Hello everyone and welcome to therapy in a nutshell. I'm Emma McAdam, a licensed marriage and family therapist.

And this is the podcast where I condense mental health skills into bite-sized nuggets of health.

When I was volunteering in Argentina for a year and a half, we had a situation where we had been working really hard to help people,

really pouring our souls out to try to help people improve their lives, and we were like physically, emotionally, spiritually giving everything we had.

One day during a meeting one of our local leaders, the man who was supposed to be supporting the work we were doing,

he basically told us that all the people we were working with were losers and that there was no hope and that we were doing a terrible job.

We finished that meeting late at night, we were exhausted, we were angry, we were discouraged, and my co-worker called the president in tears, we were ready to

just quit in that area. And our leader listened carefully and he said, Ermanus, go to bed.

Things will look better in the morning. And he was right. After we took a break, we came back to

the problem, refreshed after a night's sleep, we were able to go back to that leader with

clarity to, you know, confront the issue. And we were able to do a lot of good in that town. So,

in this video, you're going to learn all about coping skills. If you're feeling like you're in

crisis, if you feel like you're going to make bad choices, if you're afraid you might self-harm, or if you're just so emotional that you can't think clearly, halt.

Okay, this is an acronym to help you remember that if you're hungry, angry, lonely, tired, or if you're on substances, or if you're severely depressed, or severely severely anxious or whatever, pause, slow yourself

down and reach out to the resources. So in the rest of this video, we're going to talk about

some of the coping skills you can use and we're going to develop a little bit of a crisis

plan for the people you can connect with in case, you know, something comes up that feels a little

too big for you to handle in the moment.

Coping skills are activities that we can do that help us calm down.

Many of the best ones incorporate brain and body and don't have negative side effects like emotional eating or drugs do, right?

Now, this is just a short list. There are hundreds of things that people can do to calm themselves down.

And as you may know from my previous video, why I hate coping skills. I'm obviously not a huge fan

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