5 Tips to Manage the Holiday Season
While the end-of-year holidays can be joyous to celebrate with friends and family, they can also add more stress to our already stressful routine. Since the past several years have been full of ups and downs with COVID-19, many of us are struggling this holiday season.
With that in mind, Cory Gerwe, PhD, LPC, Director of Coaching, Leadership and Wellness for GME and Assistant Professor of OBGYN, shares his tips for managing the holiday season.
- Wherever you are, be there! Engage in mindfulness practice. This could be anything: meditation, mindful walking, or visualization. By doing this, you'll likely feel more relaxed and less anxious. You will also be better positioned to leave stress where it belongs. This way, you won't be taking your work stress home to your family and vice versa. You can find mindfulness practices on many places including YouTube and fitness apps. If you make mindfulness a daily practice, you find it easier to focus, and you will likely reduce your overall anxiety.
- Express out, don’t act out. It's important to express your feelings as opposed to acting out in ways that are unhelpful and only serve to increase your stress. Expressing emotions means finding a healthy way to let out how you feel. This could be journaling, talking with friends, or finding a creative outlet such as drawing or crocheting.
Acting out occurs when you keep emotions inside, and they come out in ways that may be irrational and unhelpful. If you know that Thanksgiving dinner could end in political debate, don't avoid attending. You'll probably regret it. Instead, go and simply state, "I do not want to discuss politics," and change the conversation. Doing this will allow you to maintain your boundaries while creating memories with your family. Then you can make decisions based on reason instead of emotion.
- Create distance from reactivity. Holidays can be stressful, and family can be part of that stress. This is especially true if you get in conversations that are loaded or feeling aggressive. If you feel yourself getting upset, try to distance yourself from reactivity. For example, if your mother-in-law gives you a critique about how you prepared the stuffing, it can be helpful to ask yourself how you will feel about this issue later. How will I feel about this in six hours? One month? Three years? Likely, you won't feel the same way about this in three years. By achieving some distance from the stressful event, you may be able to create a new emotion.
- Invite humor into your daily routine. Sometimes the winter brings with it the holiday blues. Laughing has been well correlated with positive thoughts and emotions that reduce stress, feelings of anxiety, and depression. So, engage with humor. Watch a funny show or movie, have a go-to funny image, let yourself be silly, or talk to that one friend who you know will certainly make you smile and laugh.
- Stick to your mental health routine. The holiday hustle can lead to feeling emotionally drained and sleep deprived. We tend to try to "do it all" during the holidays and often can lose ourselves in the shuffle. Usually, we will discontinue our mindfulness routine, engage in poor eating, stop exercising, and neglect our support system. It is important to practice self-care regularly during holidays and practice boundary setting that will help protect our emotions. This may include continuing with our weekly therapy or coaching sessions, attending community support groups, doing daily exercise or specific self-care rituals, and other similar mental health routines that sustain us on a regular basis. While it may take intentionality and flexibility, keeping up with your regular self-care and mental health routine during the holidays can help alleviate negative emotions that can be associated with the holiday blues.
If you feel you need professional help from a licensed mental health provider, EVMS provides employee assistance support through Optima Employee Assistance Program | Optima Health or call 1.800.899.8174.