5 Habits to Keep You Sane Through the Holidays
Want to ditch the hustle + bustle and lean into being present and living peacefully the rest of this year? The holiday season is a time for creating sweet memories with your loved ones! Today I’m sharing 5 habits that will keep you sane through the holidays! 💃🏻🎄🍾
The title is 5 Habits to Keep You Sane Through the Holidays but honestly...these 5 habits are ones that will keep you sane all the time. These 5 habits are a part of my daily and weekly routines and I hold them near and dear to my heart because I 100% notice a difference in the rhythm of my days/weeks if I skip them. When I’m being disciplined in these 5 habits, I am more grounded, peaceful, and present as I go through my days. When I skip out on these, I find myself more apt to feel overwhelmed, anxious, and exhausted to the point of being unpleasant to be around.
These 5 habits have really improved my mental health and how I show up for my life so I just had to make sure you knew that you need to be doing these in the name of Hustling Sanely your way through the holidays:
1️⃣ Journaling
Journaling is such a healing thing for me. I’ve been an avid journaler since I was a little girl and I really do credit my emotional maturity to journaling (and prayer) - and not in a prideful way, but I’m saying that journaling has really allowed me to learn how to be vulnerable with myself which in turn has allowed me to be vulnerable with others. And that’s where connection and growth happens.
Journaling allows me to extract things that might be buried deep in my heart that I didn’t realize were there because I’ve unintentionally (or sometimes intentionally) just been pushing them down as I go through my day to day life because I don’t want to “deal” with it.
I’m really passionate about journaling because it helps things not build up and fester. And that’s what causes us to hit that point of exploding our feelings all over our loved ones. But journaling helps me process my feelings which allows me to communicate them more clearly which generally leads to a more desirable outcome, you know?
2️⃣ Gratitude
I will never stop shouting the importance of gratitude from the rooftops ever ever ever and that’s because it changed my life. I’m not being dramatic either. I used to be such a pessimist, believe it or not. I was so hyper focused on everything that I didn’t have and everything that wasn’t going well that I completely neglected to pay attention to what I did have and what was going well.
Y’all have heard me say this before but it makes so much sense: when you focus on things to be grateful for, you find things to be grateful for. When you focus on things to be ungrateful for, you find things to be ungrateful for.
Has this ever happened to you - when you have a conversation with someone about something specific, you start to see it EVERYWHERE. This happened to me with a conversation I had with my grandma.
We were talking about Birkenstocks - yes the sandals, lol - because she loves them and swears by their comfort. After that conversation, I noticed people wearing Birkenstocks everywhere I went - the grocery store, the spin studio, Target, the gas station...seriously, everywhere you guys. So did people start wearing Birkenstocks overnight after I had that conversation with my Grandma? NO! People had been wearing them but I just hadn't noticed because I wasn't looking for Birkenstocks.
Intentionally recognizing what you are grateful for, positions you to be open to receive more to be grateful for. It’s not magic or anything weird but because you’re looking for opportunities for things to be grateful for you’re going to find opportunities to be grateful. Make sense?
Whether you keep a daily gratitude list in your journal, keep a note on an app in your phone, or just say it out loud while you’re waiting for your coffee to brew...just have some sort of daily gratitude practice to help keep you sane through the holiday season.
3️⃣ Designating “White Space Activities” + Meditation
Okay so this is a 2 for 1 because I feel like they kind of go hand in hand. I did an episode not too long ago where I shared that when I take showers (which is something I do daily, lol) that is my designated “white space activity.” So what does that mean? It’s a time for my brain to just be. It’s no secret that we are on consumption overload all day every day - some good and some not so good. Having a designated time in your day that allows your mind to decompress is so important for mental health.
I picture our brains as balloons, expanding all day as we blow content into them - books, movies, podcasts, music, stories, videos, blog posts, whatever. If you pump too much content into the balloon, it’s going to bust. Having this white space is a time for your brain to digest what you’ve been consuming because you can’t digest if you’re constantly being fed, right?
So white space is just a time when you don’t have any outside sources pumping information into your brain. Pretty simple. It’s intentional quiet time. When I’m showering, it’s just me, my breath, and my thoughts. I imagine my brain releasing a big sighing exhale every time I shower.
