5 Easy Ways to Beat the Blues and Feel Joyous this Holiday Season
by Lynn Serafinn, MAED, CPCC
SO sorry this is late! I actually thought I had posted it before Christmas. So, you’ll be getting 2 posts back-to-back, one today, one tomorrow.
Today we continue our series of tips to help you beat the blues over the holidays:
- Holiday Blues Number 1: Seasonal Affective Disorder (“SAD”) posted 6 December
- Holiday Blues Number 2: Seasonal Illnessess, posted 10 Dec
- Holiday Blues Number 3: Family “Dramas” (in today’s post)
- Holiday Blues Number 4: Stress over Money (coming Monday 28 December)
- Holiday Blues Number 5: Feelings of Isolation (coming Thursday 31 December)
TIP: If you want to receive all 5 articles, be sure to subscribe to this blog in the box on the right hand side of your screen.
Surviving Family Dramas during the Holiday Season
For many people, visiting with relatives during the holidays is a wonderful experience, because it allows them to reconnect with loved ones they might not ordinarily see during the rest of the year. But for many others, visiting with parents, siblings and extended family can bring out the worst in us. It’s as if we’ve travelled back in time. We might be the most powerful and respected person in our professional life, but somehow when we are around our childhood families, we change into blithering idiots. By dint of some inexplicable time-warp, we get caught up in the age-old “family dramas” that drive us absolutely batty and leave such a horrible aftertaste when we go back home to our “adult” world. Within minutes, we manage to regress into a juvenile version of ourselves that never shows up under any other circumstances. But what is worse is that we find it nearly impossible to get out of the age-old scripts we have played out since our youth.
Small wonder why I chose to speak about this in a Holiday Survival Guide!
Getting “hooked” into a role
When we get stuck into a family drama, I call it being “hooked.” The reason why we get hooked into our family dramas lies in the term “drama” itself. Think of what a drama is. It’s not merely a judgemental word; it’s actually a very accurate description of what is taking place. A drama is a complex story with complex characters. And our family dramas are no different. When we are hooked, it means we have taken on the role of one of these characters. And, yes, there are cliché roles in which people tend to be cast. Continue Reading…
Posted 7 months ago at 22:16. 1 comment
5 Easy Ways to Beat the Blues and Feel Joyous this Holiday Season
by Lynn Serafinn, MAED, CPCC
Today we continue our series of tips to help you beat the blues over the holidays:
- Holiday Blues Number 1: Seasonal Affective Disorder (“SAD”) posted 6 December
- Holiday Blues Number 2: Seasonal Illnesses (in today’s post)
- Holiday Blues Number 3: Family “Dramas” (coming Sat 12 December)
- Holiday Blues Number 4: Stress over Money (coming Tues 15 December)
- Holiday Blues Number 5: Feelings of Isolation (coming Fri 18 December)
TIP: If you want to receive all 5 articles, be sure to subscribe to this blog in the box on the right hand side of your screen.
Beating Holiday Blues Number 2: Seasonal illnesses
In Part 1, we looked at SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder). In today’s instalment of my “Holiday Survival Guide”, we’ll look at beating the holiday blues of seasonal illnesses like colds and flu.
Ok. I admit. There is nothing that makes us feel more “blue” than getting ill, especially during the holidays when we are supposed to be having fun (aren’t’ we?). There has indeed been an awful lot of flu going around this year (I had swine flu in September myself), over and above the usual seasonal flu. But what makes the flu season even worse is the fact that during the holiday season, we tend to compromise our body’s immune system to an extreme by: Continue Reading…
Posted 7 months, 3 weeks ago at 19:15. Add a comment
5 Easy Ways to Beat the Blues and Feel Joyous this Holiday Season
by Lynn Serafinn, MAED, CPCC
Author Patrick Dennis somewhat sarcastically referred to the winter holidays as “The Joyous Season” in his 1960s book of the same name. Most of us inwardly believe that Christmas and the winter holidays are indeed meant to be joyous. But in actuality, many people have a rough time during the holiday season, for many reasons.
Because the holidays seem to be such challenging and sometimes transitional periods in our lives, this month I decided to have a look at what I think are the “Top 5 Blues” that affect so many people during the holidays, along with why we get them, and how to turn them around into Joy. Here are the top 5 that came to mind:
Over the next 12 days, I’ll be examining each of these “blue areas”, give you some tips from other great thinkers, and offer a few of my own suggestions for turning the winter “blues” into cheery multi-coloured mind-body-spirit holiday sparkles. Today, I’ll be talking about SAD– Seasonal Affective Disorder. The findings might surprise you!
Beating Holiday Blues Number 1: Seasonal Affective Disorder (“SAD”).
SAD is a condition that affects some people during the winter months causing them to feel a bit blue, low in energy, or basically “down in the dumps.” But what causes it? Continue Reading…
Posted 7 months, 3 weeks ago at 22:48. Add a comment
