Stress Inoculation and Coping
Stress Inoculation involves learning several skills that will help you cope better with PTSD symptoms. People usually try all a range of coping techniques to determine what helps most. When PTSD symptoms strike, coping techniques are used to reduce the intensity of symptoms and the distress they create. But it is not enough to understand the principles behind these techniques; they must be practiced repeatedly until they can be employed easily and automatically-almost without thinking about them. Some people use anxiety coping techniques to help control anxiety while they do exposure therapy. For example some techniques of stress inoculation are:
- Breathing Excercises
- Progressive Muscular Relaxation
- Assertiveness training
- Rational self-talk
- Thought stopping
- Graded tasks/exposure
