Reactive and Proactive Coping
Building resilience while taking care of yourself
Resilience is in high demand and low supply these days. Between the rising cost of living, the attacks on marginalized groups worldwide, and constant bad news, we often have very little bandwidth left to handle personal problems. Feeling overwhelmed and struggling to hold on to radical hope is absolutely normal in these conditions.
A common misunderstanding about resilient people is that they are unshakeable, impervious to the stress and anxiety of difficult situations. In reality, resilience has more to do with one’s ability to bounce back in the face of adversity. Furthermore, resilience is not something people are born with — it is learned and strengthened over time in much the same way muscles are strengthened through exercise.
This is, of course, where coping strategies come in. Coping strategies or skills can help you manage stress, difficult emotions, and tough circumstances. Hence, coping can be solution-focused but can also support you in dealing with emotions and feelings. Coping strategies can be divided into two broad categories: reactive coping and proactive coping.
What is reactive coping?
The common understanding of coping strategies is that we apply them after a negative event to remedy the consequences. This is reactive coping, which helps you manage a stressor after it occurs. For example, after a particularly bad breakup, you may watch a comforting movie, eat some ice cream, or channel your rage into angsty poetry.
These strategies can help you process your feelings and ride the waves of emotional turmoil until they subside. As such, reactive coping can include both distractions and practical responses to stress. For instance, if you are experiencing test anxiety the night before an important exam, watching YouTube video essays to distract yourself from the anxiety and deep breathing to directly address the stress are both reactive coping strategies.
What is proactive coping?
While reactive coping helps manage stressors after they happen, proactive coping mitigates future stress and reduces the likelihood of situations becoming overwhelming. For instance, if you are prone to anxiety attacks, you may preemptively create a habit of taking a 15-minute walk each day. Proactive coping can even involve building your social circle to strengthen social bonds, making it easier to reach out for support when you are struggling.
Resilience, the ability to bounce back during challenging times, can develop through proactive coping. If you imagine yourself as a bathtub with your stress level indicated by how much water is in the tub, proactive coping strategies are like an open drain, consistently emptying water out of the tub. In other words, your capacity to take on stress will likely increase if you engage in proactive coping because those strategies help you regulate your stress each day, not just when you are already overwhelmed.
Coping considerations
Figuring out when to use different coping strategies can be tricky and takes practice. Reactive strategies may work best in moments of high emotion or extreme stress, when proactive strategies aren’t enough. To continue the bathtub metaphor, if the tub’s water level is high, you will likely need more than the drain to keep the tub from overflowing. You may need an empty cup to manually take water out of the tub.
Conversely, proactive strategies work well when they are part of your daily routine, regardless of your current stress level. They may also be more helpful for coping with chronic stressors. Under chronic stress, your tub will keep filling with water each day. Without a drain, you can only rely on manually emptying water using the cup — reactive coping — which is likely stressful and exhausting in and of itself. So, integrating proactive coping into your day-to-day life can also mitigate the stress and exhaustion that come with having to reactively cope.
Understandably, adding proactive coping skills to your routine can be overwhelming at first. Instituting too much change at once — taking up meditation, a new hobby, and journaling every day, for example — can introduce undue stress. Thus, it can be helpful to start by doing small habits daily — going outside, texting a friend, or doing a bit of yoga or exercise — and build from there.
Coping strategies, whether reactive or proactive, can help you continue to survive and thrive every day. However, coping skills on their own aren’t always enough, especially if stressors are chronic and unchanging. These stressors can include, but are not limited to, job insecurity, chronic illness, living in an unsafe environment, or being politically targeted and discriminated against.
I would be honoured to sit with you through life as we know it and support you in working toward what life could be. You can fill out the contact form here to book a free 15-minute consultation and learn more about the therapy process.
