“I Am Dreading The Holidays”

Holiday dread starts even before Halloween. What will we do with all of our leftover Halloween candy? Will we have time to make our children costumes? How will we celebrate during the COVID-19 pandemic? How will the holidays shake out with our work schedule? Will we have time off?

Holidays tend to come with a lot of stress because we put extreme expectations on ourselves and others. But if we do a few key things, we can get our minds in the right place to cruise into this upcoming holiday season feeling great both mentally and physically. 

Having a Plan

When we have a plan, we think, “I have it all figured out.” We feel content. As a result, we’re grateful for having a plan, whatever it may be. As long as you know what to expect, you set yourself up for success. 

So think about the holidays you’ll be celebrating over the next few months. Get a calendar. Mark the time you have off and note anything else relevant. Have conversations with the people who will be involved in your celebration. Communicate so there is no guessing. 

Planning the holiday season will free time up for you and allow you to enjoy the experience even more.

Mental Planning

One great habit to develop is to do a simple thought download. It’s essentially a journal entry where you dump your thoughts down on paper and see what thoughts are coming up. There’s something magical about seeing your thoughts written down. 

Starting now, give yourself three minutes every day to dump all your thoughts down on paper. After a few days, you’ll start to see some trends. You’ll notice what’s really going on for you.

Try this exercise. Pick one person you’ll be seeing during the holidays. Maybe this is a person who typically disappoints you. Write down all the ways that they disappoint you and what expectations you have of them. Once you can see things more clearly, you can decide if you want to communicate what these expectations are. When you do that, you may realize that your expectations are unrealistic or that you never communicated them. This can open the door to improving your relationships with the people you care about. 

Another practice you can adopt is asking yourself “what do I need?”. That simple question will help you understand what you need to enjoy the holiday season instead of stressing about it. 

Physical Planning

Food

Many of my clients find the holidays difficult when it comes to their health goals. They want to enjoy all of the foods and drinks that come as part of their holiday celebrations. And there’s no reason why you can’t do that while continuing to pursue your health goals. It’s all about expectations and planning. 

You have to be honest with yourself about whether or not it’s realistic to stick to your food plan during the holidays. If you know you’ll be at Aunt Betty’s for Hanukkah and you can’t resist her lasagna and triple chocolate delight, you can plan to have it. It’s much better to plan for that than to insist on resisting it and disappoint yourself when you show up to Betty’s house and struggle to meet your unrealistic expectations. 

If you have a plan that you’ll go and enjoy some of your favorite things, you’re keeping the promise you made to yourself. But if you make a different promise and don’t keep it, you’ll be really disappointed in yourself, which is the last thing you want during an already stressful and packed holiday season. In fact, your disappointment may be the very thing that leads you to throw your plan out the window during the next celebration, thinking, “I already messed up so I’ll just go crazy now and try to be good again after the new year.”

One of your most powerful tools during the holiday season will be following your intuition when it comes to food. Learn to determine if you’re hungry. If you are, you should eat. Learn to determine when you’re full. If you’re comfortably full, you should stop eating. These two simple rules will allow your body to tell you what it needs without making any specific foods off-limits.

That way, you can enjoy family and food and all of the things that make the holidays so special while also feeling confident that you don’t have to have strict guidelines and rules in order to achieve progress. All it requires is trust.

Exercise 

We all know that during the holidays, we may be a bit more tired. Maybe we stayed up late. Maybe the wine was flowing. So sometimes we wake up and decide that we’ll save the exercise for next year.

This year, try to make a plan instead. Choose a minimum amount of activity you’ll do during the holiday season. Choose a realistic exercise routine that you’ll be able to stick to during the holidays. It can be as simple as going on walks with your family, going skiing, or doing some laps in an indoor pool. You can get a great workout doing so many different things. Use that to your advantage. It’s not about changing how your body looks. It’s about doing movement that feels good for you.

Accountability 

You have to be accountable to yourself first. The way to make any habits sustainable long-term is to be our own best accountability partner. It’s about continuing to cultivate the relationship you have with yourself by keeping your word to yourself. Show up for yourself like how you would for a friend. Do this because you’re worth it. You don’t need other people checking over your shoulder. 

The more you can keep yourself accountable, the more consistent you’ll be. As a result, others will know what to expect from you. This will help you create the boundaries you want.

Boundaries

There will be situations during the holiday season that will require you to communicate boundaries. It may not be super comfortable. Challenge yourself to set boundaries for yourself and others.

Maybe you want to make a conscious decision to decrease the amount of time you spend on social media on your phone. Sticking to that boundary will give you confidence that you can maintain boundaries with others, too. The first step is to be rock solid with the boundaries you set for yourself. 

If you can plan, set boundaries, and stay accountable to yourself (and others), you can cruise through the holiday season achieving any result that you want.