TL;DR: A previously-solid coping skill can stop working when the skill wears out, when life’s demands outpace or outweigh the skill, or when the skill has been masking a bigger problem. This post walks through each reason, and how to tell whether it’s time to reach out for more support. Please note, if you’re in crisis and need someone to speak with quickly, you can dial 988.
Maybe you’ve experienced this before: you learned of some coping skill on TherapyTok to help your anxiety go back down, let’s say box-breathing (where you inhale for 4 seconds, hold for 4, exhale for 4, and hold again for four more seconds- then repeat). For a while, that shit worked. You’d be in the middle of a work project when you’d feel your heart start to pound and your shoulders tense up. Recognizing this as anxiety, you’d set your status to Away, let Docs autosave your work, and close your eyes. You’d envision a box and trace its edges with your mind’s eye as you inhaled, paused, and exhaled with intention, and notice your heart rate start returning to baseline.
But lately, the anxiety has persisted. Maybe more negative thoughts are creeping in, or a stronger sense of doom. You close your eyes and picture your box and inhale/exhale your 4s and… nothing. Your heart is still racing, and you’re pretty sure if this keeps up, your shoulders will have fully turned to stone by the end of the week.
Coping skills can become less effective for many reasons, and none of them mean that you just suck at coping. For many people, especially you high-achieving badasses who are accustomed to getting shit done and eating dinner whenever (if ever), it can feel like abject failure to find that your go-to stress management technique seems to have stopped working. As much as your inner critic might argue this “you’re just a failure” case, she’s wrong!
Invite your inner critic to ride shotgun and listen along for a few minutes, while we check out a few of the more common reasons a coping skill loses its effectiveness: the skill simply wore out; life stressors outgrew the skill; or the skill was masking a bigger problem.
While it can be easy to rely on a single coping skill- especially when we find it very helpful- that reliance can make the skill less powerful over time. One skill to rule them all (all the feelings, that is) sounds great in theory, and it’s tempting to leave it at that. But if your toolkit consists mostly of one initially very useful coping skill that was working but isn’t working as well now, that may be part of the problem. Coping skills don’t require dopamine sparkles to be helpful, but a little excitement about a new skill just feels good. It can be very exciting to have found a way to help yourself manage emotions well, and once that novelty wears off a bit, it might feel like it’s not doing as much to help shift your mood.
The biggest way to help yourself in this position is the probably-obvious choice: add one or two new skills to the toolbox.
Coping skills can lose their edge when life’s demands start to overpower the strains your coping skills were meant to handle. This happens when our stressors compound, either in number or intensity (or both). If your box breathing was great at helping you manage stop-and-go traffic stress or presentation-prep anxiety, you might find it doesn’t hold up as well when life adds new family dynamics, illnesses, caretaking for others, old injuries flaring up, appliances giving out, etc.
Chronically stressful or even abusive environments are also no cakewalk for run of the mill coping skills. You can’t box-breathe your way out of corporate consolidation and being expected to hold down five departments on your one salary, or ‘count to ten’ your way out of financial and emotional abuse of a partner. Sometimes when coping skills break down, it’s simply because the circumstances have gone beyond what any one individual can do. Our emotions serve purposes, and I’m not going to sit here and tell you that you can out-cope or breathe away the stresses of late stage capitalism or white nationalist patriarchy.
Coping skills will be just one part of a multifaceted approach for managing big stuff.
Creating support plans, community, reaching out for help and support – those are the bigger pieces needed for navigating life-pileups.
Sometimes a coping skill can work so well in the moment that we end up disregarding a bigger problem or underlying pattern. The skill can do us a favor in the present, like making immediate anxiety symptoms go down. But if we let that relief keep us from looking more closely at a toxic relationship or setting boundaries we need for our own sanity… the coping skill will only get us so far.
If it seems like your coping skills just aren’t cutting it anymore, therapy may help you address the underlying issues that keep your stress running. Some possible signs that therapy could help:
When your TherapyTok coping skills are struggling, therapy can help. Let’s dig in to clarify what the underlying problems are that contribute to your symptoms, and make a game plan to identify what negative beliefs are driving the bus. We can get you back in the driver’s seat of your life, and let the inner critic take a break for once. We’ll add a few more coping skills to the mix along the way, and in the meantime, hey- you’ve always got box breathing.
If you need immediate help, you can dial 988 for support.
Holly Scott, LPE-I, LPC, SEP is a licensed therapist with over 15 years of experience supporting clients in and around Little Rock, Arkansas. She specializes in helping anxious neurodivergent millennials walking the line of ADHD/AuDHD, anxiety, and mild OCD, often with a dash of childhood trauma thrown in. She uses evidence-based approaches like EMDR and hypnosis to help clients slow their overthinking/shame spirals and start enjoying life. As the solo therapist at Therapy with Holly, Holly is committed to providing compassionate, expert care both in-person and online for clients across Arkansas.