Today’s episode of Creating The Path is about how to relieve holiday stress. The holidays can be a very fun time of the year, but it can also bring a lot of stress. So today, I’m sharing 5 tips to help you relieve holiday stress and enjoy the holidays.
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Topics discussed in this episode:
[01:36] Tip #1: Lightening your schedule
[02:39] Tip #2: Setting boundering
[04:36] Tip #3: Things you can do to manage stress and calm yourself down
[06:27] Tip #4: Breathing exercises and a special tip
[07:29] Tip #5: Focus on what feels good about the holidays
Resources:
Havening How-To Video (watch from 3:50 - 4:50)
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Noteworthy Quotes:
“Look at the things that you’re doing that you can get off of your plate for a while to relieve some of that holiday stress.”
“Put some boundaries in place. Set up the situation to allow yourself to have a good time and not have to worry.”
“Focus on the good things. Realize that there are always going to be things you can’t completely control, but feel good knowing that you’ve done what you can, and that there's plenty to enjoy.”
Summary of the Podcast:
Creating the Path is a podcast that challenges multi-passionate entrepreneurs to achieve their goals by working less and eliminating overwhelm, so they can create their own unique pathway to a life they love. My mission is to transform hustle culture and assist others to shift away from living life on auto-pilot to living intentionally and following your own path to a life you love instead.
Host Bio:
Heather Grace Hanson is a certified positive psychology-based coach and creator of the Intentional Energy Framework, a system that empowers you to create a life and business you love without burning out. Heather is obsessed with all things personal development, running and walking in the park, interior design, salsa dancing and most importantly, spending time with her pup, Barclay.
Episode Transcript:
Today I want to talk about how to relieve holiday stress and I have 5 tips for you. You know, the holidays can be a very fun time of year, but it also can bring a lot of stress. You know, there's so many things this time of year that can cause stress. Maybe it's drama with family, and you know, this year we still have covid going on, although this year we do have, some of us have the option to travel. So if you're traveling that can cause extra stress this year, um you know, we have possibly more events to attend in person, and again with Covid, if you're attending in-person events, maybe there's a level of insecurity you're feeling about how safe it is. You might have extra stuff to do in planning events and extra cooking and all sorts of things. There's just so much to do and even though these might be fun things, all of that extra stuff and extra possible drama depending on your situation, that can really add to your stress levels.
So let's get right into the ways that you can relieve some of this holiday stress. And the first thing you can do is to lighten your schedule during the holiday season. So maybe over the next month or so look at any work that you have on your plate that you could remove or just put on hold for a while. Maybe there are some weekly meetings that you normally do, maybe it's weekly accountability meetings, maybe you have weekly meetings with your boss or your employees. Whatever your situation is, if there's certain meetings like that that you tend to do every week that maybe you could just put on hold for a few weeks just to give yourself a little bit more room and space in your schedule, and that's really what you want to look for, is look at the things that you are doing that you could, just like I said, get off your plate for a while to make that extra space for the holiday stuff now.
Tip number 2 is to set boundaries. You know if you have any stress about. You know, family interactions. I know this is the case with my family that there are certain topics that I tend to want to avoid because I know it's just either going to upset me or it's going to upset someone else and it's going to just create some drama.
So in that case with family, you might want to talk to your family beforehand and maybe set some ground rules and put some boundaries in place if there's topics that you just don't want to come up around the holidays. Maybe set those ground rules and say like hey when we get together, let's just not talk about this. That way you can kind of set up the situation to allow yourself to have a good time and not have to worry that those things are going to come up and maybe cause a fight or just some drama within the family. And you know another possible thing, if you are traveling to see family members that you don't live with on a day-to-day basis, if you are concerned about Covid. You know, maybe you could talk to your family on some boundaries and how to put things in place to make all of you feel comfortable and safe.
So you don't have any extra stress on you know, whether or not you might get sick. Um, so think of those things that could potentially cause you stress during the holidays and see if there's any boundaries or any rules that you could put in place. To just make sure you feel safe and that those stressful things will hopefully not occur if you just put some boundaries in place now.
Tip number 3 is to do a couple things, this is actually 2 things you can do, but to do some things that when you are feeling emotional or if you are feeling high stress. There's a couple of things that you can do to just calm yourself down so you can do EFT which stands for emotional freedom technique. It's also known as tapping and I won't go into that now of how to do it because it's actually kind of difficult to just explain over audio if you don't already know how to do it. It's much easier to watch a video to see how it's done, and I will put a link in the show notes to show you how that is done but it's a really effective technique for when you're feeling you know, intense emotions to just bring that level of emotion down. And another thing you can do which has the same effect It's just a different technique. It's called havening and again I'm just going to put a link in the show notes to a video that you can watch on how to do this Um, because it's really, it's kind of too hard to explain over audio.
But both of these things are good things to do when you are feeling high emotions or even doing them preemptively like if you're anticipating possible family drama at a family holiday event. You know you could even do this before you go and see your family. Um, just to kind of prepare your body to remain in a calm state.
so tip number four also to kind of help calm yourself down or kind of ground yourself so that you don't get overly emotional, is to do a breathing exercise and just to keep it simple, the best way to do a breathing exercise that will calm you down is to make sure that your exhale is longer than your inhale. So you know it doesn't really matter how many seconds you do it for. But if you breathe in for four seconds. Then you just want to make sure you breathe out for longer than 4 seconds because when you breathe out that's what really calms your body down and then you can just imagine yourself melting and releasing all the tension as you breathe out. Now wherever you're listening to this right now, I'm also going to post a meditation that you can do, where I'll take you through this breathing exercise and just give you some time for some meditation, so wherever you're listening to this go after this and there's some meditation for you to do to help calm yourself down.
And that brings me to tip number five which is to focus on what feels good about the holidays for you. So whatever you enjoy about the holidays just try to spend more time focusing on that. If there's other things that are causing you stress that are maybe out of your control, maybe with family, extra things that you need to do, you know any of that Covid related stress, just do your best to put things in place to make yourself feel safe, put those boundaries in place and then once you've done everything that you can to kind of eliminate as much stress as you possibly can, then just focus on the good things you know, realize that there's always going to be things that you can't completely control, but feel good knowing that you've done what you can and that there's plenty to enjoy and just let yourself focus on that.
So that's where I'm going to end today. I'm just going to keep this nice and short so you can go off and enjoy your holidays and again, there's that meditation for you if you feel like you need it, and I will talk to you next time.