Mindful Holiday Stress Management for Better Mind and Body Health Into the New Year {Stress Management | Mindfulness}

Mindfully Manage Holiday Stress for Better Mind and Body Health Into the New Year! 

{Stress Management | Mindfulness}

The holidays are filled with beloved traditions, time with loved ones, gratitude and joy. But they can also become a season full of disappointed expectations and overwhelming holiday stress if you get too caught up in the chaos.

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The holidays bring many demands that can contribute to stress such as holiday parties, the financial burden of picking out the perfect presents, the tensions of long-standing family dynamics and the temptation to indulge in holiday foods in addition to your usual responsibilities.

It is no coincidence that you may crash and feel exhausted, come down with the annual flu during or just after the winter holidays or gain a few extra pounds by January. Even festive demands can create holiday stress which impacts the mind and body, but there are some strategies that can help you enjoy all that the holidays offer without suffering the consequences of unneeded holiday stress.

Stress and Its Impacts on Your Body

Stress itself simply refers to any type of perceived or real demand or threat, positive or negative. It is the way that your body reacts to and responds to stressful demands that can have short or long term impacts on your mind and body health due to the powerful mind-body connection (Yaribeygi et al., 2017).

Emotions, including stress, trigger physiological changes in your body which set off a cascade of stress hormones like cortisol and epinephrine (Charmandari et al., 2005) that your body uses to try to maintain balance and ensure survival. This stress response involves neurological pathways, hormones and biochemical reactions (Oken, Chamie & Wakeland, 2015) throughout the body that you may recognize as symptoms such as a pounding heart, rapid breathing, muscle tension, sweating and/or digestive upset.

This is why major life events like holiday traditions, stressors like coping with family gatherings, or emotions like those around giving and receiving gifts may trigger physical symptoms.

This combination of reactions to stress is also known as the “fight or flight” response since it evolved as an adaptive coping and survival mechanism so that our ancestors could quickly react to life-threatening situations. Unfortunately in modern life, multitasking, juggling too many things, lacking true meaningful connections and bombardment with constant stimulation are a regular part of life, especially during the holiday season, making stress incessant in many people’s lives.

Overtime, your body can also overreact to stressors that are not life-threatening, such as family difficulties, packed shopping malls or the awkward office gift exchange. These types of ongoing stressors can contribute to inflammation, irritability, anxiety, and chronic disease (Liu, Wang & Jiang, 2017).

Holiday Stress, Metabolic Imbalances and Weight Gain

For example, the stress of the holidays can be a major contributor to weight gain and metabolic imbalances.

Cortisol is one of the hormones that your body releases in response to stress which helps provide enough energy to cope with threats and challenges. During the stress response, blood sugar rises in an effort to enable fighting or fleeing from a threat, and later insulin is released to bring the blood sugar levels back into a normal range (Rosmond, 2003).

Insulin plays a key role in regulating the amount of glucose being taken from the bloodstream into the cells, but when this cycle is chronically and repeatedly activated due to stress, the signaling process can become impaired and your cells can become resistant to insulin (Chandola, Brunner & Marmot, 2006), which has far reaching consequences.

Some common metabolic consequences of stress and imbalanced cortisol levels are insulin resistance, blood sugar imbalances and weight gain, especially in the belly area (Li, Li, Zhou & Messina, 2013).

The threat of holiday weight gain is increased further when you are tempted with so many holiday treats and foods that may not normally be part of your lifestyle. Emotional eating, or turning to food to cope with the extra stress of the season, is often also exacerbated during this busy time of the year

Here are some healthier gluten-free, vegan holiday options to allow you to enjoy the festive season without digestive upset or inflammation:

Vegan, Nut-Free and Gluten-Free Christmas Cookie Roundup!

Gluten-Free, Vegan, Plant-Based Thanksgiving Recipe Roundup! Allergy-Friendly Options for the Holiday Table 

How to Mindfully Manage Holiday Stress

To set yourself up for a healthy New Year, you don’t have to forgo all the holiday treats or say no to every holiday party invitation. Instead, enter into the holiday season with greater mindful awareness of how you will choose to spend your limited time and energy so that you can mindfully manage holiday expectations and obligations.

