sensations anyway.
This practice of feeling your emotions helps you slow down when you feel intense emotions rather than being reactive and out of control.
#3 Way to Cope with Your Emotions: Soothe Yourself
By being mindful of your feelings and sensations, you are slowing yourself down. Most of the time when we cope poorly to our emotions it’s because we react impulsively or unconsciously.
Many of us have developed coping strategies that unfortunately make us feel worse such as excessive scrolling or overeating junk food. These urges are human and not the problem. Instead you learn to cope well with emotions by slowing yourself down with acceptance and mindfulness. Then you are empowered to make new choices. These choices to cope now can be truly soothing things which nourish you rather than hurt you (or others).
Being a Kind Parent to Yourself
Sometimes, when we cope poorly we neglect or abandon ourselves i.e., not getting enough sleep or water because we’re overwhelmed in life.
Related: Is Self Care Important? 4 Reasons Why it Is
Instead when you cope well, you act as an Inner Loving Parent to yourself. This concept comes from Internal Family Systems (a type of therapy). Here you do kind things when you feel emotional to cope well. Of course, this includes accepting your emotions and providing yourself understanding. You can self-validate which means expressing understanding for your emotions. For example, “It makes sense I’m angry with my partner. They broke a promise to me.” You do this instead of judging yourself or ignoring your emotions.
Next, you do truly comforting things for yourself in the face of intense emotions which is called self-soothing.
Self-Soothing Strategies
Self-soothing is really any activity or practice that helps you feel better – without making a situation worse. For instance, if you feel like overeating junk food, your Inner Loving Parent will guide you to take a nap or a walk instead. Or if you feel like screaming at someone, you may choose to do an intense workout or journal an angry letter instead.
The goal for coping well with emotions is to develop a sort of toolbox for all the things you know soothe you. Also, different emotions may require different ways of being soothed. Sadness may require you cry and then watch a funny movie. Whereas insecurity may require a meditation and anger requires exercise. These are just examples because what truly soothes you may differ from someone else.
You Can Cope Well with Your Emotions
When you discover you are capable of coping well with your emotions rather than needing to numb them or feeling compelled to intensify them, you are liberated and empowered.
It builds a great deal of authentic confidence to realize you – not your emotions – are in the seat of power. This is a practice but you have an opportunity to cultivate these confidence building coping skills most days as feeling emotions is a natural part of being alive.
For more assistance, further reading is recommended here:
- Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself by Kristin Neff, PhD (Related blog post: What is self-compassion?)
- Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha by Tara Brach, PhD
- Love Yourself, Heal Your Life Workbook by Louise Hay
- Wherever You Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn
- The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle
- The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative by Florence Williams
- The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Workbook: Practical DBT Exercises for Learning Mindfulness, Interpersonal Effectiveness, Emotion Regulation and Distress Tolerance by Matthew McKay PhD, Jeffrey C. Wood PsyD, and Jeffrey Brantley MD
- Mindfulness Journal for Mental Health: Prompts and Practices to Improve Your Wellbeing by Elizabeth Cronin
- The Inner Child Workbook: What to Do with Your Past when it Just Won’t Go Away by Cathryn L. Taylor
Note: Some book links on this site may be affiliate links. I only share books I genuinely reference and find valuable for understanding and integrating healing concepts.
At Confidently Authentic, we are committed to genuine human connection. These articles are always written by a human being.
