Episode Description:
Feeling stressed and anxious after the holidays? You're not alone! Coach Megan Devito shares her personal experience with holiday overwhelm and shares tips on how to handle holiday stress and anxiety and how to bounce back from setbacks.
In this episode, you'll learn:
How to identify your stress triggers
The importance of self-care to combat anxiety
How to challenge negative thoughts and build resilience
Why setbacks are a normal part of the anxiety recovery process
Even if you had a few "off-track" moments during the holidays or anytime throughout the year, this episode empowers you to get back on track and create a more peaceful life.
Enjoy the Episode.
Podcast Transcript: How To Handle Holiday Stress
Welcome to the More Than Anxiety Podcast. I'm Megan Devito, and I am the Life Coach for women and teenagers living with anxiety who want more out of life. I'm here to help you create a life you love to live, where anxiety Isn't holding you back. Get ready for a light hearted approach to managing anxiety through actionable steps, a lot of truth talk and inspiration to take action so you walk away feeling confident in your ability to live a life that sets your heart on fire. Let's do this.
Welcome to Episode 21 Of the More Than Anxiety Podcast. I'm recording this episode mid January of 2023, so if you're not listening when this episode debuts, hello from the past. It's been a busy kickoff to the year for me up until this past week, I'm finally getting my groove back. Finally getting back into my normal routine. My kids are back at college or they're back at school, I've got a quiet house for the most part, which means I can coach without distraction. And I can record podcasts without distraction. And try and get the laundry done. And stay up on the things that make me feel good about how my day is going, because the holidays have this way of totally messing those things up for me, even with my best intentions of staying on track. I did a pretty good job this year of staying mostly on track, but things had to shift to make way for fun and I don't really have any regrets about that. But in the middle of all the fun COVID also came back to my house, so I was busy rearranging schedules and trying to disinfect, and keep people away from everyone else so that we could actually have Santa and presets and family fun, which ended up working out, but not until New Year's Day. It was great; we just made the holidays last a little bit longer. It was fun and I loved it. And I got to be mom and Santa, and like a really fun aunt, and a good sister, hopefully, all the things that I wanted to do. I loved it, but I also love my return to normalcy. So I feel really good about recording this in a quiet house this morning. Since I work from home, I really need this quiet house so that I can focus because when I start to get stressed out or anxious, which I also felt over the holidays, my focus disappears. It's really this push and pull. And that's a lot what I'm going to share with you in this episodes.
One of the most obvious things that I notice when I'm out of my routine, other than being less focused, is that my stress level and my anxiety level do go up. Since I'm doing things at different times during the day, things get forgotten or pushed aside and I remember later. Maybe I'm running late on something or I completely forgot to do something I needed to do and I get stressed out. And it's only natural that when I feel stressed, my whole body feels off. I'm guessing you probably know that feeling to you're listening to a podcast about stress and anxiety, so this probably sounds pretty familiar. I know this feeling Isn't a problem. I know what's going on. I know I've probably got some adrenaline and some cortisol running through my veins. I know my brain is saying, "Megan, it is 10 o'clock and at 10 o'clock, you should be doing these things, not these things." Remember, your brain doesn't like change. It likes organizational routines, which is why routines are so powerful when you feel anxious. And when you're not following those routines, your body and your brain will let you know something Isn't right. So pulling myself back on track, while I talk about being on track gave me a little shove into feeling anxious, and it also helped me create this podcast. So no, not anxious and stressed to the level that I was in the past by any means back when I had some major disordered anxiety around my health, but feeling like something wasn't right. And then my brain scrambling to figure out what that was, and my body giving me all the signals that I needed to solve for something that wasn't wrong. I just noticed it. I knew it was normal, and it wasn't a problem. In this episode, I'm sharing how you can handle those setbacks; the really the big intense ones that knock you off your feet, and the little ones that are more annoying and distracting than anything else, like the ones I experienced over the holidays.
In the past I've compared managing anxiety or anxiety recovery, whatever you want to call it, to a graph of the stock market. It's very jagged, it's up and down and up and down and up and down. It's not like a gentle rolling hill. It's pretty, it's pretty dramatic. You're going to have good days, and you're going to have bad days when you're learning to manage anxiety so that those ups and downs don't mean much. It might feel really scary in the beginning, when you're just learning how to sit with those anxious feelings and still feel afraid of the thoughts, or you don't know if you can actually get to a place where you feel truly capable of feeling good. It can be scary. You can feel like a failure, and that 'this is the major problem', and 'I'm never, I'm never getting anywhere.' But that's not true. You may have had several really good days or even weeks in a row, and you think you're never going to feel it again. Or maybe if you do feel it again, you just won't notice. That's not true. Since anxiety happens to everyone and everyone has equal parts good and garbage in their lives, it just makes sense that you will experience anxiety in your life from time to time and that's a good thing. Anxiety is meant to keep you safe and aware of your surroundings and there's a healthy motivating aspect to anxiety. Feeling anxious, can get you to take that job that seems a little bit scary. Feeling anxious can get you to say 'yes', when someone asks you to marry them. Feeling anxious can get you to go on that big trip to the other side of the world. That's great anxiety. Anxiety that's a problem is anxiety that starts to take over your life and starts to determine what you do and what you don't do. So whether you have a big intense setback, or a little mild one, everything is fine.
