Although the holidays can be a special time of year, they can also bring increased pressures, demands, and expectations, leaving many feeling overwhelmed. To help you get the most of the season, we’ve compiled a list of ways to mitigate holiday stress.

Plan Ahead

Anticipate extra errands when planning for guests and gifts and try to pencil time into your schedule well in advance. Expect and strategize for additional deadlines at work before the holiday break. Arrange specialist appointments reliant on extended healthcare coverage well before the end of the year when appointments become scarce. To fight off procrastination, make a list of simple, manageable steps needed to address each task and set reminders in your daily agenda, use visual cues (e.g. on your fridge) if you’re a visual person, or schedule timed reminders in your phone. Many people report feeling a sense of satisfaction and relief when checking off listed items, which helps maintain motivation and organization. Likewise, intentionally schedule extra time for relaxation and self-care activities since they’re likely to be overlooked when they’re needed most.

Identify Triggers

Mindfulness (i.e. increased awareness of one’s thoughts, feelings, and sensations in an accepting, nonjudgmental manner) helps us better identify our triggers and manage them before they lead to mental, physical, and emotional exhaustion. Although it’s a hectic time of year and one of the most common complaints from clients is a lack of time to devote to meditation or relaxation, short grounding exercises can fit into any hectic schedule and can have a lasting impact. For instance, three times a day, take a three-minute breathing space to check in with your thoughts, feelings, and sensations while tuning into the rhythms of your breathing. Use this time to note anything your body is telling you. Have you forgotten to eat properly? Do you need to get some extra sleep? Do you need to fit in a quick walk? If time permits, you can explore longer 10-30 minute meditation exercises. Research has shown that three 15-minute meditations weekly can reduce depression and 30-minute meditations daily have been shown to reduce grey matter and activation in the amygdala, a brain region associated with anxiety and stress. By decreasing our stress hormones, meditation also helps maintain a stronger immune system to help us thrive throughout the holidays.

Anticipate Triggers and Plan Accordingly

With increased social gatherings, the holidays can be emotionally draining. Often various boundary issues come up, for instance, through commonly held customs that challenge one’s lifestyle choices (e.g. typical holiday dinners that don’t accommodate veganism, family members who don’t accept your romantic partner, or a strong emphasis on celebratory drinks, which can be exclusionary to those who don’t drink.) Based on our past experiences, we can anticipate similar situations to come up again and again –especially with family dynamics. Planning, visualizing, and practicing skillful responses (versus reactions) to difficulties helps us remember them at the times we need them most –when we may be too activated to think clearly and make healthy decisions. Learn to set personal boundaries and say no. Saying yes to everything will leave you feeling depleted and resentful. Think ahead and strategize to keep yourself safe. If you’re concerned there might not be appropriate food to accommodate your lifestyle choices at a gathering, bring a dish you’re comfortable with. If it’s triggering to be around people who are consuming alcoholic beverages, bring your own special drink with you, bring a friend you feel safe with, practice assertively refusing offers, or plan strategic exit plans to use should you need them. If you notice yourself becoming triggered during an event, excuse yourself and do a brief grounding exercise in the washroom or leave the situation and reassure yourself that you’re exercising self-care. (Various guided meditation apps can be downloaded on smartphones for mobile mindfulness!)

Get Support

With so much emphasis on social gatherings, the holidays can also present poignant reminders of one’s lack of familial ties and supports, and romanticized ideologies around celebrations like New Years Eve can have the affect of making one acutely aware of their relationship status (if single). Or perhaps the holidays bring up difficult anniversaries. If you know this is a difficult time for you, build a support network. Reach out to friends, get professional support, or join a community group. Schedule purposeful activities with friends on difficult anniversaries to ensure you’ll have the supports you need. Or find a way to cultivate gratitude. Whether through journaling or sharing with others, research has shown that practicing gratitude has health benefits, such as decreased depression and longer and better quality sleep. Also, finding a way to give back to those less fortunate (e.g. through volunteering) can redirect us from focusing on our own problems and increase a sense of purpose, community, and connection in our lives.

Wishing you a cheerful, healthful, and heartful holiday season,

Anna

“Negative emotions like loneliness, envy, and guilt have an important role to play in a happy life; they’re big, flashing signs that something needs to change.”    

–Gretchen Rubin

In my experience, guilt is mostly about a person’s core values, which are shaped by our culture, upbringing, and socialization. Some cultures use ‘guilting’ as a parenting strategy (i.e. to make children feel shameful about their behaviour in an effort to promote good little boys and girls). While this might work in the short-term, the underlying long-term message it conveys to the child is a lack of unconditional positive regard from the parent, meaning, (from the child’s perspective), if they do something undesirable, they will be subject to humiliation and possible rejection by their loved ones. This in turn seems to promote anxiety in the child (and later adult), because who wouldn’t feel anxious if they believed they were always on the verge of possible humiliation and guilt?

Moreover, it’s problematic because we often unconsciously absorb the values held by our culture, parents, and society, which form the basis of our internal self-monitoring system which guides us through life according to our morals and principles. That is, we learn lessons in childhood which form the basis of our values, and we tend to develop a subconscious parental-type voice we use to govern our own behaviour as adults to ensure we stay aligned with our idea of “being a good person” (as a generalization for most of us anyways). So in this way, guilt can become a predominant schema that automatically arises to keep ourselves in check, but it may not always be necessarily rationally-based or warranted. And if it tends to be a very strong automatic impulse, it can take over.

Some steps to managing guilt before it manages you:

1. Let go of regret. We can’t undo the past, but we can learn from it and hear what our emotions have to say about our past decisions. In this way, we can welcome the lessons guilt has to offer and become transcended rather than stuck by them.

2. Acknowledge the guilt and listen to what it is telling you. What’s the underlying message? Perhaps you feel you made a mistake, acted selfishly, or did something embarrassing and can’t get past it. What are ways you can reconcile these uncomfortable actions? Do you need to make amends with someone you care about? Do you need to change your approach going forward? Are you acting in a manner that respects both yourself and the other person involved? If you’ve done everything you can to handle the situation with the grace and integrity it deserves, simply acknowledge your guilt and move on. Often the most guilty are the most self-conscious, strongly principled individuals. So find reassurance in the fact that you’re likely very considerate overall, therefore others can forgive the odd well-intentioned mishap or two. No one’s perfect.

Mantra: We don’t have to let every automatic thought or feeling we have control us.

3. Develop an internal dialogue with it (yes, I’m actually advocating for talking to yourself!) It might sound like this “Hi guilt. Thanks for telling me that this is important. I’ve done everything I can do to be kind, compassionate, and respectful in this situation. So I’m doing my best. I’ve got this one covered.” (You might remind yourself of all the associated efforts you’ve made –I like to count them on my fingers.) And try your best to move on. Note that it may take time for the guilt to subside, but once you’ve acknowledged and validated the feeling, it will tend to dissipate over time.

4. Learn to Re-Parent Yourself Compassionately. No blaming here. Most of our parents did the best they could with what they had. But even still, some of their approaches to parenting may have inadvertently had a negative effect on us. If you think you’ve been parented by ‘guilting’ and are controlled by it as a result, learn to identify the guilt as it automatically arises and try re-parenting yourself using more affirming, compassionate language (i.e. instead of using self-shaming language e.g.: “I’m such an idiot! Why did I do that?!” try a more understanding reframe: “I made a mistake. It happens. How can I approach this differently in the future?”) This can help undo the patterns of your past and set you free!