Enjoy More Joy, Less Stress This Holiday Season | Ep 95

Imagine getting up every day full of energy is if you were in your 20s. Again, what would that be? Like? What would that be worth to

you? What is your health worth to you? Think about it. Your health isn't everything. But without it, everything else is nothing. And yet too many of us are taking it for granted until something goes wrong. No one wakes up hoping to be diagnosed with a disease or chronic illness. And yet, we've never been taught how to be proactive in our health through our school system, or public health. As a registered health coach and integrative health practitioner, I believe it is time this information is made available to everyone. Combining new knowledge around your health and the ability to do my functional medicine lab tests in the comfort of your own home will allow you to optimize your health for today and all your tomorrow's don't

wait for your wake up call. Welcome back to another episode of The don't wait for your wake up call podcast. I am Melissa Deally your host. And today I am bringing to you and an episode wrapped around allowing you to have more joy and less stress this Christmas, my theme for the month of December is peace. And of course, when we have less stress, we can open ourselves up to feeling more peace. And of course, the holiday times are very exciting for the children in our lives, they're can be very exciting for adults, and then they can also be very stressful for adults. And my answer to that is to simply consider planning. Now some people might think well, that's too structured, I don't want to plan but here's the thing, you've heard this before, we don't plan to fail, we fail to plan. And when we fail to plan, it allows a significant, significantly more stress to come into our lives. Because we're scrambling to pull it all together at the 11th hour, we're scrambling to make it all happen. When we plan it gives us structure that doesn't mean you're you know tied up in chains and confined and you can only live by what's been planned and that you're restricted and you feel like you can just enjoy it doesn't mean that at all. But it does give you structure to fall back on. And to utilize as needed in order to allow yourselves to move through this busy holiday season with much more flow and ease. And I think that's what everybody wants. So let's just start out with something that I love to share and very often is an aha for people. And so my first tip that I want to share is to consider and start saying yes to yourself and no to others more often. We very often use those words backwards. And we say yes to others. And in the moment of saying yes to others that will do something for them will attend their event, et cetera. We are saying no to ourselves in that moment. And at this time of year where there are so many things in our calendar from invitations from family invitations from friend, there's work parties, cocktail parties, Christmas parties, there's events happening at the school, there's all sorts of you know, with my kids, when they were in school, we have course had the holiday concert, we also had you know letter writing to Santa, there was all sorts of different events in the school. So you know, there's all this extra stuff coming into your calendar. And if you say yes to everything, you are going to feel stressed, you are going to feel exhausted. But if you start to choose what really matters to me, and saying yes to those things and saying no to others, you're going to be able to weed out some of the things and give yourself more space in your calendar and it is okay to say no to others. You can also if you really feel like you can't say no because it's an a family event you have to go. You can also say, you know I'm back to back that day. I'm sorry, I can't be there for you know, the start to the end, I'll be arriving late or I have to leave early because I have somewhere else I need to be whether or not you have to be somewhere else doesn't matter. It gives you the out so that you're not at this event for four hours. Maybe you're only there for one hour you showed up you saw some people and then you were able to leave and give yourself time to maybe go Armand, just get in an Epsom salt bath, and relax and unwind before getting yourself into bed. So really think about that. That is okay. It is absolutely okay. Give yourself permission to say yes to yourself and say no to others. It's not always easy to do, especially if you've never done it before, your brain will wonder what you're doing. And it'll be like, Why are you saying no, even as you're saying no, and encourage you to say, yes, I've been there, I experienced that. But I also had the frontal cortex of my brain saying, no, no, you're saying no, for a reason? Because you're saying yes to yourself. And that spoke to me more loudly than the back of my brain going, why are you saying no, You never say no. And so that allowed me to start practicing saying no to others, so I could be more protective of my time. And we all have the same amount of time, and we can't get more time, we say we'd love to have, you know, 28 hours in the day, that's never gonna happen. So we have to be more protective of the time that we have. And in saying no, to others, and yes to ourselves, we are absolutely doing that. So that's a starting point. But then that's after that. We're also planning so by saying no to others, we're creating a little bit more space in our calendar. But what else can we be doing to create more joy and less stress this holiday season? Well, start planning your meals. You know, when you're, you know, having family over, or when you might be having a holiday party for friends. Plan those meals, plan your shopping list, so that you can get to the store, get what you need, and get out or even order online. Because we can do that now. Have it delivered or pick it up. So that you're allowing the system to work for you, you don't even have to go to the store. Because we know how busy the stores are, at this time of year everybody's out shopping, we also know how busy it can be in the parking lots and driving, all of that is taking your time. So how can you reduce the time that it takes. And again, it can be stressful when it's crowded in parking lots, finding a parking spot people walking in front of you and all of that stuff. So reduce your stress by potentially if you can in your area, not even having to go make the shopping list habit delivered or make the shopping list, pick it up, and that planning your meals so that you know exactly what you need. So that you can make that shopping list is a huge starting point for that. You also can be planning visiting the malls. So again, super crowded during the holiday season in December, even late November it can get really crowded. But this episode's coming out December 3, plan when you're visiting them all. So if you can visit the mall, as soon as it opens, go on a weekday, take a day off work, go on a weekday work on the weekend if you need to, because you know you're good, there's going to be less people, right when the mall opens, and on a weekday, and also plan what stores you're going to visit. So if you know certain gifts, that you're picking up for people, and you know what stores they're in, make a plan of how you're going to do that in the most economical ways so that you're not walking back and forth back and forth from either in the mall to the other because malls can be pretty big these days, right? That's a lot of wasted time might be good exercise, but it is wasted time. And if time is more important, I plan to do it in a sensible order. I'm sure you're still going to get your steps in that day. And I want you to on top of that, once you've got all of those things done that you need to get done, the gifts that you know you need to buy, you've planned it, you've gone to those stores in the most efficient order, you've got what you needed. And then after that, you can allow yourself some time to browse because maybe you've got some other people that you want to buy for. And you don't really know what you want to get them. And so you're looking for inspiration. I want to suggest bookstores can be amazing places of inspiration for people. So head there, that's where I always go whether it's buying someone a beautiful journal journal, whether it's buying a game because often bookstores have games, whether it's buying a you know a fuzzy, warm blanket that somebody can wrap them up selves up in or a candle or a coffee mug. bookstores have so much more than just books and yes, books are wonderful gifts as well. And I love buying books. I also love buying calendars for people so they have those two. So you can get a lot of ideas in one store like that instead of having to go to five or six different stores looking for ideas. And so that's how I navigate them all. And I find it to be a much more efficient and therefore much less stressful way to do my Christmas shopping. The other thing To that I do more of now because we can is order on line ahead of time. So I was doing a little bit of that yesterday. So and you can do that anytime if you're ideally you want to be doing your gift shopping for birthdays for Christmas throughout the year, don't wait and leave it all until the last minute because again, that puts a lot of pressure on you. But if you've done that for this year, and you still have to do all of your Christmas shopping, hopefully those tips around the mall and then online shopping help you it will lower your stress significantly. If you're doing it from home, playing some Christmas music, just playing some relaxing music, and just searching what you need and ordering it and not even having to go into the masses that are in the mall, all the pushing and shoving that happens because it just gets crowded and you bump into people.

thank you for investing this time with me on the don't wait for your wake up call Podcast. I'm so glad you joined in. If you can take two minutes to share this episode with someone you think can benefit and have a positive impact put on their life. That would be wonderful. Please leave a review by going to your favorite podcast listening app,