Because I recognize that my anxiety was feeling a little more noticeable during the holidays, I had to stop and see what the heck is going on. And here's the truth, I ate a lot of cookies, I drank more wine, I changed my workout schedule, I was busy taking care of a house full of sick people, while trying to make Christmas magic and not get sick myself; which by the way I never did. I was tired, my diet changed, and my emotions were pretty well rocked with all of this mom feelings. And if you are not a mom of adult children who still love Christmas, and you're trying to make all the magic, and you see them as they're five, but you also realize they're 22, and they could move to another state in a minute... It's a lot! I had all the thoughts about my babies being adults and moving away. And, you know, my brain went down that rabbit hole. It just made sense to me then and now that I was more on edge because I was doing all the things that can make the least anx, anxious person in the world feel stressed out. I didn't like it, but it also didn't really do anything to change my routine back to normal because it was fun and that was a choice I made in order to really enjoy the holidays and eat more cookies. And it was totally worth it to me.
Take a second and really think about the things that you know cause you to feel anxious. Do you know your triggers? Do you know what gets you to a point where your body's off kilter? This is super important. This is the very first step that I go through whenever I'm coaching someone. Do you know what anxiety feels like in your body and do you know how it got there? Whether your brain notices or not, your body senses danger and floods you with hormones to make you faster, stronger and unable to think. The whole point of this is for you to escape, to stay alive, and to stay safe. That's all your brain is trying to do ever. So whether it's something that you're doing differently -maybe it's a new experience, or there's an old trigger, your body did its thing to get you ready to fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. It's still good at it. Here's what happens. Picture your brain taking little tiny Polaroid photos. Do you know those strings that you can get - like string lights with the little clips on them? You can use them to decorate bedrooms, or like party like party decorations. If you can picture your brain taking a Polaroid picture of everything that's ever been perceived as dangerous, or something that's going to cause you to be hurt. Something that might make you end up alone. Anything that would be a threat to your survival. Take a little Polaroid picture and it hangs it up. And it says we're not forgetting that one. Because you create this hormone response, you get the cortisol, you get the adrenaline, you respond to it, your brain says, "Good, we dodged that bullet. Next time, we'll do it faster." So every time your brain perceives something that it could even remotely attached to that little Polaroid memory, that pretend Polaroid picture that's in your brain, it will respond in the same way. This is why strange things can make you feel anxious. You might be like, I don't know, I've never been in this situation before. Your brains just perceiving it as a threat, but it remembers those threats and it stores them in your body. It's really good at this, and your brain is super fast at flooding your body with those hormones before you ever have a chance to figure out what's going on sometimes.
Now I want you to take a minute and consider what might have made a particular feeling happen in your nervous system. Was there a change? So there's a few common threads that are notorious for this; big huge changes aside. These are great places to start when you feel anxious out of the blue. Sometimes we just change our schedules because life happens. Are you sleeping enough? And are you sleeping well? If you're not, what changed? Are you staying up later to watch Netflix? Give that some thought? How about what you're eating? Are you eating more sugar? Are you drinking more coffee or more alcohol? If that was the case in the past, does this feeling feel familiar? It could be as simple as something you're eating? Or are you drinking enough water? Do you know how your body feels when you're dehydrated? It feels a lot like anxiety. You can get shaky and not be able to think clearly. It can mess with your blood pressure and make you feel dizzy. Are you exercising? What made you stop? If that's something that you used to do that helped, or did you start exercising and because your heart was beating a little faster, it made you feel anxious, because that can also happen. Exercising is fantastic to lower your anxiety levels, but you have to learn to not be sensitive to cortisol because if you work out hard, your body produces cortisol. That feels like a catch 22. It feels unfair. You can get through that - that's not a problem. I help people with that all the time. Are you overscheduled? Where are you spending your time and what is stealing your time? Is it stressing you out? Do you need to learn to say no? Or do you need to learn to say yes? Did you have a hormone shift? It could be age related or it could be that you just had a baby or maybe you had surgery. Hormone shifts are notorious for messing with people's anxiety levels and if you're exhausted, eating differently, and stressed out about taking care of a baby, that also makes sense. So whatever it is that pushed your body to feel anxious, and all of those things certainly can do that, and especially if those things are working together. If you just had a baby, and you're not sleeping, then you have hormones and sleep. If you're on vacation to a different timezone; like maybe you went to Europe from the United States, so you're not sleeping enough, you're eating different foods. Maybe your workout got pushed to the side. All of those things can work together. That's normal. We just have to learn to manage it and to let it go so that it doesn't become a problem. All you did was lose your balance. And you can stand up again.
