Conscious Coping: How to Stop Fighting Your Mental Health, Embrace Your Challenges, and Learn a New Way to Cope by Laurie Sharp-Page is an innovative and modern take on coping with mental health problems. Being conscious of your mental state and wellbeing is highlighted and through real-world examples, the author seeks to give individuals the tools to cope with the struggles of everyday life. This book seeks to provide a roadmap to learning coping methods which will help to navigate the chaos and the uncertainty faced by people in their lives by using a new outlook.

Conscious Coping by Laurie Sharp-Page was a refreshing and inspiring book that takes you on a step-by-step journey to deal with various mental health issues. This book will equip the reader with better habits that can be employed in times of stress. The book encourages readers to acknowledge and accept their feelings and work toward dealing with them, and I enjoyed this aspect. Too often are we expected to manage what is thrown at us without actually being given the means to do so. Although some of the suggestions may seem obvious, such as talking about your feelings and asking for help, it isn’t often that people do this. With positive encouragement, I believe people will take a step in the right direction. I stand behind what this book sets out to accomplish and I highly recommend it to every person regardless of age.

Conscious Coping: How to Stop Fighting Your Mental Health, Embrace Your Challenges, and Learn a New Way to Cope by Laurie Sharp-Page is an innovative look at how to take care of your mental health by providing you with some tools and philosophy to begin your journey to recovery. To make this introduction to a new philosophy of coping as accessible as possible, this easy-to-read self-help is split into two parts. The first part walks you through the foundational truths that you must accept before embracing conscious coping and how to deal with tough things. It serves as a prelude to Part 2, which teaches you how to use the EMBRACE model effectively. This acronym stands for Engage, Monitor, Brief, Reflect, Absorb, Capture, and Endure.

Conscious Coping takes a holistic approach by incorporating a broad range of disciplines with existential psychotherapy at the core. Laurie Sharp-Page then effectively pulls in other schools of thought such as acceptance and commitment therapy, cognitive-behavioral therapy, mindfulness, and narrative therapy, as well as various creative expression therapies. She provides examples and incorporates information with solid references. The reader gets a feeling of reassurance in Sharp-Page’s statement that it takes time to cope effectively with most of life’s great challenges, but if we continue to cope with small challenges in the midst of grappling with the great ones, then it’s progress toward healing. It’s a book dedicated to accentuating tragedies with optimism in a grounded approach that takes into account your need to cope gradually, as healing is a step-by-step process. Conscious Coping is indeed an innovative idea based on solid foundations, and any reader who is struggling to cope with challenges will find it helpful.