The holidays can be a wonderful time of the year. And they can also be an incredibly stressful, grief-stricken time of the year. As we are go into this December break, we are sharing some coping mechanisms to help keep you regulated and make the most of the time off.

Oftentimes, people will talk about someone being “irrational” or being “too emotional” in a way that discounts the purpose and function of emotions. We might also do this to ourselves. But there are problems with being in both emotion mind and logic mind.

Thanksgiving can be a welcome time of togetherness, belonging, gratitude, and love. Yet, for many of us, it can be a stressful period of navigating broken relationships, that hard-headed family member, and those topics that have been swept under the rug only to pop up when the entire gang is around the table.

One way to improve repair in relationships when you’ve done something that hurts someone else is to use correction-overcorrection. This can also be helpful if you are struggling with feelings of shame, guilt, and regret for having done something that negatively impacted someone else.

Urge surfing is a technique that can help you manage unwanted behaviour by learning to ride it out, like a surfer riding a big wave safely to shore.

Being able to fully experience moments of pleasantness, happiness, and joy is not always a straightforward and easy task. In the short-term, it can feel easier to avoid feeling good in order to not experience feelings of loss or disappointment.

This idea of becoming a better person (whatever that means) involves the idea that there is something happening right now within ourselves that we need to escape from. Pema Chödrön calls this an act of “subtle aggression” against ourselves.

Shame is a deep-rooted belief hidden in the parts of your subconscious and it can become a roadblock in building more profound and meaningful relationships with your partners.

I went back and forth between trying to throw my attention back onto the stage and going through my to-do list for the rest of the week, along with my dinner plans for the evening (in case you were wondering, I ended up having a nice plate of pasta). I was torn between two modes of being : Being and Doing modes.

The constant checking my phone for the time gave me the illusion of having control and a way to cope with the uncertainty of the situation. But it wasn’t very effective except for making me more irked and impatient. We all know that a watched clock never goes faster.