How to Avoid Emotional Burnout This Holiday Season
Whether you celebrate or not, the holiday season can be stressful for many reasons. From experiencing difficult emotions like grief, anger, or resentment that seem to resurface out or nowhere, to the pressures of making everything perfect for everyone, there’s a lot of opportunity for emotional burnout.
Many people who report that they feel burned out have simply taken on too many responsibilities, either because of pressure from others or because of their own expectations. An overloaded social schedule combined with the demands of entertaining, gift shopping, decorating, and other holiday traditions can evoke panic in even the most organized people. Furthermore, family and other interpersonal conflicts often surface at holiday time, due both to individual differences in expectations for the holiday season and increased overall stress levels.
If you feel you're prone to holiday burnout, you can formulate an effective holiday stress management strategy with these four keys to avoiding holiday burnout:
1. Practice mindfulness.
When things get hard, we must try to accept and allow what is happening in the moment—this is the core of mindfulness. Blinders off, we can learn to observe what is happening and ride the wave of our feelings around that.
This is difficult work, so we tend to avoid it. We run in the other direction. We bury ourselves in work, get a drink to take the edge off, or turn our TV on to distract ourselves. We pretend we’re fine and we push through, thinking we’ve outsmarted our feelings. But the pain is still there, lingering, festering, ready to explode in the least opportune moment.
It’s important to practice mindfulness during less tumultuous times and learn to observe our thoughts and feelings when things are relatively easy. Then, once we build our mindfulness muscle, we can practice bringing it into more difficult moments to ride them out.
Don’t be afraid to feel your feelings—the more you resist the stronger they get. If you’re tend to get overwhelmed easily, plan ahead. Schedule time to feel bad, to rage, to cry, to talk to someone, to journal. Do it in a safe space and preferably with the support of a friend or a professional.
The goal is to feel whatever feelings you’re holding onto and release that pressure in a mindful way, so it doesn’t come out inappropriately (or misdirected) around the holiday table.
2. Validate your feelings.
Allowing, accepting, and validating your feelings is vital to emotional well-being. Whether it’s guilt, anger, or grief you are feeling, they have their place and are all valid. Neither good nor bad, our feelings are messengers—they inform us as we go about our lives. And we need to listen in.
Growing up in an invalidating environment, this was my weakest link. My feelings were never accepted, and I was often threatened to stop displaying them or I’d get in trouble. It was incredibly invalidating to have no one say, “I understand.” Instead, my displays of emotions were met with disdain, anger, and punishment. I learned to bury my feelings and disconnected from my emotional self.
As an adult, I kept looking to other to validate me. This was frustrating, and often left me feeling rejected, lonely, and insecure. Eventually, I learned to listen to my feelings and acknowledge that it was okay to feel the way I felt, that I had a right to feel this way, and that it made perfect sense I felt the way I did given what happened. I learned to allow my feelings to just be.
Let yourself feel and listen to what the feeling is trying to tell you. Maybe you need to apologize and repair a lost connection (guilt). Maybe it’s time to draw new boundaries to restore balance or protect your mental or physical well-being (anger). Maybe you need to accept that an important relationship failed and move on (grief).
Our feelings are there to guide us, to help us make the most informed decisions. The better we listen the faster we learn and recover.
3. Practice self-compassion and body-mind self-care.
We tend to revert back to our pre-programmed patterns and behaviors around our nuclear family, replaying our childhood roles and falling into habits we thought we shed long time ago. Don’t beat yourself up when this happens—it’s natural and your awareness of it is the first step to changing it. And we can start by putting ourselves first, practicing self-compassion, and taking care of our needs.
My programming was that of the perfect daughter/wife/mother who would bend over backwards to take care of everyone’s needs, to my own detriment. I neglected my own needs, both physically and emotionally. I planned elaborate menus, invited friends out of obligation, and tried to be everything for everyone: cheerful, helpful, supportive, forever patient and giving, saying “yes” to everyone but myself. It was physically and emotionally draining.
Through reflection, and a lot of journaling, I realized I was on a path of self-destruction. My overfunctioning was harming me both physically and emotionally, and I had to do something different. The one thing that made a huge difference was learning to put myself first and set healthy boundaries in my relationships with others.
It’s beautiful to have a giving personality and want to be there for others, but when we do that to our own detriment everyone suffers. Neglecting yourself is not a virtue. Everyone is responsible for their own feelings and needs—you can’t do this work for others. Your job is to take care of yourself, body, mind and heart. When you fill your own tank, you then can be there for others, but not before.
Don’t neglect yourself. Take a long, soothing bath or shower, walk your dog, eat protein-rich breakfast, spend time in solitude, bake your favorite cookies, reconnect with yourself though journaling and meditation, practice gratitude, learn to say “no,” reach out for support, take a nap. Pay attention to what you need and respond with love and nurturance.
And when you stumble, love yourself. When you make mistakes, talk too much, get sucked into family drama, lose your way—this is when it’s really important to love yourself anyway. Love your shadows and your imperfections remembering they once helped you survive. In time, you will transform them into strength, change, and growth.
4. Tap into your resilience.
You will be challenged around the holidays, that’s a given. Trust that you are strong enough to ride the waves of emotions mindfully. This shift in perspective will empower you to make better choices when faced with difficulty.
Before I built my resilience toolbox, I would get emotionally reactive to something as simple as mean comments, bickering children, or people being late, simply because I was under a lot of stress (a lot of it self-imposed).
With mindfulness, I learned to take a pause between trigger and my reaction. I watched as my body tensed, my heart started racing, and negative thoughts came rushing in. And I breathed through it, watching it change, and eventually pass. If it didn’t pass, I’d take some action to take me out of the situation and reset, like go for a walk. Or I’d ask myself, “What do I need right now?” and gave that to myself. Then, I could come back and respond, typically from a much calmer and supportive place.
Chose to be kind to yourself when you’re struggling. Learn few coping strategies you can employ in time of need: embrace yourself when you feel like falling apart, take five extra deep breaths to reset your nervous system, step outside to catch some fresh air, put headphones on and play your favorite resilience song really loud (mine is “Unstoppable” by Sia).
There are many things you can do to soothe your nervous system and strengthen your resilience muscle, practices that will help you explore, sort out, and process your emotions. Yoga, journaling, long walks, sitting in silence for five minutes every day, or dancing are all beneficial.
The point is to pay attention to your inner world, recognize when you’re struggling, and give yourself what you need to recover.
5. Avoid unhealthy coping mechanisms.
Temptations are always around—food, alcohol, binge-watching Netflix, scrolling social media, holiday shopping, etc. These are perfectly fine in moderation and often handy as a short-term break from the heaviness.
But we must be mindful of when we try to distract and numb ourselves in order to escape, because that only prolongs our suffering and delays the healing process. When we numb, we avoid vulnerability—the core of meaningful human experience—and we never resolve and move past our issues. Engage in your life consciously, be open, and accept what is. No more escaping. Trust that you are strong enough to walk through the pain and come out the other side.
Try to keep the whole experience in its proper perspective by remembering that the holiday season represents only a very short portion of the year, which will soon be at its end. Holiday time does not necessarily need to be the most important or meaningful time of the year. Only you can decide what is most significant for you. Realize that many others feel the same way as you and may also be experiencing disillusion, stress, or anxiety.
Reevaluate your priorities and determine how you will live your life to honor what is most important to you.
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Reference:
https://tinybuddha.com/blog/how-to-avoid-emotional-burnout-this-holiday-season/