Christmas Stress
To be honest I am not a great fan of Christmas and as I get older I seem to like it less and less. Maybe I’m just becoming a ‘grumpy old man’. There are lots of potential ‘stressors’ and potential pitfalls in the period before, during and immediately after xmas and I will be blogging about these and possible solutions during this month.
My wife and our 2 grown up daughters love Christmas, so I get pleasure from seeing them have a good time. However, I have to hide my grumpiness or I am accused of ruining Christmas for them!
This is supposed to be a religious festival lasting 12 days with its climax on 25 th December. It probably doesn’t help that I don’t have a religious bone in my body (I veer between describing myself as agnostic and sometimes refer to myself as an atheist depending on my mood).
Unfortunately this festival has been hijacked by commercialism and consumerism and the period before (foreplay) gets longer and longer or so it seems. It’s not just the retailers either; I cycled past a house at the end of October which was covered from ground to roof in one of the most over the top displays of decorations I have ever seen. I was not amused when 2 carol singers appeared at my door on 2nd December singing; “we wish you a merry Christmas”.
I can’t even blame my pre-christmas grumpiness on it being winter, the weather or the short days. In fact I like the winter season and fortunately I don’t suffer from seasonal depression. My friend Josh used to suffer from this problem; a condition known as Seasonal affective disorder (SAD), sometimes referred to as the ‘winter blues’. Many people claim to suffer from this form of depression during the winter months. With my help and without the need for anti-depressants or sitting under special lights for long periods of time, Josh no longer suffers from this condition in winter. If you know of anyone that is suffering from the ‘winter blues’ you might like to send them this link so that they can hear what Josh has to say about how he overcame his seasonal depression.
One of the techniques I used with Josh is called, ‘re-framing,’ whereby we found a way of re-framing the winter months for him. A part of his brain, known as the ‘reticular activating system’ was focusing his attention towards all the things he didn’t like about winter and his mind was blocked from seeing anything good about it. He is now able to focus on aspects of winter that are positive and block out the negative thoughts to a great extent.
To get myself in the Christmas spirit I am going to do a bit of re-framing myself this week so that I can look forward to all the good things about this festive period.
Going back to my sexual analogy it shouldn’t be a surprise that many women will start shopping in November and most men leave it until Christmas Eve!
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