Five ways to actually relax over the holidays

Are you frightened to even look at your calendar this holiday season? Between the jam-packed concerts, the swishy cocktail parties, the harried shopping trips and the stressful visits with family, its downright overwhelming.

If you could use some new rituals, read on. These five expert tips will ease your stress this holiday season and even — dare we say it — even help you relax!

1. Think your time through
“It’s like that old saying — start with the end in mind. What do you want the holidays to look like?” asks Brian Beech, a Newmarket-based clinical social worker. “If you imagine yourself in January, what would you like to be able to look back on that period and remember?” Thinking December through can help bring some clarity to what priorities you have, and what are more negotiable tasks. “Obviously some of those tasks have to get negotiated to some degree with family and whatnot, but I think thinking it through before going into it is so important.”

2. Do a reality check
Have realistic expectations for yourself and others, suggests Louise Veres an Oakville-based life coach. She encourages people to ask themselves, “What can you really manage? How much do you really want to do? And what’s possible, rather than trying to squeeze everything in,” before committing to too many things. “Take a look at your work schedules and what’s going on with family and go from there,” she advises.

3. Take care of yourself
When planning out the month, build in some of your favourite downtime activities — hitting that spin class you love to do, or just going to the movies with a good friend. “Just make sure that it is important because some people really do want to have some time with their family or even just for themselves to go out and do something and make sure that’s part of the plan,” says Veres. “Block off time for that to give yourself a sense of peace and calm.”

4. Set — and stick — to a budget
Where does this fit into managing seasonal stress? “The financial stress can also hit, so it’s important for people to be realistic, says Beech. “You hear so much now about people not taking on more debt and stressing themselves out at a cost,” which is a great step to getting back into the true spirit of the holidays. He advises setting a strict budget and sticking to it no matter what, “It’s so easy to get caught up in ‘more-is-better’, but the amount you spend isn’t equivalent to how you feel.”

5. Make a game plan for stressful events
Tensing up at the thought of visiting your uptight sister-in-law? “Exercise some decision-making beforehand with your partner about things like: how long are we going to be there? Can we have a check in discreetly to see how it’s going?” suggests Beech. “If possible, step away from the party or event or just go out and take a break or breaks. It’s all about feeling like you have choices and exercising those choices.”

What's Your Stress Style?

Physically, we all react the same way to stress: Our heart races, breath quickens, muscles tense and palms sweat. But emotionally? That's a whole other story. Your M.O.—whether it's to panic, shed tears or lash out—is something scientists call reactivity.

"Your level of reactivity is a complex combination of your environment—for example, how you were raised—and your genes," says Daniel Mroczek, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Your life experiences, parents and personality all shape how you respond to stressors. Reactivity is mostly determined from an early age, but it isn't set in stone. "You always have a choice to change how you react to a stressor," explains Eva Selhub, M.D., a clinical associate at the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

People who are truly cool as cucumbers even under stress do exist, but the rest of us tend to fall largely into one of five categories. See which one sounds the most familiar and follow the personalized tips to relax already.

The Catastrophizer

You find out that your company is being sold. You're certain you'll lose your job and default on your mortgage. Before you know it, you've spiraled into a dark hole of worry, anxiety, negativity and fear. "Regardless of whether stressors are a true threat or not, you perceive everything as a disaster," Mroczek says. Overall, you're extremely sensitive and feel emotions—both good and bad—more strongly than other people do. "It's like having an emotional sunburn," adds Jared Minkel, Ph.D., a psychologist at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina. "You always feel it, but it hurts a lot more when you press on it."

Your stress Rx: per

Start your day with mindfulness meditation, in which you focus on what you're thinking and feeling and nothing else. After just three days of brief sessions, participants who learned the technique perceived a tense situation as less stressful than non­meditators did, according to a study from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Many reported that the habit helped them see how they were reacting, which enabled them to concentrate on the task at hand, instead of getting caught up in their emotions about it. To do it, try an online-and-app program like Headspace ($8 per month, headspace.com), podcasts from the UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Center or simply sit quietly and pay attention to your breathing and your physical sensations. Work up to at least 10 minutes a day.

