As December starts, the pressure begins to build up. Are you someone who LOVES all the activities, the socialising, the cooking and present-buying, or are you someone who dreads this time of year and has stress about Christmas?

Maybe you have difficult or complicated relationships with your family? Maybe you set very high expectations for yourself to produce “the best Christmas EVER!” and beat yourself up when you fail to reach those goals? Maybe you look longingly at others’ plans because you feel lost and alone? Maybe you feel torn between work and family and their competing demands and feel as though you fail at both? Or perhaps Christmas brings up strong emotions of people you have lost from your life and of what might have been.

Whatever worries you about this time of year, there are some ways of managing your thoughts and emotions that could enable you to have a more peaceful and relaxed time this year.

Dealing with family tensions

This can be one of the most challenging issues for many people. It’s important to remember that we can, mostly, only change our own thinking and our own responses. Trying to change what other people do might be possible, but can’t be guaranteed, so what can you do to change your response?

If you find that you are looking out for the usual comments that upset you, for example, or the behaviour that winds you up, how about making a conscious decision to step back from those emotions? The person who is most affected is you.

Why not try:

• Taking some time to practise relaxation or mindfulness immediately prior to going into the family time, so that you are relaxed and mentally resilient
• Make a mental game out of those annoying comments by imagining a bingo card in your head and mentally tick them off, with an internal smile, when you notice your relative brings them up
• Think about your own responses to your family –  do you regress to your adolescent self in your family’s company? – and consider whether you can change that
• Find a simple breathing technique that helps you to calm down and remember you can always disappear to the bathroom for five minutes of calm
• Consider whether you take things too personally. Is that comment really about you? Or is that just the way that relative talks to everyone?
• Don’t bring up old issues or problems from the past. Will it make you feel better to go over old ground again? Practising techniques to let go of unhelpful thoughts and worries can be really useful and I have a recording of an exercise like this on the home page that you can try
• When you notice your tension building, take a breather, maybe outside if you can, notice the colours, listen out for the sounds, what textures can you feel, what can you smell? Connecting with your senses can ground you in the moment

Everything has to be PERFECT!

I’ve learned over the years that I’ll never get around to making my house perfect for Christmas. There are just too many other people who live there, making it untidy, and too many extra tasks to complete to find the time. I would like my house to be wonderfully tidy and festively decorated, but I’m not going to lose sleep because I bought the mince pies from a shop, rather than made them by hand. I know of someone who hosts a regular Christmas drinks party for all her friends and she will stay up for hours the night before sorting out that mountain of Lego that her children left, yet, when the time comes and the guests have arrived, she will spend the first hour rolling out pastry and handmaking mince pies! Wouldn’t it be better to have bought mince pies, stuffed the Lego into a box and spend more time enjoying the company of her friends?

What can help is to notice when we are putting extremely high expectations on ourselves and learn how to step back from the brink. Focus on what will make us the happiest and give us the most joy.

Why not try:

• Make a list of everything you would like to get done. Separate the tasks into important and urgent, important and not urgent, not important and urgent, not important and not urgent. Then you can prioritise doing the important and urgent tasks and work out what to delegate. Everything that is not important and not urgent probably can be forgotten!
•  Who will be judging you if everything isn’t perfect? Your guests, or yourself? If you are honest, most of the judging we worry about is our own judgement. Learn to get it go.
• Practise flexibility. You might prefer that everything is perfect, but is it essential? What can you cut back on, what will never be missed?

In a few days I’m going to be providing some advice on how to cope with the emotional challenges and stress about Christmas at this time of year and how to deal with practical problems such as timing. Stay tuned