Your coping skills are your ability to handle life's challenges in the most effective ways, maximizing your chances of success or survival, and minimizing the damages and other negative consequences.

There is a virtually unlimited spectrum of difficult, or even potentially devastating, situations that life could hit you with, sooner or later. It may be a serious illness or chronic pain, an abusive relationship, divorce, big financial loss, burnout, business or career failure, a child with ADHD or autism, and so on. It could be a one time blow, like a loss of loved one, or it could be something that stays a big challenge for many years, even for life, without giving you much of break.
Will you be lost and destroyed under stress or will you have strong enough coping skills to stay in control and do the best that can be done? Will you have the resiliency to come out stronger than you ever were?

While some of the coping skills and strategies (or rather tactics) are specific to the type of challenges you are facing, the most important of those skills are fairly universal. Your ability to cope well and stay in control depends most on your strengths in the following two areas:
your actions, your emotions. Fortunately, there are certain skills and coping strategies you can build or improve that could make you much stronger in each of those areas.


Your actions
Nearly in every challenging situation there is a number of specific actions you could do to reach a successful resolution or to ease the pain and minimize damages. Your effectiveness in that will mainly be determined by your thinking skills and abilities. For example, if there is no reasonable alternative in sight then you need to unlock your creativity to think laterally and brainstorm some options. If there are too many options and difficult trade-offs then you need your judgment and your decision making skills to select the best course of action. Finally, you most likely have only limited time and resources to realize that course. Hence you depend on good planning and time management skills to develop and execute a good plan.

Maybe you were content with your level of such thinking and coping skills in quiet times. But now there is a complication. When faced with outstanding challenges you are often in situations of high emotional arousal, under stress. And, as you may have already realized, high emotional arousal can significantly distort our thinking, and very often not to our advantage. How do you deal with that?

A good line of defense is to learn and use more systematic thinking strategies. Think on paper, as much as possible. Learn to think on paper ("paper" could be a text file on your computer). Instead of agonizing or letting your mind race, take a deep breath and jot down your main thoughts. Brainstorm on paper. Follow a sequence of systematic decision making steps, on paper. Go as far as you can with that (even if your switch to pure intuition in the end). The more you practice that, the more robust and uncluttered your thinking will be.
Finally, for situations when you need to make quick decisions on the fly, your intuition is probably your best guide, if you learn to tell apart its voice from the noises of the stressful moments (You can strengthen this ability in the course of working on your emotional intelligence skills).


Your Emotions: Understanding how to adequately handle your emotions, your emotional intelligence, is an absolutely critical aspect of coping skills.
Emotions are essentially messages from your inner brain to your consciousness. Those messages use a different language than your thoughts, the language of physical sensations in your body. That language is more powerful, direct, and efficient than thoughts in communicating certain types of information that are critical for your survival.

Your emotions can carry valuable clues for finding solutions and navigating through the most difficult problems you may face, if you learn to read them properly. However, like any concentrated power, emotions can turn highly destructive if mishandled.

There are two main ways how your emotions can work as destructive power against you.
First, they can cloud or totally block your thinking, decision making, and creative abilities. Those abilities that you may need most to resolve the threatening situation. They can paralyze your actions. Instead of being keenly aware of your emotions of the moment and accepting them as nothing more as messengers you could fall into the trap of letting them overwhelm you and take full control of your thoughts and actions.

The second destructive force, which is a longer-term effect, comes from emotions that were somehow suppressed, that were not accepted, felt fully in your body or released. Those emotions pile up with time, like unhandled mail, somewhere in the background, underneath your mind. They become toxic waste that keeps draining your energy, narrows your thinking, makes you apathic or drives you to self-destruction. That emotional baggage can hold you back in life and take a heavy toll on your health.

How do you prevent your emotions from turning into your enemy? One of the main strategies is to work on developing your emotional intelligence. Your level of emotional intelligence is not something you are just born with. You can systematically build it, but it takes some time and work.

The first necessary step on that path is gaining a good knowledge base on that topic, mainly through reading. In the process, you can use your growing base for identifying and critically reassessing your beliefs about emotions and your relationship with them. There is much more to it than may seem on the surface.

To survive well and stay healthy in the longer term, you also need a good way to regularly release your accumulated baggage of suppressed or unexpressed emotions. This is an essential component of your coping skills. There is a number of ways to do thid. For some people it is journaling, when you use writing to let out your feelings. For some it is prayer or meditation. There are also special techniques, such as the Sedona Method. Like for other coping skills, you need to work out what works best for you, through trial and observation. Growing your emotional intelligence will help you on that front as well.

Source taken from: http://www.time-management-guide.com/coping-skills.html

1. Starting the day without an action plan.
The most important thing in time management is doing things right and not doing it fast.
The latter just results in not achieving anything. It is best to have a specific goal for the day.
What do you want to accomplish? How will you go about accomplishing those things?
Begin doing when the day begins so you can attain your tasks by the end of the day.

2. No stability in life.
It is said that life is comprised of seven important areas.
These are family, health, intellectual, financial, professional, social and spiritual.
As a student, you cannot spend equal amounts of time to all these things.
There may be some areas where you need to focus more on a certain day and other areas for a different day.
All these areas are related to each other.
One cannot work properly without being dependent on some.
That is why you need to balance your time in these different areas to be more stable and at peace.
It may seem difficult initially to adjust your time in all the areas of your life.
But you can attend to all areas if you plan your time properly.

