The holiday season is upon us! 🦃🍗🛍️🎄🎁
Halloween has come and gone. Now, Thanksgiving is zooming up quickly! And before the turkey leftovers are even put away, Christmas arrives in full force!😳
Before you get overwhelmed, let’s stop and breathe.🧘🏻♀️
I’m going to share some quick and easy self care tips that are actually doable. These will help you get through the stressful holiday season without completely losing your mind.🤪
Come back here each week, and I’ll have a new tip dropped and ready for you!😉
Some people (and stores🙄) skip right from Halloween to Christmas. Personally, I wait until the weekend after Thanksgiving to put up my Christmas decorations. But: You do you! I won’t judge you if putting up your Christmas decorations on November 1st makes you happy!
Now let’s talk about holiday self care.
This one is sooooo easy. Are you ready?!
Just BREATHE!
Did you know that when we start feeling stress and negative emotions, our breath gets shallow and more rapid? And that causes us to feel even more stress! We get into an endless downward spiral.😔
So…just breathe.
When you start to feel the stress building (or even if you’re already deep into that spiral):
*Sit up straight or stand up tall
*Slowly inhale through your nose (try to fill your belly)
*Then slowly exhale through your mouth (go ahead and make some noise!)
*Once you have completely exhaled, just repeat
*Slowly inhale through your nose (each time you should be able to breathe in deeper)
*Again exhaling through your mouth
After 3-5 rounds, you might try exhaling through your nose. For me, after a few exhalations through my mouth (with loud sighs), I find that I’m ready for the more peaceful nose exhalations.
You will be so surprised at how much just breathing helps when you start feeling out of control. Now, there are many variations of breathing techniques out there. I encourage you to check some out. You might find one technique works better for you in certain situations.
The best thing about THIS holiday self care tip is that it can literally be done ANYWHERE! (Ok, if you’re in public, you might want to skip the loud sighs with your exhalations.😆) And it’s not just a holiday tip, but one that you can take with you all year long.
The key is reminding yourself to do it. So stop and practice your breathing from time to time…even when you’re NOT stressed. This will help it become routine to you, which makes it easier to remember when you really need it.
