What follows is a list of suggestions to powerfully transform your Holiday Stress Season into one empty of any significant stress and full of laughter and appreciation of the things in your life.
3 Rules to Shift into a Peaceful Holiday Paradigm
Time Period: from the last week of November through to the end of second week of February (11 weeks total)
Rule 1: Pretend that people are [temporarily] clinically insane during the Holiday Season. This attitude counteracts how most people are on edge during the holidays and makes it impossible to take other people’s rudeness personally.
Background: If you are watching for it, you will see it every year. An almost insane irrationality and emotional reactivity is all too common in people during the Christmas Season. Raw emotions permeate the Season for many people. Perhaps the loss of a loved one and other tragedies are more prickly and painful and serve to "pre-stress" many people, making them more easily triggered into an emotional reaction that is almost certainly to be a disproportionate reaction. I’m not saying to run around telling others they are insane. I am saying the general population is more stressed than usual and that we should respond proactively to save everyone stress.
Rule 2: Lower your expectations of yourself [and especially others] to reduce unnecessary stress during the holidays.
Background: Stress is the result of the difference between Expectations and Acceptations. Something not obvious about expectations is that they give rise to the feeling of being judged and no one likes that feeling. Make allowances for extra patience with other people and yourself because most are under increased stressors in their life. It follows that their ‘performance’ will likely be lower across the board. If you are prepared for it, you won’t be stressed out from it.
People have been increasingly non-committal, breaking agreements more easily with increased excuses. Why? Because the amount of their stress has increased causing people to hesitate, change direction on a dime or get distracted easily. With this perspective in mind, it is easier to prepare yourself for this. The hard part is not to take it personally. It’s not you. Really.
Rule 3: Take an Action Step. Almost any will do. Action Steps require you to get up and move.
Background: One peculiar characteristic of stress is that it responds immediately to a physical step in which physical action and motion are involved. For example, taking a few deep breaths when getting tense and overwhelmed immediately decreases our stress experience and permits us to continue forward. Now, contrast this with most mental techniques and you'll notice they take some time to percolate into the desired effect(s). Action steps work because they activate preexisting circuitry that reliably generate solutions. Contrast that with a purely psychological approach and what you have is no trigger to initiate the process that finds solutions more easily. This is why taking an action step immediately is so powerful and is more effective than just talking about an issue/trauma.
Overwhelm and its Powerful Influence
As all my patients know, this ‘state of overwhelm’ mentally is fully controllable physically. My Calibration techniques restore the body’s ability to breathe well and sleep effectively too. To consistently feel refreshed by your sleep heals overwhelm by allowing you to have fresh energy mentally and physically. Yes, overwhelm is a fully healable state – even under austere circumstances. Overcoming overwhelm creates tremendous confidence because you know that no matter what life throws at you that you will quickly and fully recover.
Overwhelm is a state familiar to all animals and the brain circuitry involved in this deep reflex is ancient indeed. Anthropologists estimate this circuitry to be nearly half a billion years old. That means its ‘pull’ is powerful and has a seismic influence on our lives, our choices or decisions, our life path is often in relation to this circuitry. For example, most people in the Healing Arts are partly motivated by a tragedy or trauma they experienced in childhood. In my own case, I witnessed a lot of suffering as a child. I felt I could help in that regard, and here I am.
If you do find yourself in a state of overwhelm, my advice is to focus on one thing at a time. If you feel like you have too much to do, take a deep breath and say to yourself, “I have enough time to get everything done.” Then pick one thing on your list and do it. Maybe it’s wrapping an elephant gift for an office party or washing your favorite ugly Christmas sweater, start somewhere. Once you are able to cross something off your list, it will give you a rush of dopamine which produces motivation to get the next thing done. If you still need to shake off the heavy feeling, a leisurely 30-minute walk in fresh air will do you good.
Train Meditation to Clear Overwhelm and Confusion
Imagine you are standing by a set of train tracks, close enough so you can feel the wind of the train passing by but far enough that you feel safe. Pick a thought that is plaguing you and put it up on the side of a train car, give it reverence and watch it pass. Avoid analyzing feelings, just allow them space without judgement. Now, focus on the next thought and visualize it on the next train car. Repeat the same process and let the car pass. Continue with the next thought which might be "I need to make a shopping list for the holiday dinner." See it on the side of the train car, let it be there for a moment and then watch it go by. Keep this going for as many thoughts as you have cluttering your mind until no other thought comes up. The train is as long as you need it to be. By the time you've exhausted your mind as you let go of these thoughts, you will find that your mind is now empty and calm, allowing you to relax and even fall into a slumber if the time is right. You can do this mediation anytime you feel overwhelmed or confused.
Memory Anchor Connection
As a boy, I grew up around a lake. The lake had a very distinct, unmistakable, and pleasant odor or scent. Every few years or so I will catch a whiff that reminds me of my adventures as a boy around (and in) the lake. Those memories were saturated with the odor of the lake both literally and figuratively. Thus, each of many components (visual, sound, tactile, etc.) to associative memory is itself an ‘anchor.’
We all operate on ‘memory association’ – a sort of edict on the structure of memory and how they are formed by being connected to at least one anchor that in some way is recognized to have or bear some connection to the item(s) being committed to memory. The smells of the lake triggered the memories of the adventures. We experience multiple inputs in the form of visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile, or kinetic, etc. which themselves create a lattice work structure for memory construction within us.
Memory associations can have negative affects as well as positive ones. A person can get triggered by a particular memory or smell which can cause an adverse feeling or reaction. The more traumatic the memory and/or higher the level of background stress, the bigger the reaction. The goal should be to move into action immediately (Rule 3). As these feelings come up, remind yourself that what you are experiencing is something that occurred in the past. Begin our TRM anti-stress Trumpet Breathing Technique. Give your body permission to relax - physically relax - and ground yourself in the present. Grounding techniques may include walking on green grass in your bare feet or leaning up against a large trunk of a tree. Allow yourself to take the time to reorient yourself in the current time and space. Acknowledge the memory and then imagine it being blown away by the wind like a balloon you gently let go of.
I hope that these rules and realizations help you through any tough times that arise this holiday season. Make a great effort to enjoy time with your loved ones. You never know when you will embrace them again.
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