Tag: coping with holiday stress

Happy Thanksgiving and Tips for Surviving!

Happy Thanksgiving week!

Turkey and all the trimmings can be great fun, but this season comes with its share of stressors for many of us. Whether it’s dealing with family members we’d rather not, coping with memories of better times, or something else – Thanksgiving doesn’t always look like Pinterest tells us it should.

So here are just a few quick-and-dirty tips for making it through to Monday.

Keep up with your normal routine. As much as you can, try to keep up with your normal routine this week. Whether that means taking a walk each morning, saying a prayer each evening or watching Ellen every afternoon – keep it up! These are the routines and behaviors that keep your stress at bay all year long – don’t abandon them now!

Take a break from social media. Nothing can ruin the holiday more than comparing yours to everyone else’s on your Facebook feed. You might be having a perfectly good Thanksgiving, but there’s always going to be someone who seems to be having more fun, in a prettier home, with better behaved children in a more stylish outfit. Best to not even go there.

Go outside. This one might seem a little weird, but I am a firm believer in getting outside and DOING something – particularly when things inside are going south. Uncle Jim driving you crazy? Take a walk. Grandma Penelope drinking too much? Grab the cousins and throw a football. You get the idea. A little fresh air and activity is a effective, healthy stress management strategy – and its fun, too.

Are You Cool Enough to Be Stressed?

Did you know that hip, important and interesting people are pretty much stressed out all the time?

No?

Well, log into Facebook, Twitter or Instagram – better yet check out the latest on Pinterest and the blogosphere and you will see in fact that cool people are highly stressed and super busy, like all the time.

Not true, you say? Unfortunately it is what many of us feel.

photo credit

photo credit

At some point in the last – oh, I don’t know – 20 to 30 years it became super cool to say “I’m so stressed!” and “Life is crazy right now!” and “I don’t know if I can keep going at this pace – aggghhh!”  The only problem with this idea is that it isn’t so cool when this stress leads to heart disease, psychological disorders and other health issues.  Come to think of it, being super stressed doesn’t actually make you cool at all.  It just makes you stressed.  And probably a little bit irritable.  And maybe prone to do things you probably shouldn’t like eat too many candy corns or drink too many lattes.

But yet the idea persists that the more stressed you are the more important you must be.

This holiday season I am going to take a stand against the often-super-stressful months of November and December by offering tips (I’ll shoot for a couple times a week as I am trying to keep my stress down, too!) on keeping the holidays simple, the stress low and the fun high.

Do you have tips, strategies or plans for lowering your stress this holiday season? If so, please send them to me at stephanie@drstephaniesmith.com and maybe they will get included on the blog!

And check out this article on Psych Central that I got to be a part of:

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Why I Hate the Holidays (Hint: It’s the Most Stress-filled Time of the Year)

no turkey

Sorry to be a downer, but I find the holiday season to be the most stressful and unpleasant time of the year.  Each year at this time, I find myself daydreaming of far away beaches, mountains, deserts, plains – anywhere that would provide an escape from the stressors of the holidays at home.

Many folks have very good reason to find the holiday season difficult: the death of a loved one, the break-up of a marriage, the loss of a job.  These painful events can make the holidays excruciating for people, and I don’t want to discount the real-ness of their pain.  But their are also other – albeit less tragic – aspects of the holidays that can make them a struggle for people as well.

Our families don’t change.  Very few of us have “perfect” families.  Awkward blended families, alcoholic uncles, inappropriate in-laws – we all have at least one family member that drives us crazy – or worse.  But for some reason, many of us expect that our families will be magically transformed after Halloween and become the happy, smiling, super-functional families we see on cookie tins and Christmas cards.  Well, hope all you want folks but the family you started the year with is the same one you’re stuck with now – maybe even worse.

There’s only one Martha Stewart.  Ms. Stewart started a wave of domestic arts that seems to be reaching a fever pitch with the growing use of Pinterest, Etsy and similar sites.  I have to admit, I do love crafts and all things Martha, but the pressure to look perfect while serving the perfect meal in the perfect house while your perfect children are doing a perfect craft is overwhelming, and quite frankly impossible to achieve.  There’s is only one Martha Stewart people – and you are not her.

A lot of traditions are dumb.  <—– OK, that wasn’t a very mature sentence, but it’s true.  Roasting a turkey on Thanksgiving because it’s “tradition?”  Ick.  I can be just as thankful (and a whole lot more gastronomically satisfied) with a big plate of spaghetti and meatballs.  So why do I stress out about making a bird every year? Beats me.  Sure, there are a few, very meaningful traditions in my family which I love – but what I would really love is to ditch the dumb ones that drag me down and make the holidays drudgery.

They’re so darn long.  Why, oh why do we need to start celebrating one holiday after another with no break whatsoever starting on October 15th?  Seriously, two and a half months of anything will get old.  And the holidays are no different.  The retail chains and box stores may be a lost cause when it comes to shortening the holiday season, but at least I can resist celebrating Christmas until at least December.  Better yet, December 24th.

Bah humbug.

Click here for more tips for managing holiday stress.

Click here for more about why the holidays are tough.

Click here for more about surviving the holidays with flair.