Reducing suicidal feelings

The best way to cope with your feelings is to communicate with another person. A volunteer listener is always here for you when you wanna talk.

In the meantime, there are other things you can do to help reduce your feelings of stress and emotional pain. We hope this section on coping strategies and dealing with emotional crisis will be helpful.

There are some practical coping strategies you can use to help decrease your level of emotional suffering. Here are a few to practice:

Positive self-talk
Long-term coping strategies
Stress Plans

And to avoid:

Negative coping strategies >>

Self-talk

To help us experience less emotional suffering, we must first learn to change what we say to ourselves - and the way we think about ourselves. This is accomplished by shifting our words and thoughts from what we call ¥negative self-talk' to 'positive self-talk'.

The following are a few examples of how we may turn negative comments into positives ones:

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Long term coping strategies: staying healthy

Finding ways to improve our health can help decrease both our suicidal feelings and level of stress, and can increase our ability to cope with problems in the long term. Simple ways to do this are:

• Get more adequate SLEEP
• EXERCISE more.
• Eat HEALTHY FOOD.
• LAUGH more.
• Apply POSTIVE SELF-TALK & POSTIVE ATTITUDES
• TALK to people you trust.
• Work at MANAGING YOUR TIME
• Make an effort to RELAX

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A stress plan: what to do when you are dealing with stressful situations and experiencing suicidal feelings

Everyone needs a certain amount of stress in order to get things done, but sometimes it can become too much.When that happens, we may feel overwhelmed by our emotions and may even experience a crisis.

When you recognize that you are feeling overwhelmed by problems and emotions, you can feel better by using a stress plan like this one:

1. Identify the stressful situation: What is upsetting you?

• School, work, relationships, family, self...

2. Identify your signals: How are you feeling about the situation?

• What changes in my body, thoughts, emotions & actions do I observe?

3. Brainstorm your options: What can you do?

• CHANGE THE SITUATION: can I say no? can I assert my needs?...
• CHANGE HOW YOU REACT TO THE SITUATION: exercise, sleep, relax, accept support, make time to have fun, laugh...
• CHANGE HOW YOU LOOK AT THE SITUATION: use positive supportive self-talk, look for hidden opportunities in negative situations, and look into the future past the problem...

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You can reduce the emotional suffering you are experiencing. The first thing you might want to do to help yourself do this is to work on your coping strategies.