Tips to Manage Your Mental Health During the Holiday Season 

As the year draws to a close and the holiday season approaches, I often encounter clients dealing with a range of emotions. While it’s a time of excitement and anticipation, it can also be a period of stress and anxiety. There’s an inherent expectation to enjoy the holidays and be content, but it’s also important to recognize that the season can be overwhelming. With all the socializing, gift-giving, and traveling involved, it’s crucial to prioritize your mental well-being during this time. Here are 5 Ways to manage mental health during the holiday season 

Set Boundaries 

Setting boundaries can be hard and can make us feel awkward at times, especially with friends and family. But in the long run, boundaries are essential to manage stress and anxiety that come with the holiday season. We do not set boundaries for other people, but we do so to protect our own peace and well-being. The holiday season can include many family gatherings, which can bring up tension, old patterns, and uncomfortable topics. Hence, it is okay to set boundaries around topics of conversation, how long you can stay with family and friends, financial responsibilities, gift giving, and how much emotional energy you can handle. 

Example of Setting Boundaries Around Difficult Topics 

In the current times, political discussions and conversations are hot topics that often come up during family gatherings. Hence, you can set boundaries surrounding such conversations in the following ways.

• You can simply excuse yourself from the conversation and join a separate conversation.
• If the conversation makes you uncomfortable, you can say something like this: “Political topics are always stressful, and there is a right time and place to talk about them. Can we talk about something less stressful? How about travel plans for the new year?” 

Prioritize Self-Care

The holiday season can be quite demanding, and we often want to make everyone around us happy and satisfied. However, it is important that you take care of yourself physically and mentally. This will help you be more present in festivities and enjoy them in a meaningful and manageable way. 

Below are some ways through which you can prioritize your self-care

• Engage in your hobbies: If you feel stressed or overwhelmed, make sure to engage in your hobbies like listening to music, reading, engaging in your favorite workout or yoga classes, and many more. Whatever brings you joy and calmness would be your hobby, and it is important to engage in it. 
• Say ‘No’: During the holiday season, we often struggle to say ‘No’ and end up feeling pressured to say yes to every plan. However, I want to normalize saying ‘No’ to plans you can’t manage. If there is any plan that brings anxiety, stress, and discomfort rather than joy, then it is important to give yourself grace and permission to decline the invitation. Most importantly, you do not have to always give a reason for saying ‘No’ to an invitation. You can politely decline and say, ‘I would love to, but unfortunately I will not be able to make it, ‘ or you can say, “Thank you for thinking of me- I appreciate it, but I won’t be able to make it. I hope you will enjoy and have fun”.
• Eat and Drink Intentionally: It’s not about restricting calories necessarily, but to make sure you have balanced meals by eating regularly and staying hydrated. A balanced diet during the holiday season will help you to feel less bloated, and you can enjoy all the holiday delicacies. 

Do Not Be Trapped In the Notion of ‘Perfect Holiday Season’ 

There is no ‘perfect holiday’, rather everyone’s holiday season is unique and different in its own way. We often face the pressure of having a flawless holiday season accompanied by perfect gifts, perfect planning, and perfect meals, which often converts the joyful season into a season of stress and exhaustion. A perfect holiday season is, in fact, a myth that gets portrayed in movies and on social media. In reality, our life is much more meaningful and even messier at times. However, when we run for perfection, we miss the beauty of spontaneity and genuine connection. Therefore, when you let go of the unrealistic expectations of making the perfect holiday season, you prepare yourself to be more present in the way things are rather than focusing on how things should be. A true holiday season is based on you being your authentic self and creating a safe space where you have the freedom to show up the way you want to. 

Plan your Finances 

Managing finances during the holiday season can seem overwhelming. The holiday season often brings in the pressure to overspend in buying gifts for people, hosting, and traveling, and it often comes at the expense of your financial stability and peace of mind. Hence, it is important to engage in financial planning by creating a realistic budget, which can help you ease out your anxiety and make you feel more prepared for the holiday season. The first step would be identifying and prioritizing non-negotiable costs and expenses like housing costs, utilities, groceries, insurance premiums, etc. Once you have done this, you can plan out your finances to set spending limits on gifts, outings, and travel. It can also help to make a list of how many people you plan to give gifts to and how much money you will spend on each person. 

Prioritizing meaningful, practical, and thoughtful gifts over costly purchases can significantly help to ease the financial pressure. It is important to know that financial planning is not about restriction, but rather to make you feel prepared by giving yourself the freedom to enjoy the season without worrying about your finances as you enter the new year. 

Asking for Help 

We need to normalize asking for help during the holiday season. Asking for help is not a sign of weakness but rather of humility, self-awareness, and healthy interdependence. We do not have to figure out all things by ourselves, but we are allowed to give ourselves permission to seek help and support from others. We can seek help in many different ways, like asking a friend or family member to share the workload or even reaching out to your friends for emotional support. 

For some of us, asking for help may also include connecting to a therapist to better manage our mental health during this season. Whatever asking for help may look like for each of us, we must normalize seeking it during this season so that we can transform the holiday season from silent struggles and battles to shared responsibilities and genuine connection.