Christmas Anxiety - spending time with family!

Spending time with family can bring up all types of feelings, and if you are experiencing feelings of stress and anxiety anyway, then the thought of Christmas may be filling you with feelings of dread and worry.

Families can be wonderful and beautiful to share time with, yet spending time with the people closest to us can often bring up many challenges too.  

Picture this, your parents are a whole generation older than you and they really struggle to understand your model of the world, they think social media is awful, they have an opinion on how you’re living your life and they may even have an opinion about who you’re choosing to live your life with.  

You spend time with your folks around the holidays and their difference of opinions and ways of being and thinking make you feel even more disconnected than you already feel. That disconnection is what started your anxiety in the first place...

Anxiety of overeating.

Christmas is known to be a time of over indulgence, of all things that are not too great for your waist line (or your pocket, as you may have read in my previous blog). If you’ve been spending time this year watching your weight, have been on a diet or have created healthier habits for yourself, then the thought of Christmas being around the corner can make you feel pretty stressed out. In fact, the thought of all the will power needed to walk past the constant overload of chocolates laid on by your well-meaning family/friends/colleagues can be pretty distracting… ask me how, I know! ;)

Maybe you have a different way of eating than the rest of your family and that brings up feeling of anxiety. YES, I have been here too. As a vegetarian since I was 16, I’ve had to endure years of ridicule at most family events which, if I wasn't such a strong-minded, stubborn sod could easily have affected me really negatively. And I will admit,...

THE ANXIETY OF OVER SPENDING

As I have mentioned in my previous blog post, anxiety often comes from a feeling of not having the ability to be in control.  Many things we cant control in life; the weather, time, other peoples reactions,  however, one thing that we can control, is how much we spend over the festive period.  

If you are already struggling with the feelings of anxiety then festive occasions can make you feel even worse, especially if your financial issues are already a concern.

 The thing that I believe is super important here, is to know that you can consciously take control of the situation which will not only make you feel like you are growing in strength, it can take so much unnecessary stress out of the spending situation and life in general.

What we  really need to do here is to be a little bit creative about the way that we look at where we think the money has got to go and I believe that by taking a practical view point on...

Anxiety over having to attend social events

If you suffer with any the of social anxiety, any kind of festivities or social gatherings can feel like a total nightmare.  In fact you my feel like you want to put your head under the duvet and not come out until next year. 

This doesn’t have to be the case if you are able to understand what is really going on and  you're able over come the thoughts that are creating the feelings of anxiety.

Here are a few things that I have learned from working with hundreds of clients who have struggled with the symptoms of anxiety.

Social anxiety often comes from;

The fear of being judged - let me just tell you this; we are all so worried about what’s going on in our own heads and own lives, that we don’t have time to notice what is going on elsewhere, so the fear of what other people are thinking of us is pretty irrational.  I mean, are you judging what someone said at the last event you went to?...

So, it is not just people who have had a traumatic child-hood or who have even suffered from some kind of adult trauma in their lives. Anxieties can hit those of us who are feeling uncertain in our lives.

Let me explain a little more about what anxiety really is; anxiety occurs where we represent time in our minds; when we ruminate about past events in our lives, we often feel what we know as guilt – anxiety. When we are uncomfortable in the present moment this is more about our current needs being unmet- anxiety. Now, if you really like to torture yourself then you like to plan out the worst case scenarios over and over in your head, of future events that may or may not happen – anxiety. In fact this is known as catastrophising yuk! I think that we can all relate to this.  This is the stuff that we need to learn how to transform and then we can consciously start to create our lives, we are creating them anyway so may as well do it consciously. As I teach my...