3. Untidy and chaotic study area.
Ever noticed that when there are a lot of things around you, you get distracted easily?
Not only you lose your concentration and your mind starts drifting away from work, you lose the enthusiasm and feel sad about studying.
Compare this to a clean and arranged area. You will not feel buried among the mess and you can focus on the task at hand.
This is the same reason that office workers are effective.
You do not see any mess lying around their work station much.
They maintain a clean and cluster free environment so it will be easy to move around without any distractions.
This same principle should be applied to your study area.

4. Not enough sleep.
According to studies, almost 75% of most students are constantly complaining of being tired easily.
Some even get tired even before the day is finished.
It is not that they lack any sleep.
A few are even disciplined enough to get the 8-10 hours sleep that is needed.
What is lacking in them is quantity and quality sleep.

5. Procrastination
Students tend to procrastinate their work.
One example: Students tend to wait for the “right” mood or the “right” time to tackle the important task at hand.
This is downright a waste of time, it is just an exuse for that they are yearning to procrastinate.
However, the big task isn't going to go away – truly important tasks rarely do.
Furthermore, in the end, they have to rush through their work at the eleventh hour.

Rushing through homeworks

Poor quality of work

Burning midnight oil

No time for yourself and your family.

Affecting your studies

Time management tip 1: Learn to say No
Some people engage in so many activities and overload themselves that they wind up not enjoying them as much and feeling overburdened by them.
Because of guilt, concern for what others think of us, or a real desire to engage in that activity, we have a hard time saying ‘no’.
In this case, finding out where we will be able to get the most value is important.
We should focus on tasks that fulfill this principle first before moving on to the next, less rewarding activity.

Time management tip 2: Prioritizing
– You know what is the most important task to complete from the "to do" list you made.
Try to prioritize the activities you want to achieve.
Similar to daily "to-do" list, you can also make a list of goals you want to achieve in life.
Put your most important goal in life on top of your priority and your least important goals to down below on the list.
Now, adjust your planner so that your activities match with your goals.
It is also important that you should be realistic on your list, try to base your list on what you need to achieve and not on what you want to achieve.
If you have a long-term priority, it is probably best that you put it on the bottom of your list; you can always work on that tomorrow.

Time management tip 3: Evaluate tasks once
Many of us open our mail, read through it, and set it aside to act on later.
For example, if you receive a questionnaire from some graduate student doing research on stress, your usual tendency is to put the questionnaire aside and fill it out later.
However, that is a waste of time.
If you pick it up later, you will have to, once again, familiarize yourself with the task.
As much as possible, look things over only once.
That means, when you first pick it up, be prepared to complete working on it then.

Time management tip 4: Delegate, delegate
When possible, get others to do those things that need to be done, but that do not need your personal attention.
Conversely, avoid taking on chores that others try to delegate to you.
A word of caution: this advice does not mean that you use other people to do work you should be doing, or that you do not help out others when they ask.
You should just be more discriminating regarding delegation of activities.
Do not hesitate to seek help when you are short on time and overloaded.
Help others only when they really need it and you have the time available.

Time management tip 5: Make a schedule
Allot enough time to do each task on your priority list, according to importance.
If a certain activity needs to be done at a certain time frame, then list it first on your schedule and work the less important tasks around it.
Make sure you stick to this schedule you created.

Time management tip 6:Set goals everyday
– Before you sleep, list down all the things you want to accomplish on the next day.
This will help you to know what you are going to do and avoid doing unimportant tasks.
With a “to do” list, you will get everything done more efficiently and faster.

Time Management tip 7:Use your spare time
– You may not notice it but you have lots of spare time as a high school student.
Try to add up the minutes of the school bus ride to school and the school bus ride back home.
You can use these times to study and do your homework.
By doing this, you will get an idea on what you need to do on your homework when you get home.
This allows you to finish your homework faster and have extra time for other things.

Time Management tip 8: Finding the right time
– Students have the “right time” to study. Students have specific time to study more efficiently.
For example, you solved your math problems well on afternoons; do not wait until nighttime to it, then.
When your mood shifts immediately start solving math problems as much as you can before you lose interest.

Time Management tip 9:Taking notes
– Writing down important notes is an effective way to study.
It is much better than just plain reading.
Writing down notes has an effect on your mind.
You can understand the topic more effectively and memorize it more effectively than by just reading.

Time Management tip 10:Get enough sleep
– Trying to stress yourself out studying when you are supposed to be sleeping can bring ineffective results and unwelcome health problems.
If you need to sleep you have to sleep, do not force yourself to study if you cannot effectively study.
If you try to study in this situation, you will most likely waste your time.

Time Management tip 11:Get it over!
If you are putting something off because you just don't want to do it, and you really can't delegate the work to someone else, you need to find ways of motivating yourself to get moving. The following approaches can be helpful here:

Make up your own rewards. For example, promise yourself a piece of tasty flapjack at lunchtime if you've completed a certain task.

Ask someone else to check up on you. Peer pressure works! This is the principle behind slimming and other self-help groups, and it is widely recognized as a highly effective approach.

Identify the unpleasant consequences of NOT doing the task such as the punishment of not doing homework, etc.
Though, if you find the project overwhelming, this may be helpful:

Break the project into a set of smaller, more manageable tasks. You may find it helpful to create an action plan.

Start with some quick, small tasks if you can, even if these aren't the logical first actions. You'll feel that you're achieving things, and so perhaps the whole project won't be so overwhelming after all.
In this way, you may not find it that overwhelming. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Above tips should assist you in improving your time management skills and make your journey through school life more enjoyable. Keep faith in yourself and your abilities to meet your goals.

survey!

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