The Deer in the Headlights

There's the fight-or-flight response most people experience when stressed. Then there's what you do: freeze or shut down whenever you feel overwhelmed at work or have a fight with a friend. That's a handy survival mechanism if you're a lizard trying to blend into your environment to evade predators. But it's not so helpful for humans. "While freezing can be a sign of panic, people who shut down under stress might have an inadequate stress response," Dr. Selhub says. "Your adrenaline never gets going, so you stop and nothing gets done." Perhaps you experienced physical or psychological trauma early in life and learned to cope by going numb, but that's unhealthy. Avoiding, rather than facing, stressful situations is associated with even greater stress as well as an increased incidence of insomnia, a study in Sleep found.

Your stress Rx: 

Unroll your sticky mat. While the relax­ing benefits of yoga can't hurt, there's another reason to get your down dog on regularly. Doing so relieves fatigue and boosts self-esteem. "Low self-esteem can make you feel powerless, and the fear that taking action will result in failure often leads to no action at all," Dr. Selhub says. But boosting your confidence shifts your perspective so that stressful experiences become challenges not threats. To do this on the fly, "think of a time when you felt successful, invincible or magnificent and then imagine yourself in that experience again," Dr. Selhub instructs. Conjuring up those sensations reminds you that you're capable of feeling that way regardless of the circumstances and empowers you to take action.

The Imploder

On the surface, you appear calm and collected. But inside, you're totally freaking out. You can't sleep. You can't eat. You're sick all the time. And no one knows. "Imploders may experience a lot of physical problems because they don't express any of their feelings," Dr. Selhub says. "When you aren't dealing, your stress response keeps firing without any outlet. As a result, stress hormones flood your body, and your digestive system can shut down, your immune system can stall and inflammation can become rampant. Eventually, if you are susceptible, your risk of developing depression, heart disease or cancer can increase."

Your stress Rx: 

Schedule a date with your closest friends stat. You may have grown up in a family in which no one talked about personal or difficult issues, but that's exactly what you need to do. When you feel supported, you're able to let down your guard and share what you're going through, Dr. Selhub says. This sense of trust causes your brain to release feel-good hormones like dopamine and serotonin, which help regulate your stress response. Research shows that feeling connected to other people lowers your blood pressure and heart rate when you're in tense situations and can even help you live longer.

The Crier

A last-minute meeting that interferes with your jam-packed schedule equals tears. A minor disagreement with your partner equals tears. If stress usually sets off waterworks and feelings of sadness, you may be headed toward the big D. A recent study from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York suggests that in about 20 percent of people, repeated stress may activate a group of neurons in the front of the brain that are strongly linked to depression. "Your emotional reactivity has a lot to do with how you perceive stressful experiences," Minkel says. "If you feel as if an event is ruining your life and it's never going to get better, then you're more likely to feel depressed." Chronic stress and depression can be a deadly combo. They increase your risk of stroke by 59 and 86 percent, respectively, according to an American Heart Association study, and are associated with obesity, heart disease and diabetes.

Your stress Rx: 

Run, dance, paint, cook—do any activity you love, even if you have to force yourself. "When you're stressed and depressed, the parts of your brain that produce positive feelings don't function properly," Minkel says. "But doing things you enjoy jump-starts those regions." At first it may seem like a struggle to make it through an art class and only marginally better than sitting on your couch and scrolling through your DVR, but stick with it. Most people notice a boost in mood after they rediscover their old hobbies, Minkel says.

The Hothead

A long line at Starbucks can throw you into a fit of fury. "You get angry when you feel as if someone or something is block­ing you from achieving a goal," Minkel says. People who blow up when they're stressed tend to abide by all-or-nothing thinking, says Mary McNaughton-Cassill, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Even the littlest snag can set them off. Learning to put a lid on your rage could save your life. Anger can cause changes in the nervous system that might lead to a heart attack, research shows.

Your stress Rx: 

When you encounter a stressful situation, pause for a minute. "It gives you a chance to think about your behavior rather than lashing out," McNaughton-Cassill says. Now reframe what's happening. Maybe the driver who cut you off just had a fight with her spouse and now she's distracted. Realizing that she may not have been deliberately trying to aggravate you can extinguish your impulse to explode.

The Power of Mindful Meditation

I’ve got a quick task for you. Lift your hands off your keyboard, mouse or wherever else they may be and lay them lightly on your desk in front of you. Spread your fingers so each digit only makes contact with the desk. Now think about the weight of each fingertip as it presses against the hard surface of the desk. Think about the true feeling your fingers are making as they hang heavy on the desk. Think of nothing else.

