Living With Stress Tips For the Holidays

By Anne C. Crowley, MAc, LAc

LaPlata Acupuncture and Healing Arts

. http://www.laplataacupuncture.com

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Living With Stress Tips For the Holidays

Stress has become a catch-all word for most of us, but it really means something quite different to different people. It's really about circumstances or events in our lives that give us discomfort and even disease. The secret is to walk through life more smoothly whatever that stress may be for us.

Some people feel stress as depression. It may surface more during holidays. Holidays force us to think back on many memories in our life, some pleasant and very missed and others unpleasant and forced to surface.

Managing stress is really about walking through all this with more ease. Circumstances in life don't change quickly, but they do evolve over time. It's about getting that ease minute by minute.

I heard someone say the pain of depression is greater than any physical pain. So this walk is not so easy sometimes. We are only given the moments between birth and death. Taking a deep breath and walking through is all we can do. Life will have its pain and yet another chapter always lies ahead. Grieve, contemplate and sit in the unknowing for as long as you need to.

In acupuncture sessions, we walk though these moments of joy and sadness together. The goal is to offer patients practices to take with them ways of walking through the tough moments of life, when they are not in the treatment room. In acupuncture, we are fine tuning the FM station or maintaining our car before the red light comes on. It's really about allowing patients to ride smoothly on their own.

Tips For The Holidays

If you are lonely, call a friend, or go to a group event. Be sure you put yourself around people that lift your spirits.

If you need rest and want to be alone, take long baths, get a massage (ask for total silence), or go for a walk in the woods (daylight of course).

Get rest, it gets dark early for a reason. Get more sleep in winter. Store up your reserves for the upcoming spring.

Wear a scarf around your neck. Keep extremities warm. Wear a hat too.

Eat warm foods, make hot tea.

Be okay with the stillness and reflection that winter brings. We will notice this more after the holiday hustle and bustle ends.

Be still, and listen, great power is rumbling underneath the silence just as new seeds are under the ground rejuvenating for spring.