What are Coping Skills?
Coping skills have been shown to be effective in reducing anxiety and stress, while improving anger control. Coping skills for anxiety are strategies such as mindfulness, deep breathing, exercise and art that help you feel better when you are experiencing negative emotions. With coping skills training, our therapists teach children to relax at the first sign of the stress response and counter anxious thoughts with coping thoughts when faced with a challenging situation.
5 Powerful Coping Skills for Anxiety
The first step in coping skills training is teaching your child how to relax. The skills need to be practiced daily to over learn the relaxation techniques so that he can use them when he encounters stressful situations.
Relaxation skills involve the following five techniques:
- Deep Breathing. Breathing awareness and good deep breathing habits will enhance your child’s emotional and physical well-being.
- Progressive Relaxation.Progressive relaxation of muscles reduces pulse rate and blood pressure. Deep muscle relaxation, when used successfully can be used as an anti-anxiety pill.
- Relaxation Without Tension. As the name implies, this technique is similar to progressive muscle relaxation, but you take out the tension and just focus on relaxing the body.
- Cue-controlled relaxation. Cue controlled relaxation reduces the time your child needs to relax. The instructions help him to build an association between a cue and relaxation.
- Special-place Visualization. In order to overcome feelings of stress or unhappiness it is important to visualize a safe, relaxed space while refocusing the mind on positive, healing images..
Learn More Ways to Build Coping Skills for Anxiety
Our FUN brain-based aerial yoga classes are beneficial to the brain and body to support physical and emotional growth in ALL children. Our unique classes utilize evidence-based tools to teach social and emotional learning and mindfulness. I work on deep breathing, relaxation, and other techniques that build coping skills for anxiety in every class. Join us for an aerial yoga class or aerial yoga camp. Or read my book, Mindfulness for Children, it is full of evidence-based breathing methods. Need more help? Sign up for an initial assessment.