In this episode…

We discuss specific Holiday Anxieties such as:

• Feeling like you’re behind schedule in gift-giving

• Worrying about your budget when it comes to gifts and festivities

• Creating a card, and ordering them, and sending them out

• The fear that the holidays will fly by and you’ll feel like you missed it

• Doubting whether it’s worth all the effort it takes to decorate and celebrate

• Worrying whether gift-recipients will feel adequately thought-of, considered, and loved by the gifts you give them

• Feeling the pressure to ‘make dreams come true’ – or at least to make reality look a little more like the romanticized, idealized Hallmark Movie Holidays™ – for loved ones

And here are the tips & thoughts we discuss, as countermeasures to all these anxieties:

Categorized by topic:

• Social Life

  • Accept that you might have to simply decline some holiday invitations in order to respect your own energy needs, relationships, and priorities

  • Consider scheduling and keeping appointments with yourself or your family, instead of filling up the calendar with other social invitations

  • Give yourself recovery time and recovery days in-between activities and responsibilities. For example, schedule a day with ‘nothing’ on it after returning from a trip, or after a big party or get-together

• Gift-Giving

  • In giving gifts, think about centering the thoughtfulness of it above the dollar price that you’ve paid for it

• Making ‘Dreams Come True’

  • Try to remember that bringing reality closer to some romanticized ideal involves more than arranging to somehow surround people with physical objects like gifts, decorations, and colorful sparkling edible treats. It includes the energetic presence you yourself are, and contribute, to relationships and social interactions: your attention, kindness, care, fun, peacefulness…whatever personal qualities you’ve been gifted to have by Life, to enjoy, and to offer to others.

• General Stress & Anxiety

  • You can try mini snack-sizes of intentional breathing or check-ins with yourself. Set an Alarm or Timer on your phone. (If it’s a Timer, maybe for every 3 or 4 hours or so.) And choose a soothing sound so when it goes off it doesn’t stress you out more. 😆 ‘Seedling’ is a nice one on iOS 17. You might find that the less-than-5-minutes it takes to do the breathing/check-in (check-in: stop everything except breathing and paying attention to your connection points with the ground/Earth, and the sensations in your body) buoys you, as you re-enter the fray that constitutes daily life in (sigh) late-stage capitalism.

And, here are links to the book Siena mentioned, First We Make The Beast Beautiful by Sarah Wilson: Amazon (affiliate link), Bookshop.org (non-affiliate link).