Hello readers it’s another beautiful day in the new year and before I begin, I would like to wish you a Happy New Year. I pray that as we keep increasing in knowledge this year, we will see God’s goodness. January is a month of new beginnings and with new beginnings come new stressors from every aspect of our lives; academic, work, relationships, family, religious etc. In today’s blog I will be writing on the topic of stress and coping with emphasis on coping strategies.
Stress is an anxious or threatening feeling that comes with interpreting or appraising a situation as being more than what our psychological or physical resources can adequately handle. Stressors are situations that pose this threat to us. The stressors may have a relatively direct relationship to us (proximal stressors) such as career choices, academic hassles, death, or any major life transition, or they may be indirect (distal), for example economic conditions, social policies etc.
In our day to day lives, whenever we are questioned on the state of our being we usually tend to say “Oh, things are fine” but on certain rare occasions when the issues of life start to overwhelm us, or when we are stressed, we may sometimes say “… I’m coping.” In order not to sound burdened. As we go further in the blog, we will be unpacking what it truly means to cope (from a psychological standpoint).
Coping according to Lazarus and Folkman (two Psychologists who propounded the theory of stress and coping) is referred to a person’s efforts to manage demands that are appraised as taxing or beyond their resources. Appraisal is just a fancy word used for how we interpret or understand an event or situation, therefore the appraisal of a particular situation is subjective to the individual experiencing it. In other words coping is the manner in which we handle or try to deal with stress.
There are over 300 coping strategies that have been identified by scholars and researchers but they can be categorized into 2 different types of coping; Emotion- focused coping and Problem focused coping. Let’s jump right in shall we…
Emotion focused coping, this is believed to be the first type of coping we engage in when we face a stressful situation. It is when we do things to primarily deal with our emotional. Behaviours such as seeking support, sympathy, crying or even denying and avoiding the situation are forms of emotion-focused coping.
Problem focused coping is the second type of coping and this happens when we try to decrease stress by beginning to seek solutions to the problem. This could either come in the form of seeking information, taking an action or even changing your own behaviour.
Now, it is prudent to know that the type of coping strategy a person chooses partly on the situation and partly on the individual’s personality. Certain individuals may not even adopt emotion focused coping before moving on to the next. The personality factor that influences a person’s choice of coping strategy is how much control he or she believes to have over the situation. An individual who appraises the situation as under or within their control would most likely adopt the problem focused coping strategy, unlike an individual who sees the situation as beyond their control. Individuals who appraise a situation as being out of their control would first use emotion focused coping to help them get rid of any negative emotion such as anger, frustration, sadness or even jealousy. Once all emotions are settled problem-focused coping is used to help solve the problem. For example, women are more prone to use emotion-focused coping to help deal with stress while men would usually go straight for problem focused coping in order to solve the problem.
While emotion focused coping is very useful in the moment it is a very short-term solution. Although you may tend to feel emotionally sound, the issue or the cause of the stress would not go away until problem-focused coping is adopted to solve the issue and it has a long-term effect.
Let’s consider this scenario; a husband and wife, married for 5 years lose their child. The wife will most likely stay in grief much longer than the husband would, not because the husband does not care about the death of the child but biologically and psychologically men are more prone to adopt problem focused strategies faster than women. In this case the husband may want to start funeral plans to bury the child (taking steps to decrease stress) while the wife may still be in denial (first stage of the grief process).
These forms of coping strategies help to make the individual psychologically sound and able to function. In the coming months dear reader, we have to be more intentional about how we handle stressful situations. In my opinion, both strategies are needed in order to carefully eliminate a stressful situation and all the negative emotions that come with it.
Till I come to your screens again, this has been Olive’s Corner.
Olives Corner 