3 Ways To Lower Your Holiday Stress

This is the season to feel jolly as various songs remind us, but are you feeling stressed instead? With all the added demands on your time during the holidays to shop for gifts, decorate, and host family or friends, you rarely have time to slow down. It is especially difficult to meet these holiday demands when you have experienced an illness, a relationship issue, increased financial stress or the loss of a loved one during the holiday.

Our holiday stress levels increase significantly when our perceived expectations of what we need to do for the holiday clashes with with our current low personal energy and wellbeing due to dealing with other issues.

We will look at three ways you can lower your holiday stress and bring the jolly back into your holidays….

The first way to lower our holiday stress is to know your current energy level both physically, mentally, and spiritually. Take special note of your current feelings, thoughts, and actions so far this holiday season.  For example, have you found yourself getting more irritated and angry because you have committed to too many events?

Are you feeling out of balance due to changes in how much you have been eating or drinking during this holiday season? It is very easy to get off of our routine as we go visit people and end up eating and drinking more than we normally would.  The same goes for changes in our sleep pattern.  Are we getting less sleep during this holiday season  because again we are trying to cram in too many  activities at once.

Is your current energy low due to a recent illness? So many respiratory illnesses are going around this holiday season. I recently battled flu and I felt so far behind with my Holiday to do list.  I wasn’t able to get a lot of my work done.

Have you have lost a loved one during the holiday? It is important to remember that working through the grieving process will put significant demands on your physical, mental and spiritual energy, making it difficult to focus on any holiday tasks.

So again to lower your holiday stress this season,  it is first important to take note of your current feelings and your energy level during the holiday season. What has led to the low energy?  This gives you important information as to the source and intensity of your holiday stress. Once you have found the source of your stress, you can move to the second way to lower your stress level.

To hear what the second and third way to lower your stress this holiday season, click on the listen tab of this website to hear podcast #51 Three Ways to Lower Your Holiday Stress….

(photo by Eagan Hsu)