End-of-year holidays are a time of joy, reflection, and—let’s face it—some stress. Whether you are dealing with difficult family dynamics, are apart from your loved ones, or are hosting large celebrations, the holidays can trigger all kinds of feelings. In this Meetup Live event, we’ll be discussing how to deal with anxiety during the festive season.
Watch this recording with Tara Schuster, author of Buy Yourself the F*cking Lilies, for a conversation on how to manage stress during the holidays and enjoy yourself this year. Learn to navigate conflict, cope with the expectations of others, and make space for joy. Give yourself the gifts of self-care and calming rituals this holiday.
Main Takeaways:
Self-care is not selfish:
- We are all a part of some community. So, if you heal yourself you are necessarily healing the community. This means really digging deep, and showing yourself compassion by letting yourself feel how you really feel without judgment. It’s ridiculous to say that self-care is selfish, self-care is community care.
Staying consistent with self-care rituals:
- When I wake up, the first thing I do is open the blinds, make the bed, grab my coffee, and journal. My journaling is where I write a gratitude list. I have between 6:30 am and 7:30 am every morning scheduled for this practice. Scheduling it is the hardest part: honoring your time, and honoring yourself. This actually makes life a lot better and makes me more available to my community so I am going to protect this time.
- Another technique for self-care is bribery. Let’s say you want to start a gratitude practice: pick a goal to write five things you’re grateful for every day for seven days. If you do that then you can reward yourself. Bribery’s okay when it’s in the service of healing yourself.
Spending the holidays alone:
- Make a plan. Don’t let yourself get to the evening on New Year’s Eve and find yourself scrambling to find something to do.
- Expand your definition of partnership. We think of romantic love as the ultimate partnership but we all have so many other partnerships. There are people in your neighborhood or community that can make you smile. It’s these very little things that add up to huge change.
Dealing with tricky family dynamics:
- Don’t get super reactive. Pause and consider why someone is asking you uncomfortable questions. You can also deflect your responses because you don’t owe a response to anyone.
- Set boundaries. None of the people in your life have any reason to change if you don’t set boundaries. Without boundaries, they know you will roll over. Don’t feel guilty about setting boundaries. You don’t want to end up resenting people close to you, and there’s no way around that unless you change something about the situation yourself.
Top Q&A Questions and Resources:
- How do you differentiate truly wanting to be alone versus wanting to be alone because of depression, and mental health?
- I am so glad that you asked this question. What I do is force myself to go see somebody and use that as a test. It can be hard, especially if you’re starting in a state where you’re already alone. Make a small plan with somebody else, and test run it. The worst-case scenario is you can leave and use your exit strategy.
- I find it difficult to connect with people in my life who haven’t done the work themselves. How do you deal with this?
- When you have done the work, or even begun to do the work, stuff starts sticking out to you like a sore thumb, and sometimes I find myself wanting to change the people around me. You want to start suggesting things to people, and then you almost feel rejected if people can’t change, it’s really tough. You might need to get some new relationships because again, those people in your life don’t actually have a reason to change unless something about the situation has changed. Maybe it’s time to deepen relationships with people who are a little more on the path with you.
Resources:
- Buy Yourself the F*cking Lilies
- Pre-order GLOW IN THE F*CKING DARK: Simple Practices to Heal Your Soul, From Someone Who Learned the Hard Way due out February 2023
- Subscribe to Tara’s Newsletter here.
- Holiday Emotional Support Guide
- Tara’s website
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Last modified on November 21, 2022
