The Impacts of Holiday Stress on Body and Mind and How To Build Resiliency {Stress Management | Mindfulness}

Holiday festivities are full of excitement, gifts, family and food, which can come with stress. Manage the impacts of holiday stress and enjoy the season! 

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The impacts of holiday stress on the mind and body can build up from the many demands of the season. This is a season of joyful gatherings with family, remembering your blessings and festive food but it can also become a season full of expectations and stress as you scramble to deck the halls, bake endless batches of cookies and pick out the perfect presents.

Even festive demands like these can create stressful impacts on the mind and body. When you learn to recognize your individual stress triggers and understand how the body copes with stress, you can employ strategies to enjoy all that the holidays offer without suffering the consequences of unneeded negative impacts of holiday stress.

How the Body Handles Stress

The term ‘stress’ simply refers to any type of perceived or real demand or threat, which can be positive or negative. What matters for your acute and long-term health is the way that your body reacts to and responds to stressful demands (Yaribeygi et al., 2017). Your reactions to stressors can have short or long-term impacts on your mind and body health due to the powerful mind-body connection. 

Emotions such as stress can trigger physiological changes in your body involving a cascade of stress hormones like cortisol and epinephrine as you attempt to maintain balance and ensure survival (Charmandari, Tsigos, and Chrousos, 2005). This stress response involves neurological pathways and biochemical reactions throughout the body that you may recognize as a pounding heart, rapid breathing, muscle tension, sweating and/or digestive upset.

This is why major life events like holiday traditions, the stress of coping with family gatherings, or emotions like those around giving and receiving gifts may trigger physical symptoms and lead to significant impacts of holiday stress.

When constantly bombarded with demands, your body can start to overreact to stressors that are not life-threatening, such as family difficulties, packed shopping malls or the awkward office gift exchange. These impacts of holiday stress may become chronic and contribute to inflammation, irritability, anxiety, and chronic disease (Liu, Wang, and Jiang, 2017).

Recognizing and Coping with the Impacts of Holiday Stress with Resiliency!

A busy holiday season is not necessarily a bad thing, but there are some steps you can take to cope with holiday expectations and obligations to minimize undue stress and its impacts on your mind and body. To cope with the impacts of holiday stress, the key is to build resiliency so that you can respond to stressful situations without triggering the alarm system every time.

Recognize Your Holiday Stress Triggers

The impacts of holiday stress build up when you are faced with the many potential sources of seasonal stressors such as a lack of time to fit in all the holiday parties, the pressure and financial burdens of picking out the perfect presents, the tensions of long-standing family dynamics and the temptation to indulge in different foods which may not work best for your individual body.

When you feel pressured to always say yes, get caught up in the hype and business and lose touch with your core values, these can build up and contribute to overwhelm.

Recognizing the types of triggers that send you into a stress response can help you take steps to reprioritize your choices and plan ahead to find greater balance. This will help you approach the season with an intentional approach that respects your true desires and needs so you can avoid negative impacts of holiday stress.

Common sources of holiday stress to be aware of include:

• Overextending yourself by accepting every holiday party invite
• Trying to make everything for your holiday meals from scratch
• Feeling immense pressure to find the perfect present
• Excessive drinking or eating foods that aren’t ideal for your individual body or needs
• Going beyond your budget for gift and food shopping, adding to long-term financial stress
• Unrealistic and overly high expectations of what makes a “perfect” holiday season
• Family tensions and arguments

When you enter into this season with an awareness of potential holiday demands, you give yourself the chance to mindfully choose where to spend your time and energy so that you are prepared to manage stressful triggers.

Learn to Listen to Your Body

Sometimes stress is inevitable, especially at this time of year. Even if you find yourself in stressful situations, the sooner you recognize that your body is reacting to the impacts of holiday stress, the sooner you can take back control and choose how to react.

The first step in effectively managing stress is to start to pay attention. When you are able to recognize the symptoms of stress in your body and mind, you can identify emotions as they arise, recognize when stress threatens to become overwhelming and choose how you react and dedicate your time and energy.

Stress causes emotional, cognitive, behavioral and physical symptoms, which can become especially noticeable when it is too intense or too frequent. Red flags that can alert you to excessive stress include signs of autonomic nervous system imbalance such as a racing heart, nervousness or shaking, irritability, tension headache and changes in digestion.

Build Resiliency to Enjoy the True Meaning of the Season

As you start to pay more attention to how you spend your energy and the ways in which different demands impact your body and mind, you can choose your priorities and begin to build resiliency.

This will allow you to take control of the holiday chaos in a way that brings more enjoyment and meaning to the season!

Since the impacts of holiday stress actually arise from the ways in which you respond to challenges not the nature of the stressor itself, you can start reducing your holiday stress by slowing down enough to have the freedom to choose your priorities, recognize your interpretation of what is happening around you and decide how you want to move forward.

To keep the holidays manageable and meaningful, plan ahead to keep realistic expectations. Reflect on what truly matters to you and make deliberate choices to create a season that feels meaningful for you. This allows you to set boundaries and focus on what’s really important to you so that you have the energy to savor each experience more.

Instead of getting caught up in rushing to do the next thing on your list or in your life, consciously pause and start to think about how you want to choose to use your time and energy.

• Take some time each day to center yourself, take some deep breaths and reconnect with the present moment.
• Reflect in your journal about:
  • How do you want to spend your time and life?
  • What are the most meaningful things/people/experiences for you and how can you cultivate that?
• You can use the prescriptions in Chapters 1, 2 and 3 of The Whole Cure to go deeper into finding your authentic and passionate purpose. You can get started with your free preview and some mindfulness and self-awareness exercises here!
• Eliminate the unnecessary and ask for help when you need it.

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 in turns builds resiliency and buffers you from the negative impacts of stress.

I hope that understanding some of the science of stress and the mind-body connection and increasing your ability to pay attention to your body will help you to find peace, joy, and better health for a more meaningful holiday season!

More Ways to Build Resiliency for a More Meaningful Holiday Season:

 

• 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

 

• Self-Massage for a More Balanced Nervous System via the Vagus Nerve
• The Whole Cure: 52 Essential Prescriptions to Overcome Overwhelm, Reclaim Balance and Reconnect with a Life You Love!

What would you like your holiday season to look like to minimize holiday stress and maximize meaning?

 

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!