This is a powerful step towards minimizing undue  holiday stress and its impacts on your mind and body. 

Pay Attention and Listen to Your Body to Reduce Holiday Stress

Learning to recognize the symptoms of stress and when they are becoming overwhelming or harmful to you is the first step in effectively managing it. Paying attention allows you to identify emotions as they arise, recognize when stress threatens to become overwhelming and choose how you react and dedicate your time and energy.

Stress can lead to emotional, cognitive, behavioral and physical symptoms when it is too intense or too frequent. Red flags that can alert you to excessive holiday stress include:

• Difficulty sleeping
• Cold hands and feet
• Racing heart
• Mood changes or irritability
• Nervousness or shaking
• Weight gain especially around the belly
• Persistent feeling of urgency or unease
• Exhaustion that interferes with daily life activities
• Rapid breathing
• Tension headaches, backaches or other excessive muscle tension
• Decreased satisfaction with tasks or relationships
• Clenched jaw and teeth grinding
• Changes in digestion including constipation, diarrhea, nausea or abdominal pain

Recognizing the types of triggers that set you into a stress response can help you take steps to reprioritize your choices and remember the distinction between events and your experience of them. This allows you to start to leverage challenges as opportunities to grow and evolve which builds resiliency and buffers you from the negative impacts of holiday stress.

Manage Your Time and Expectations to Avoid Holiday Stress

When it comes to the holidays there are often many competing demands on your time, energy and pocketbook. Putting things off until the last minute frequently leads to extra holiday stress and challenges.

Your resilience depends heavily on your physical and mental health. When you are giving to everyone except yourself, you become depleted, are less present and miss out on meaningful moments.

You cannot mindfully give to others if you have not first taken care of yourself. Planning ahead and mindfully considering your needs and desires can help you to deepen connections and make meaningful memories without becoming overwhelmed.

Make time ahead of the season to consider what you want to prioritize and which holiday traditions matter most to you. This way you can plan ahead, delegate tasks, avoid last minute time crunches and make the space to spend your time and energy engaging in the traditions and events that are most important to you.

• Plan ahead to cook healthy meals at home to continue to nourish your body in a balanced way.
• Don’t forget time to rest. One of the best ways to reduce the negative impacts of an out of control stress response and to support the recovery process is by taking time for adequate rest. Rest and relaxation activate the parasympathetic “rest-and-digest” system which is the antithesis of the sympathetic “fight-or-flight” system, giving the body time for reparative and digestive activities.
• Give to yourself first by scheduling in self-care. Stay grounded with daily meditation, keep up your regular yoga practice or take time alone to fit in a walk.
• Plan well ahead of the holidays and make some lists of your goals for the season, what events and traditions you will prioritize and the types of gifts you would like to share. This allows you the time and energy to brainstorm ways to make mindful choices that prioritize your time and energy so that you can set appropriate boundaries. It also reduces the stress of last-minute shopping or reaching for a quick but superficial present choice.

Cultivate Compassion for Less Holiday Stress

With all of the hustle and bustle around this time of year, it is easy to lose touch with your compassionate nature and true intentions. This makes it easier to lose your cool when faced with long lines at the supermarket, rude relatives or a disappointing gift.

To give of yourself requires patience, compassion, and kindness. Fortunately, you can strengthen your ability to cultivate compassion towards yourself and others. Research shows that strengthening compassion through meditation has positive benefits for reducing stress, anger and chronic pain (Chapin et al., 2014).

• Try this self-compassion exercise inspired by The Whole Cure when you feel overwhelmed, despondent, stressed out, or stuck in struggle.
• You can also strengthen your ability to show compassion towards others to reduce the negative impacts of stress, especially with holiday gatherings and family tensions. To practice a quick and easy compassion meditation, close your eyes and imagine someone you think could use some compassion. Focus on an image of them in your mind’s eye and slowly repeat these three phrases to yourself, directed toward them: “I wish you peace. I wish you love. I wish you happiness.”

With some planning and awareness, you can recapture the magic of the holidays. Use these strategies to approach this season more mindfully to reduce holiday stress so that you can find peace, joy and meaning throughout the holiday season!

