Most of the "101 coping skills" sheets you can find are photocopies of a school counselor's handout: a hundred and one lines in one long column, with nothing to say about which of them you could do at a desk or which need another person. The number is the point. Nobody uses all of them, but a list that long almost guarantees a few you would never have thought of, and the ones that work are rarely the obvious ones.

This page keeps the hundred and one and fixes the rest. The list is sorted by the kind of help each skill gives, every line carries tags for how long it takes, whether it needs company, whether it works at your desk and whether it costs anything, and there is a star beside each one for the ones that have actually worked on you.

Six kinds of help

The groups follow how researchers have sorted coping for decades. When Charles Carver and colleagues built the COPE inventory, they separated problem-focused coping from emotion-focused coping, and both from turning to other people, with distraction and disengagement measured as strands of their own. The six headings here are those strands in plain verbs.

• Soothe works on the body and the senses: cold water, the heavy blanket, one slow song.
• Distract takes you somewhere else for a while, with a stop time: one crossword, one drawer, one episode.
• Move lets the body burn some of it off: the stairs, the block, a bad dance.
• Connect puts a person or an animal between you and the feeling.
• Express gets it out of you and onto something: a page, a voice note, a drawing with no skill in it.
• Solve looks at the thing and takes one step: the next smallest action, the appointment, the note to tomorrow.

None of the six is the good one. Reviewing three decades of coping research, Susan Folkman and Judith Moskowitz argued that whether a strategy helps depends on the situation it meets: the distraction that steadies a wait for test results makes a problem you could fix worse. So the list gives you a range and lets the moment choose.

How the page works

Under the title are two rows of chips. The first is what you have: a minute, ten minutes, alone, with people, at work, no money. The second is what you need: to calm down, to get out of your head, to feel less alone, to get moving. Tap any of them and the list narrows to the skills that fit all of it, and a line under the chips says how many of the hundred and one are left. Tap again to release.

The stars are the part a printed list cannot do. Star a skill and it lands in a short list at the top, copied out in handwriting; the line under the title counts your stars and says which kind of help they lean toward and which kind has none yet. The sheet holds fifteen stars on purpose: they turn a list you read once into a list you would actually grab, and fifteen is about as long as a grab list gets.

At the bottom there is room for six lines of your own, numbered from one hundred and two onward. And if you came for the PDF, print the page: the chips disappear and what comes out is the full numbered list in two columns, hollow stars for marking by hand, your stars filled in, and your own lines at the end.

What the evidence says

Two of the six groups have research worth knowing about. A Cochrane review of thirty-nine trials found that exercise reduced symptoms of depression by a moderate amount compared with no treatment, though the effect shrank to nothing significant in the six most rigorous trials, so moving is fairly called a reliable help and unfairly called a cure. On the connect side, a meta-analysis across 148 studies and more than three hundred thousand people found that stronger social relationships went with a fifty percent higher likelihood of survival over the follow-up periods, an association the authors put on a par with established risks like smoking. A five-minute call is not a health plan, but it is not nothing either.

What the evidence cannot say is which line will work for you. That is what the stars are for.

What this page is not

It is a list for ordinary hard afternoons and heavy weeks. It diagnoses nothing and is not a treatment. If the moments you reach for it are frequent, frightening, or getting heavier, that is a conversation for a professional, and a starred list is worth bringing to it.

When to use it

Read the whole list once on a calm day and star the ones with a track record. On the hard day use the chips: two taps, then the first line that fits. If you would rather sort your keepers into drawers with a grab-first tray on top, the Coping Skills Toolbox does that, and Coping Skills Worksheets is the place to write a when-note beside each one. The second line on this list, the long out-breath, has a page of its own in the Physiological Sigh.