This is a perfect spot to be at. This is when you remind yourself that you can't have a setback if you never made progress. Having a setback, when you're already low, and you've never moved forward isn't a setback, it's just moving further backward. But if you had good days, and you're like, 'why have I felt like crap for the last few days'... because you're human. You also are in a powerful new position here to practice showing yourself that you have everything you need to let how you feel and what you think the thoughts or the feelings that are going on in your body be a non issue. At this point, you know what feels good and you know what it feels like to be anxious. Even though it's not something you want to do again, even if you have to panic, or you have a bunch of scary thoughts, you have proof that you're okay. You've been okay every single time in the past that you've been anxious. You've felt bad, and you've been scared, but you made it through. You have proof. You also know that when you're anxious, it's just your brain working overtime because it thinks something is dangerous or wrong. Neither of those things is true. You hold all the cards in this position and this low spot or this anxious time period is only part of the process. It's a change. It's a chance to practice recentering and showing yourself who's boss.
This is how it's done. You go back to what works. Find what got out of alignment, and go back into alignment. Think about all the things you've done in the past that have moved you to a point where you started to notice that you felt better. Maybe you learned that taking a walk was a huge relief. Maybe you laughed off your thoughts in the past, and that felt incredibly powerful. Maybe it's singing in the car until your body settles down. Did you guys know that humming actually is soothing for the vagus nerve? So if you sit and just hmmmmm, that actually stimulates that nerve and can lower your stress and anxiety levels. Hum. Maybe it's talking to your anxiety; and yes, even out loud. You can have a full conversation with your anxiety. I've done it. My kids have caught me doing it and it's perfectly fine. Just keep talking.
Even better, though you also know what not to do, you are probably going to notice that you have those same old urges coming back to you. So you might start to feel like you need to Google something and you might have broken that habit a long time ago of looking up symptoms or statistics. Maybe you're feeling like you need to avoid things that you finally started going to again; that's okay. Those Polaroid pictures of how to react are in your brain. Your brain doesn't just throw those pictures away. It keeps them because it's going to try and keep you safe and alive forever. They're still in there and you could notice that you want to go back to your old habits. It's not a problem. Take a deep breath, exhale, and exhale and exhale. Further, further further. Breathe in slow and make a choice. You have everything you need to keep choosing to do the things that work even when the feelings are bigger than they have been in a while. Think of this as a chance To refresh your skills, or maybe it's the perfect time to look over your life and see what needs attention. What thoughts are you having that need to be addressed? What feels off in your life that has to be pulled back. Even though you feel anxious, nothing serious has changed that you cannot address and fix. And there may not be anything at all to fix - it might just mean you need to go to sleep earlier.
As you continue to recover, and you have a lot more good days than anxious days, it's important to remind yourself that this is what you worked so hard to achieve! It has never been about never feeling anxious or stressed out again. That isn't how life works. You are a human being and you are having a human experience; that includes the very best days and the very worst days. If you only had good days, how would you even know? The bad days give you a reason to celebrate those great days. And the good days gives you a reason to keep moving forward so that when you feel sad or stressed out or anxious, you know where you're headed; you know where you want to get. Congratulations, you're living a full humans spectrum of ups and downs. Keep taking steps toward what comes next.
As you move towards feeling more confident, like "Okay, I got this! I can do this again" you'll have more peace and you're gonna have more fun...and fun is the opposite of anxious. If you're ready to go bigger and take this new confident you to the next level, I'm here to help. There is so much waiting for you that was put on the backburner for far too long while anxiety and stress was running your life, this is the perfect time to intentionally take the next step toward whatever else you want to see in your life. Whatever it is, from feeling more confident, to changing jobs, to taking a big vacation, getting to know yourself better, I'm here for it, schedule a call with me and let's talk about how you can use the resilience and the skills that you've got so far. That got you to where you are through this setback and forward. And let's create more amazing things together. The world needs all of you. So let's let that mother out. Go to megandevito.com/workwithme. And I'll talk to you again next week.
I hope you've enjoyed this episode of The More Than Anxiety podcast. Be sure to subscribe and leave a review so others can easily find this resource as well. And of course when you're ready to explore coaching with me, jump to the show notes. Click the link and scheduled time for us to talk. See you soon.
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