Coping Skills to Increase Emotional Awareness
You can use a number of coping skills to monitor your emotions and increase your emotional awareness, including:
Expressive writing Seeking out social support Self-soothing Deep breathing
You’re probably using one or more of these. But not every coping skill is effective in every situation. So how do you know if the skills you’re using are actually working in situations where you need to get strong emotions under control? One of the emotional awareness exercises you can use appears below.
Create an Emotion-Monitoring Worksheet
Here’s how: Now, compare the strength of your emotion in column 5 to its strength in column 7. Did its strength change? If so, was it less strong, the same, or stronger? These results will show you how well your coping skill worked in this particular situation. You can use this worksheet over and over to monitor your emotions and test how well your coping skills work when strong emotions arise.
Tips for Doing This Exercise
It’s important to be as descriptive as possible. The more information you record, the more clues you’ll have to figure out which coping skill works best for you in which emotionally stressful situation. Don’t be concerned if you notice that the strength of your emotion doesn’t change right away. Give yourself time to see results. It can help to repeat the same exercise every time you face a similar emotional situation. After a number of “tries,” you should start to feel more confident about your coping skills. What if you find that a certain coping skill doesn’t work for a certain emotion in a certain situation? Don’t be discouraged: That’s a learning experience, too. Try another coping skill the next time a similar emotional situation threatens to get out of control (be sure to record it on your worksheet). Over time, you’ll come to know how to manage strong emotions in many different situations.
