You hear it every year – the holidays are stressful! But why do these “happy” holidays feel stressful at times? Between family gatherings, gift shopping, hosting events, and everything else that comes with the season, it’s easy to ignore stress until it feels too big to handle. Taking care of yourself and your mental health during the holidays is crucial to stepping out of anxious habit loops and getting to enjoy your life.
We can work with holiday stress and anxiety the same way we work with any habit: becoming aware of the trigger, behavior, and result behind the habit and leaning into behaviors that feel more helpful. We refer to the trigger, behavior, and result behind a habit as the habit loop. Let’s map out the holiday stress habit loop together.
Identify the trigger or the behavior
We begin mapping habit loops by identifying the trigger that initiates the stress cycle. The trigger for holiday stress may be attending an upcoming party, picking out gifts, or hosting family and friends. While these activities alone don’t equate to stress, our behaviors or attitudes towards them can cause the holiday stress cycle to begin. Sometimes, we don’t recognize the trigger until we’ve spent time in the behavior.
Understanding our behaviors
Our behavior is how we respond to the trigger. This could be anything from feeling overwhelmed about that upcoming party, procrastinating gift buying, worrying about the affordability of gifts, or maybe feeling irritable prepping to host family or friends. Becoming aware of behaviors like worry, procrastination, irritability, or isolation is essential for managing holiday stress rather than avoiding or being overwhelmed by it. One way we can tap into awareness around our behaviors is through a mindfulness exercise, such as RAIN.
Try this RAIN practice to simply note the behavior without judgement. Mindfulness exercises can help separate ourselves from the habit and look at it through a lens of kindness and compassion.
- Recognize that this is a habit
- Allow or Accept the experience as it is
- Investigate with curiosity
- Note what is happening without trying to change it
Recognizing the results
Finally, we have the result of the stress habit. To understand the result, we ask ourselves, “what am I getting from this behavior?” When worrying about a holiday activity, take a few deep breaths and focus on what worry feels like in your body and mind – do you feel tension or clenching, or maybe overwhelmed or anxious? When we don’t become aware of our habits and how they make us feel, anxiety and stress habits can provide a false sense of control. For example, worrying about an upcoming social gathering and constantly combing through all the details may feel like you’re getting rid of all the things you could possibly worry about, when in fact the worry is keeping you in this cycle of stress.
Stress habits may also act as a distraction so that we can stay on autopilot and ignore what our body is trying to tell us. Say you’ve been shopping non-stop trying to find the perfect gifts, but by being on autopilot, you haven’t noticed your heart racing from stress or an emptiness in your stomach because you’ve forgotten to eat.
The result can also be external – how does my behavior impact those around me?
Really seeing the result of how unhelpful habits make us feel AND how these habits make others feel helps us shift the habit. Mapping habit loops and recognizing the results of our habits trains our brain that we may not want to engage in that unhelpful behavior anymore.
How do we step out of the holiday stress habit loop?
Mapping out your habit loop around holiday stress is a powerful place to start. Once we become aware of our habits, we can work with them. As you notice anxiety or stress habits and recognize what you’re getting from those habits, you can step out of these habit loops by asking yourself, “what do I need in this moment?” By practicing short moments of mindfulness many times, we naturally gravitate towards helpful habits over unhelpful ones.
Breaking the cycle of stress and anxiety takes practice, and Unwinding Anxiety is here to help. Join the evidence-based program to receive guided lessons, anxiety tools, community support, and help from habit change experts to learn how to work with stress, not against it.