What you just did was a brief introduction to mindful meditation. For years, people have tried meditating for it’s stress-reducing benefits, but recently, researches have concluded mindful meditation has a much larger effect on our bodies than previously thought. So powerful is the ancient technique, that it has the ability to physically change the nature of our being.

At it’s root, mindful meditation is about being acutely aware of our present surroundings and the moment around it. We are taught to notice our thoughts as the flow freely into, and out of, our minds. The goal is to not hold on to or fight these thoughts, but simply recognize them for what they are. This exercise in embracing the moment is what has traditionally precipitated a reduction in overall stress.

There are tens of millions of people around the world who practice this technique daily. Sports teams, corporations, and schools are some of the more recent adopters of this mind soothing practice. As popularity grows, researchers are looking at mindful meditation in a whole new way. By performing a series of MRI scans on the brains of individuals entrenched in mindful meditation courses, scientists are now better able to understand the physical effects of the technique once reserved for Buddhist monks.

Fear Not

Perhaps shockingly, the largest effect of mindful meditation takes places deep in the center of our brain. There is a little area in our brain called the amygdala. The amygdala is our “fight or flight” center, which you’ve likely heard of before. This primal area of the brain is responsible for both fear and emotion.

As participants in an eight-week mindful meditation course were monitored, scientists noticed a shrinking of their amygdala. An actual physical change in the size of a region of their brain. Let that sink in for a moment. As the size of their emotional fear center decreased, another remarkable change took place. The pre-frontal cortex – the area of the brain associated with concentration, decision-making, and awareness – becomes larger.

Not only that, scientists examined how these two areas are connected with the rest of the brain. Perhaps as expected, the decreased amygdala had reduced connectivity with the rest of the brain while the pre-frontal cortex increased connectivity much more strongly.

In short, mindful meditation allows physical changes in the brain which shifts away from lower-order, more primal thought processes like fear, to higher-order pre-frontal cortex-driven mental processes, like reasoning. Or phrased another way, with mindful meditation we are able to eliminate our stress and fear levels and replace them with more thoughtful and intellectual responses.

It’s Not Just Size
The ability to enlarge the pre-frontal cortex isn’t exclusively reserved for mindful meditation. Playing video games, for example, also enlarges this region of the brain. The key in achieving the mind-changing benefits however, appears to come from the connectivity of these specific regions of the brain to their surroundings.


Particularly, by cutting some of the connection between the amygdala; center of stress, and the rest of our brains, we are able to realize the greatest physical benefits from mindful meditation.

We’ve long known that stress can cause real, physical damages to us. By cutting he cord to this stress center, the array of stress chemicals for which it drives release of, diminishes. Cortisol, certain proteins, and interleukin 6, all which are associated with disease, are reduced in the blood stream.

Not only is stress at the root of many disease processes, it’s also at the root of why so many Americans have trouble losing weight. Cortisol in particular, when floating around our bloodstreams, makes many of our fat stores impervious to even the most intense exercise regimens.

The stresses or our modern lives – angry bosses, bills to pay, long commutes from work – begin to add up. This chronic state of stress that so many of us live with, results in us walking around loaded up bodily hormones and chemicals that are actively working against us. Unfortunately (or fortunately, however you look at it) there is no quick-fix or pill to reduce these unhealthy levels of hormones. The change needs to come from within, and now more than ever, scientists believe mindful meditation is the answer.

Mindful Meditation and You

In truth, you don’t need to become an expert practitioner of the technique to feel its benefits. You don’t need to lock yourself away in a cliff-side monastery and forsake all pleasures in life to invite a little zen into your life. Studies show as little as 10-15 minutes of mindful meditation a day will bring about the positive changes I’ve been discussing.

Just like you spend time to brush your teeth, take a shower, and/or paint your face like a Tomahawk going into battle each morning, a little time spent mindfully meditating could go a long way. Mind expansion techniques and the belief that something so simple could change your entire outlook on life and health have often been scoffed at by the masses. But as more research rolls in on the subject, the scientists expect the current body of evidence to exponentially grow.

Get yourself ahead of the gain, and give mindful meditation a try – just 10 minutes a day to start. Over time, I believe you’ll start to enter a state of greater relaxation, experience less emotional responses to the stresses of life, and perhaps even start thinking and speaking like a more intellectually aware individual. Not to mention the improved response of your body to exercise.

Mindful meditation sounds like a win all around, so what are you waiting for? Drop those fingers back to the table and get in touch with your inner self.