Emotional Resilience During the Holidays

Consistently investing in your emotional health builds emotional resilience over time. Resilience allows you to maintain groundedness, clarity, and compassion in the face of challenges.  When resilience is present a hard hit to your heart, like an argument with a family member, still hurts but you are less likely to escalate reactivity by reviewing past hurts and weaving painful stories in your mind. Let’s look at some simple strategies for cultivating resilience. Cultivating subtlety and mindfulness about three distinctions regarding what’s truly emotionally nourishing is a fundamental place to start. Let's dive into the following:

1. Pleasure vs. Nourishment

2. Habit vs. Skillfulness

3. Safety vs. Challenge

Pleasure vs. Nourishment

Distinguishing pleasure from true nourishment might be obvious in physical realms. For example, even as you gobble down the salty and fatty pleasure of potato chips, you know that a green salad is actually more nourishing, but choose to orient to the short term pleasure of the chips. Consistent physical nourishment supports emotional balance. Thus, considering ahead of time what food choices you will make as you enter holiday time will support you in staying regulated. 

In the more overtly emotional realm, there are also choices that involve short term pleasure and long term nourishment. For example, there is a strong impulse to vent when you feel angry and there is immediate pleasure in following that impulse, but of course giving in to that impulse is toxic most of the time. Venting anger releases stress hormones contributing to adrenal fatigue, saps you of energy, and entangles you more deeply in a contracted web of reactivity. Here are some possibilities for emotional nourishment during the holidays when reactivity might threaten to take hold of you:

• Gratitude is, perhaps, the most accessible and nourishing emotional resource. Before you enter a gathering or at the beginning of a gathering take time to list what you are grateful for. Engage the process until you feel the shift into the sense of lightness that accompanies gratitude.

• Before you enter into a group gathering (whether virtually or in person), hold each person in your heart and identify what you appreciate, admire, or respect about them. Identify one way you will celebrate or care for each of them. Nothing is too small here. Offering care could be as simple as focusing on a feeling of love as you share a hug or remembering to ask them about something they are excited about.

• Plan activities that naturally support an enjoyable connection and avoid the usual places of contention. For example, learning to play a game while meeting with people virtually is a new challenge we have all faced this year. Invite others into the experiment of playing a game together. Games can create a lighthearted atmosphere that might later deepen into meaningful conversation.

• Identify known triggers and rehearse what it might sound like to engage in self-empathy or empathy when those triggers appear.

• Create time for one on one conversations that you anticipate will be nourishing.

Habit vs. Skillfulness

Habit is a powerful force and when you aren't paying attention, it will simply choose for you. For example, if you have the habit of withdrawing and spending time alone, you might neglect the form of emotional resource that comes from spending time in a healthy community. Engaging the skills and knowledge you have to invest in that which is emotionally nourishing, requires a critical mass of awareness regarding the habits that limit your life. Awareness increases with practices like meditation, prayer, spiritual contemplation, and reflecting compassionately on your choices and their results. Engaging in at least one of these every day enables you to access the skills you have worked so hard to learn. Here are a few simple strategies for interrupting limiting habits and increasing access to engaging your skills.

• Identify one habit that you know you would like to interrupt before attending a holiday gathering. Such habits might include: advice giving, complaining, listening longer than you enjoy, entertaining thoughts about what others should do, sulking because no one got curious about you or invited you in the way you wanted them to, comparing your experience to some standard of what you think would be better, or filling in the quiet moments with chatter that distracts from deepening the connection.

• Choose a specific skill you would imagine will be most helpful to access and imagine how you might engage it before the gathering. For example, perhaps you want to set your intention to only respond to your uncle with empathy this year. Review his most common stories and comments and look through the feelings and needs list to identify what might be present for him when you see him.

• Choose a skill for grounding yourself that you would like to engage and how you will remember to use it. For example, if being outside and looking at nature is grounding for you, you could intentionally leave items you will need in the car so that you have to go outside to get them. If you are meeting virtually, you could set an alarm to cue you to take a break.

Safety vs. Challenge

This last distinction is about perceived safety rather than an actual threat to safety. It’s about knowing when pushing yourself to do something even when you are afraid or nervous and whether it will be nourishing in the end or when it will only be dysregulating. You can consider this distinction in at least two ways. First, in the moment, it’s about finding equanimity with the fear long enough to consider what nourishment the present challenge might bring. Second, it’s about considering how much resourcing you will need in between the challenges you say yes to. This is a form of titrating your experience so that you can face a bigger challenge while maintaining a consistent level of resilience.

Bringing mindful attention to your sense of emotional resilience and consistently engaging in that which resources you, not only makes for a more enjoyable life, but also benefits those around you.  As an emotionally resilient person, you can access compassion and wisdom and make use of relationship skills when you need them most.

Practice

Take a moment now to check in with your sense of emotional resource.  Do you feel an expansive sense of resilience and connectedness?  Or do you have a sense of emotional flatness or thinness with irritability around the edges?  If it's the former make, a note of how you have been resourcing yourself lately, It's working!  If it's the latter, make a commitment to engage in some form of emotionally nourishing strategies listed in the three sections above.