How to Keep a Clear Mind During the Holidays

Dec 6

Ahh, the Holiday season. The most wonderful time of the year.

Or is it?

In the space between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, many of us find ourselves planning, baking, shopping, wrapping, and decorating in ways that would make Martha Stewart blush. While this season is depicted as the Happiest Season of All, often the reality is that we would rather be hiding under the covers with a mug of cocoa (extra marshmallows, please), wishing it would all be over.

Rather than letting the holiday blues get you down, what if we asked ourselves, How can we use this time to learn to better manage, and even enjoy, the stressors of life?

The emotional experience of Our Life continually swings back and forth, like a pendulum, between the positive and negative. Prosperity and hardship. Times of bounty and famine. It is extremely common to chase the positive feelings and hide from the negative. Naturally, most of us want to feel happy as much as possible and avoid feelings of sadness, loneliness, or discomfort. This never serves us in the longterm.

To be alive is to experience the entire spectrum of human emotion. What does serve us, and helps us grow as people and more fully enjoy our lives, is allowing our thoughts and feelings to have their time and space, pass through us, teach us, and then keep moving. Emotional states should be temporary. It’s our mind’s ability to revisit these feelings that causes turmoil. We can take steps to fully deal with our personal stressors, and then let them go in peace. The result is often a calmer, saner, more enjoyable mindset.

Let’s look at a few steps we can take to help us move through our stressful emotions (rather than shove them away and ignore them) in a psychologically healthy and gratifying way.

1. Create Space Between Yourself and What’s Upsetting You

If you find yourself melting down in the mall parking lot, shredding your wrapping paper, or stressing out over the Zoom call with those family members, give yourself permission to take a step back.

This is one of the healthiest actions we can do when we feel discomfort creeping into our lives. Pause, take a few deep breaths, and reflect on what exactly is getting under your skin. Perhaps even take five minutes to meditate.

We can break the chain of feeling a deep emotion and then instantly reacting to it. It’s entirely human to want to have an emotional reaction if we have to endure another comment from our closed-minded Uncle. We might respond by raising our voice (and undoubtedly our blood pressure), or shutting down and tuning out. If we take time to pause and consider the moment, we might be able to respond in a way that more aligns with us. For instance, we can choose to:

Take a deep breath
Ask this person questions to better understand their viewpoint
Create a boundary resulting in increased respect

By taking a moment, we create a little space between us and the feelings we’re having. We can then respond calmly to the stressor, while reminding ourselves that this moment shall pass.

When we know deep down that these feelings won’t last forever, we can ease into them a little more easily. It’s possible that we can even begin to enjoy those feelings, because they remind us that we are in the thick of Life.

2. If Feeling Stuck, Take a 5-Minute Action

When we start to feel overly anxious, depressed, or overwhelmed in any way, we can gently nudge ourselves out of this funk by taking a simple, 5-minute action that moves us one step closer to our larger goals. This method is useful because it takes almost all of the pressure off, yet gets us moving in the right direction. Think of any type of “win” for yourself, and make it as small as you can:

Drink a glass of plain water
Reach your arms above your head and stretch
Take ten deep breaths
Take a walk around the block
Look out the window for a few moments
Brew a cup of tea

Then, let whatever comes to mind happen next. Maybe that means putting aside a project and working on something new. Often times, by just taking one tiny step in the direction of where we want to head, we will infuse ourselves with the motivation we need to take another small action towards our goal, and then another. Before we know it, our To Do list is complete and we’re left feeling accomplished rather than rushed.

3. The Golden Rule: Finished is Better Than Perfect

During the Holidays, when it comes to pulling off a celebration (whether Chanukah, Christmas, the Winter Equinox, or anything else), finishing the dang task beats perfecting it. For those perfectionists out there, it can be SO HARD to finish a project because we see how it could be just a little better or we aren’t ready to share it with the world yet.

I’m here to tell you to Just Get It Done.

Consider this: by not completing that project, or organizing that Zoom call with your family, or boxing up your… interesting-looking baked goods to drop off at friends’ and neighbors’, you may be robbing another person of the chance to benefit from your work. The world needs our contributions, even if they aren’t exactly what we envisioned them to be. The world needs us to participate and show up and offer up our efforts so that others may build upon our ideas and continue their momentum.

For instance, my vision for this blog post was that it would be a sleek half-page, three-point message that you could digest quickly, and immediately feel its benefit. From there, I dawdled, wrote about seven pages of nonsense, started several other article topics, and then finally wrote it the day before I wanted to publish it. At some point, I had to remind myself that it’s better to get the words down and figure it out from there, than to give up. Perhaps this article doesn’t hit exactly the way I wanted it to, but if you’re still reading, then isn’t it worth it?

So as you navigate this holiday season, please remember to give yourself permission, often and with self-kindness, to take a break when the going gets tough. Observe your thoughts and feelings. If you’re feeling stuck, take small and easy actions to kick-start your momentum. Most of all, please, please allow yourself to participate fully, even if the outcome is different than you hoped for. With these tools in your mental health arsenal, you’ll be better prepared to mange the responsibilities of the Holidays while enjoying your time as well.

From my family to yours, much love and have a wonderful holiday season.

Have any thoughts on the article above? Which of the tips above did you find helpful? Email me to reply to this post! I’d love to hear from you.