We were physically, emotionally, and spiritually giving everything we had. When I was volunteering in Argentina for 18 months, we had a situation where we had been working hard to help people, really pouring our souls out to try to help people improve their lives. Coping skills are techniques you can use to get out of your emotional brain and back into your rational brain so you can think clearly again. In this post, you’ll learn about coping skills. Our brain and emotions are incredible, powerful, wonderful things, but sometimes emotions make us act kinda stupid. We need a way to slow things down and think clearly so we can make better choices that help us move through uncomfortable situations instead of just reacting to them. In these circumstances, allowing the brain to regress into survival mode is not the best strategy. We may shut down when getting a bad grade on a school assignment or when we get rejected by our crush. Our brain may enter survival mode when getting feedback from our boss at work or when we have to talk to a big group of people. Today we experience all these same emotions when things get intense, but the circumstances they happen in are quite different. It doesn’t want complex thinking to get in the way of survival.Įxamples of this for our ancestors could have been needing to run from a tiger or eat something high in calories so they didn’t starve to death or falling in love so they could reproduce. The rational part of your brain shuts down when it perceives a threat. Do you ever feel like your brain falls out when you’re emotional? Do you act stupid when infatuated or make bad decisions when scared, or angry?Īnd there’s a good reason for that.

Coping skills for anxiety