Welcome to the Very Well Mind podcast. We've interviewed over 100 authors, experts, entrepreneurs, athletes, musicians, and others to help you learn strategies to care for your mental health.

This episode is hosted by psychotherapist and bestselling author Amy Morin. Now let's get into the episode.

Okay. You're listening to the Friday fix. Every Friday, I share a quick mental strength strategy that will help fix the thoughts, feelings, and actions that can hold you back in life.

Today I'm talking about the coping skills that can help you deal with uncomfortable feelings. Our emotions affect us all day

every day. The decisions you make, the conversations you have, the thoughts you think, and the

things you do are all affected by your feelings. Yet strangely, most of us were never taught much, if anything, about

how to cope with feelings. We weren't taught how to identify our feelings, how to tolerate

them, or how to change them. Fortunately, though, you're never too old to learn. And today we're

going to talk about how to cope with uncomfortable emotions. The goal, though, isn't to make

uncomfortable of feelings go away altogether. Instead, we're going to talk about how to take the

edge off them enough that you can think clearly. Because uncomfortable emotions are really intense,

and they can sometimes last a really long time. And that makes it hard to make healthy decisions for ourselves.

We spend a lot of our lives running from uncomfortable feelings. In fact, we'll often do just

about anything to gain temporary relief from an uncomfortable feeling. Even when it costs us

something in the long term, when you're lonely, you might turn to social media. When you're

sad, you might turn to food. When you're anxious, you might pick up a drink. That's not to say that

those coping skills don't work, though. They often do, at least in the moment. They tend to take the

edge off of feeling bad. But doing too much of any of those things quickly

becomes unhealthy. And sometimes it introduces new problems into our lives or it makes our

existing problems even worse. In fact, any coping skill isn't necessarily good or bad. It's how we

use them that matters. We'll talk more about that in a minute, though. First, let's talk

about what a coping skill really is. It's essentially something that you do to cope with an

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