So choose something that you do every day already - that’s at least 10 minutes long - and make that your designated white space. Maybe it’s your commute, your morning walk, your workout, your lunch break - whatever works best for you.
And a bonus - this is usually when my best ideas come to me. Business ideas, fun ways I want to celebrate my loved ones, all kinds of things. I’m giving these ideas space to grow because I’m pausing consuming for a bit each day.
4️⃣ Intentional Communal Check-Ins
This is a newer one that my husband and I have been practicing and it’s been incredible. I’m really disciplined at checking in with myself in the mornings when I’m journaling but sometimes we can forget to share the real heart stuff with our people because we either think it’s not worth sharing or it seems too hard or uncomfortable to share it.
So instead, we ask each other questions like, “How are you?” or “How was your day?” and we respond with things like, “Good.” or “Busy.” Ugh surface level conversation is something I dread - I know it has its place but when it comes to spending time with my loved ones, it’s a no from me. Instead, I like to prioritize having meaningful conversation, even if it takes more thought and energy because that’s what’s going to allow a relationship to thrive.
Having meaningful conversation with your loved ones is one of the best ways to nurture a relationship. When we stick to surface level conversations, I think unintentional walls are built and that prevents us from learning and growing together.
My husband and I started doing this thing where instead of asking each other the surface level questions - we ask more thought-provoking ones like:
“How is your heart right now?”
“What is stressing you out right now?”
“What are you excited about right now?”
We ask one another these questions at least once a week and at first it felt foreign and a little awkward but it’s totally worth it because now we’re having more meaningful conversations which is helping us grow as individuals and as a couple.
Whatever Intentional Communal Check-Ins look like for you - do them! Maybe it’s calling your best friend on your way to work and asking her these questions. Maybe it’s Facetiming your Mom once a week after dinner and asking her these questions.
We were created to do life together in community and asking these kinds of questions helps us not stay isolated in our own thoughts, triumphs, and struggles.
5️⃣ Sabbath (or Rest)
If you’ve never heard the word Sabbath before, it’s basically a day of rest and worship. I learned about it as a little girl in church but it was kind of just briefly mentioned - I never really understood what it was until I started learning this past summer from John Mark Comer - who I talk about often. He is the pastor of Bridgetown Church in Portland, Oregon and I shared two of his books in last week’s podcast episode and those are the books I read that really broke down why Sabbath is so important.
Backstory - which it’s probably not a secret, lol - I work from home and I love what I do. I’m also, what I like to call, a recovering workaholic. It’s super easy for me to open my laptop and write or create because I really do love it.
BUT I know that when I am always “on” when it comes to doing - I start to hit burnout and then I resent my work and clam up and want to do nothing. Fun fact, I’m an enneagram 3 and when we are operating unhealthily, we go to a 9 and become lazy and complacent. Now that is NOT my nature so I know that when I’m feeling like that, it’s probably because I’ve been burning the candle at both ends for too long.
Incorporating Sabbath into my weekly routine was hard at first because I really could not imagine taking an entire day to just rest and worship but WOW the benefits - mentally, physically, and spiritually are so rewarding.
I’ve been taking Sunday as my Sabbath day - I go to church and worship with my community in the morning and then during the day, I rest. Now, I talked about this 2 weeks ago in a weekly email but rest is not the same as sleep. Rest is what you do to recharge. So it looks different for everyone.
Rest for me is being outdoors - biking, paddleboarding, rollerblading.
It’s reading.
It’s doodling on my iPad.
It’s enjoying a technology-free meal with my loved ones.
For you, rest might look like: gardening, playing board games, taking a bath, writing - there is no wrong way to rest in my opinion.
I don’t have a lot of “rules” when it comes to how I Sabbath - I steer clear of working so I don’t open my laptop. I also try to avoid running errands or doing anything like that. I do spend ~30 minutes at the end of the day prepping for the week ahead because that is a form of rest for me. Making a plan for the coming week puts my mind at ease and energizes me.
So figure out what intentional rest looks like for you and make it a weekly habit!
Those are the 5 habits that have changed my life for the better and that I recommend you incorporate into your daily and weekly routines ASAP...seriously.
If you enjoyed this post, tune into episode 058 of The Hustle Sanely Podcast to listen into this topic!
