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Five
Tips to survive the Holidays
Newswise — Finally! It’s the holiday season!
We get a break from work, visit family,
watch football games, eat great food.
And the other time-honored tradition: we get
to stress out. And with unemployment across
the country rising, many people might truly
have a blue, blue Christmas.
“When someone becomes stressed they’re
experiencing an age-old, very normal
reaction to the perception of some sort of
threat,” says Dr. Jonathan Abramowitz, an
expert in anxiety disorders and professor of
psychiatry and psychology in the University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of
Medicine and College of Arts & Sciences.
“Your heart races, your chest gets tight,
you start to sweat. There are catastrophic
thoughts: ‘Oh, no! What’s going to happen?’
And then we act – it’s the fight-or-flight
response,” Abramowitz says. “At its heart
these are normal and adaptive behaviors.”
Stress, anxiety, depression and anger all
are caused by certain patterns of thinking.
“When we get angry, we’re telling ourselves
that things must or should go a certain way,
or other people must or should behave
certain ways.
With the economy, we might be thinking that
we have to buy gifts or go on vacation or
travel to see family.
But, Abramowitz says, it’s the way we think
about things that dictate our emotions.
“If we’re thinking, ‘ I have to buy gifts
for everyone. We signed up to take this big
vacation, we have to travel.’ Those set us
up to be let down.
So, what are we to do?
• First, identify what the trigger is – a
relative’s comment or the thought of a
departed loved one – recognize how it makes
you feel and slow down your thought process
to keep your emotions from going 0 to 100 in
5 seconds flat.
• Put expectations into perspective – lower
them; the holidays do not have to be
perfect.
• Think of yourself first; we cannot control
what others do or say but we can change the
way we think about things.
• Limit demands and ultimatums; replace
“should,” “must” and “have to” with “I
wish,” “maybe” and “my preference is ...”
• Remember the holidays are temporary;
January is right around the corner.
We don’t have to like the holidays, and they
might not be stress free, but going into
them thinking, ‘This is temporary, I can get
through this,’ instead of “Oh, God, this is
going to be awful,’ prepares you to get
through them,” Abramowitz says.
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