More Ways to Have a More Mindful and Minimalist Holiday Season with Less Holiday Stress:

• Embrace Minimalism During the Holidays for a More Meaningful & Less Stressful Season
• Thanksgiving Gratitude Ritual: Savor the Season and Eat Mindfully with a Meditation Exercise

• Mindful Gift Giving Guide
• 8 Steps to Simplify Your Life Today
• The Whole Cure: 52 Essential Prescriptions to Overcome Overwhelm, Reclaim Balance and Reconnect with a Life You Love! 

References:

Chandola T., Brunner E. & Marmot M. (2006). Chronic stress at work and the metabolic syndrome: prospective study. BMJ. 332:521. 

Chapin H.L., Darnall B.D., Seppala E.M., Doty J.R., Hah J.M. & Mackey S.C. (2014). Pilot study of a compassion meditation intervention in chronic pain. J Compassionate Health Care. 1.

Charmandari E., Tsigos C. & Chrousos G. (2005). Endocrinology of the stress response. Annual Review of Physiology. 67:259-284.

Li L., Li X., Zhou W. & Messina J.L. (2013). Acute psychological stress results in the rapid development of insulin resistance. 15;217(2):175-84.

Liu Y., Wang Y. & Jiang C. (2017). Inflammation: The common pathway of stress-related diseases. Front Hum Neurosci. 11:316.

Oken B., Chamine I. & Wakeland W. (2015). A systems approach to stress, stressors and resilience in humans. Behavioral Brain Research. 282:144-154.

Rosmond R. (2003). Stress induced disturbances of the HPA axis: A pathway to Type 2 diabetes? Med Sci Monit. 9(2):RA35-9.

Yaribeyg H. et al. (2017). The impact of stress on body function: A review. EXCLI J. 16: 1057–1072.

What are your biggest sources of holiday stress?

How do you prioritize self-care during the holiday season?

Mindfulness education and practice is a big part of the Simple Pure Whole Solution! Here are a few resources that can support your mindfulness practice during times of uncertainty, anxiety, fear and calm:

Mindfulness Resources for Self-Healing:
      

• Download your free chapters and wellness prescriptions now and get started incorporating a more mindful approach into your life and building resiliency. You can also get your copy of The Whole Cure in paperback or Kindle edition from Amazon.
• My Mindfulness Resources for Crisis and Self-Healing Package provides you with professionally-designed worksheets, handouts and workbooks for creating habits and practicing tools that support optimal stress management, resilience and coping with difficulty.
• Guided meditations and relaxation exercises from my Breathe CD.

Mindfulness Resources for Health Care Practitioners:

   

• If you are a health coach or other health care professional,  I heard from many of you requesting done-for-you content and tools for easy-to-incorporate mindfulness practices that you could use during this time with your clients and patients. To address this need, I want to offer my Done-for-You Package of Mindfulness Resources for Crisis and Calm at 70% off the regular price. Right now you can get the complete package for only $67 here. This Done-for-You Package of Mindfulness Resources for Crisis and Calm provides professional mindfulness resources for coaching and sharing self-healing tools and practices to empower you to teach others how to disconnect from panic, fear and anxiety and build inner peace.
• My newest done-for-you workshop package Rest, Restore & Rejuvenate to Mindfully Manage Stress is the perfect way to offer support for stressful times and everyday optimal health. You can use this completely done-for-you workshop package with your clients or for a virtual teleworkshop or series of sessions. You get everything done for you, from a complete word-for-word script to handouts for your clients to a guided exercise to a complete instruction guide so you are ready to confidently share this guidance with people right away. 

I would love to have you in my Insider’s Community! Join for free to subscribe to my email newsletter and receive your BONUS of FREE Chapters from The Whole Cure: 52 Essential Prescriptions to Overcome Overwhelm, Reclaim Balance and Reconnect with a Life You Love! You can pick up a full paperback or Kindle copy on Amazon (affiliate link) for a wealth of insights, exercises and complete toolkit to help you uncover your true passions, authentic purpose and calm confidence as well!