5 Simple Tips for Making the Most of your Christmas Break

Christmas can be a mixed bag. There is bustle, expectation and expense but there is also cheer, good will and hope. It means time with family and friends, an opportunity to recap on the year past and to speculate about the year to come. The objective of this short piece is to invite you to practice skills in ‘savouring’ so that whatever the holiday season brings you may at least be present for it.

1. Share. Cultivate the habit of sharing pleasant experiences with others. So that the significance is not lost, explain to them how much and why you value the experiences.
2. Be Active About Memory Making. Take mental photographs or even physical souvenirs of nice things that happen over the Christmas break. You might even take a conscious breath in the moment or experiment with smiling to yourself. (NB. If you notice anyone else smiling to self without any obvious cause refer them immediately to an approved mental health facility.)
3. Congratulate Yourself. If you or someone in your family achieved a goal this year, recognise what has happened. Acknowledge the effort that went into achieving the goal and remember how long it took to achieve it and the effort that was required.
4. Sharpen Your Focus. Practice focusing on particular aspects of an experience, like closing your eyes and listening to sounds around you or noticing the smell of your Christmas dinner before you tuck in.
5. Lose Yourself in the Moment. Allow yourself to become totally immersed in an experience in the remaining weeks of 2014. Not thinking about it but noticing what it feels like in your body and even emotionally to be present in that moment. To really ground yourself, engage your senses by tasting, feeling texture and temperature, smelling, seeing and listening.

Practice these skills so that whether the magical moments you share with your family and friends are frequent or few, they shall at least not be forgotten. 

It's a Hard Knock Life

It's not always easy, is it. Awful things happen to good people and individuals and groups less than virtuous sometimes prosper, or at least appear to do. We will all in our time face tragedy and may have occasion to feel lost and alone even when the love of friends, family and colleagues means we are neither. So, how do we develop our capacity to survive; to press on, and how do we encourage others to do so?  

From a psychological perspective, the ability to cope with stress and respond in a positive way to difficult life events is known as ‘resilience’. This is the ability to bounce back, so to speak, from the hard knocks that life dishes out without regard for our sensitivities or readiness. 

A happy truth is that the capacity to be resilient is not fixed. It can be developed. Paraphrased below are suggestions by the American Psychological Association on how to increase your ability to bounce back in the face of adversity. May you find in this some good learning.

1.       Nurture your relationships: have a friend and be a friend.

2.       Trust that you can bear crises and stressful life events. 

3.       Try to be patient and accept the things that cannot be changed right now.

4.       Set goals that are realistic and work towards them.

5.       Show decisiveness in difficult situations by taking charge of your behaviour.

6.       Learn and find meaning in loss.

7.       Believe in yourself. 

8.       Keep a long-term perspective and view the difficult times you face within the broader context of your life.

9.       Hope and expect that good things will happen. Visualise the good things.

10.   Respond with kindness to the needs of your mind and body by doing things that make you feel well. 

For me, the spirit of what it is to be resilient is encapsulated in a touching monologue by Philadelphia's greatest philosopher, Rocky Balboa. 

“The world ain't all sunshine and rainbows. It is a very mean and nasty place and it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain't how hard you hit; it's about how hard you can get hit, and keep moving forward. How much you can take, and keep moving forward. That's how winning is done. Now, if you know what you're worth, then go out and get what you're worth. But you gotta be willing to take the hit, and not pointing fingers saying you ain't where you are because of him, or her, or anybody. Cowards do that and that ain't you. You're better than that!”