How Was Your Christmas?
How was your Christmas? Good New Year?
Not so good???!
Big social rituals like Christmas and New Year can make us put a lot of pressure on ourselves, pressure to have a good night, pressure to achieve more, pressure to be happy, more sociable, less anxious, more successful, thinner, richer…. The list goes on.
For many people it’s the worst time of the year, the most stressful or loneliest.
It can also be a time that brings back difficult memories or emphasizes losses on long, dark days. All these things mean that actually December and January can be pretty tough.
Therapy can be a great way to address things that come up for us at these times and an opportunity to make things better for ourselves. We often put unrealistic targets on ourselves, fail and then beat ourselves up. But there is a kinder and more productive way to be.
Using a combination of therapeutic and coaching tools can help us.
- What did go well?
- What didn’t go well?
- How whole is your life really?
- What do you want more of in your life?
- What boundaries do you need to put in place?
If therapy isn’t for you right now there are tools you can still use.
- Start with celebrating what did go well, write it down – remind yourself of all the successes or good moments you had, no matter how small.
- What would you like more of in your life in 2025? Neuroscience has shown that we need to focus our thoughts on what we want to help us achieve them.
- Create a table for all the different areas of your life (for example: hobbies, work, romance, friendships, family, education/learning, health, spirituality, recreation) then list all the things you have already in one colour and then in another colour write in the new things you would like.
- Take it slow, look at one aspiration at a time, what do you need to do to achieve these? Who could you ask for help?
This is just an example of a process you might start in coaching or therapy.
Tips:
- Write it down (ideally pen and paper not on the computer).
- Try to visualise it, some people find pictures to create inspiration or draw pictures.
- Say it out loud.
- Keep your plan somewhere you can see it to remind yourself.
- Come back to it later in the year, add your successes, adapt it.
You will be amazed what you can achieve!