Cope Ahead Plan: Picture a Hard Situation Ahead and Rehearse Your Coping Skills

About this tool

Cope ahead is an emotion regulation skill from dialectical behavior therapy. The idea is that you do not have to wait for a hard situation to arrive before you start coping with it. By planning and mentally rehearsing in advance, you walk into the moment already prepared, which makes it far more likely you will use your skills instead of getting hijacked by emotion.

It works the way athletes and performers use visualization. Rehearsing an action in vivid imagination activates many of the same mental pathways as doing it for real, so when the moment comes it feels familiar rather than threatening. In cope ahead, you do not just imagine the situation going well by magic. You imagine yourself actively using specific skills to handle the difficulty and the emotions that come with it.

The most important part is to rehearse coping with problems, not a perfect outcome. You imagine things getting hard, and then you see yourself using your skills, staying steady, and recovering if you slip. That way you are prepared for reality, including the parts that do not go smoothly. Practicing this when calm builds genuine confidence for situations you would otherwise dread or avoid.

Two strands of research back up why this works. Studies on mental practice across sports and performance settings have repeatedly found that vivid rehearsal of an action improves later performance compared with no practice at all (Driskell, Copper, & Moran, 1994). Separately, research on implementation intentions, plans that link a specific situation to a specific response in an if-then format, found that people who make these concrete plans in advance are more likely to follow through when the moment arrives (Gollwitzer, 1999). Cope ahead combines both: a concrete if-then plan plus vivid rehearsal of carrying it out.

Cope ahead tends to help most with situations you can name in advance and that trigger a predictable pattern, such as a difficult family visit, a medical appointment, a hard conversation, or a recurring trigger at work. It is less useful for distress that comes out of nowhere with no lead time, and it is not a substitute for treatment if the anticipated situation involves significant trauma history: rehearsing a traumatic scene in imagination on your own can sometimes intensify distress, so that work is better done with a licensed trauma-informed therapist.

When you look back at your readiness rating over several plans, notice whether it climbs as you practice this skill more, and notice which categories of skill (physical, cognitive, or self-talk) show up in your most successful rehearsals. If your readiness score stays low no matter how much you rehearse, or the situation you are preparing for involves real danger rather than difficult emotion, that is a sign to bring in outside support through our therapist directory at /therapist/ rather than to keep rehearsing alone.

Reviewed by Michael Callans, MSW
Reviewed the worksheet for fidelity to the DBT cope ahead skill, including rehearsing coping rather than a perfect outcome.

References

1. Linehan MM. DBT Skills Training Manual. 2nd ed. Guilford Press; 2015.
2. Linehan MM. DBT Skills Training Handouts and Worksheets. 2nd ed. Guilford Press; 2015.
3. Driskell JE, Copper C, Moran A. Does mental practice enhance performance? J Appl Psychol. 1994;79(4):481-492.
4. Gollwitzer PM. Implementation intentions: strong effects of simple plans. Am Psychol. 1999;54(7):493-503.

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