How To Avoid Overwhelm During Seasonal Transitions And Holidays

Avoiding Overwhelm During Seasonal Transitions

Fall brings with it, along with pumpkin spice everything, a start of many shifting seasonal transitions. First, it’s back to school, weather changes, then thanksgiving, and then Christmas and the Winter Holidays. All of these transitions bring with them the potential for major overwhelm in your home and life and on a personal level.

Over the next month, we will be talking about how to stay focused on the different areas of your life: home, work, and self.

Here are some ways to skip overwhelm during the busy seasonal changes and holidays:

1. Prioritize Sleep

Sleep seems to be the first thing to be sacrificed to the busyness that the holidays bring into our lives.

Making sleep a priority is more natural when it becomes a habit. Set up a routine for yourself that allows you to get the sleep you need (for most people that is 7-8 hours) each night. Whether that means making a routine that allows for a later alarm or an earlier bedtime if you make sleep a priority you will feel a world of difference.

2. Eat Healthy Foods

Another one we surely all know is essential; a proper diet is crucial to being our best selves. It is also key to staying well and reducing stress. But all the delicious holiday food can throw us off track and creating a menu, meal planning, and meal prep can become a challenge.

Still, let’s try to plan for healthy meals as they are the best ways to adhere to a healthy diet- for you and your family. Prepping ahead also reduces chaos around mealtimes and packing lunches, so it is a win-win.

3. Stick To a Routine

One of the fastest ways to slide into overwhelm is to lose track of your daily routine. Our daily routines anchor us and allow us to feel more relaxed. Our brains like to know what’s coming next.

There is possibly no time that a solid routine is more important that during seasonal changes like back to school, Summer break, or the Fall and Winter holidays. Sit down with your routine at the start of each season and see where it needs adjusting to create a routine that works for your life in these times.

4. Plan For The Unexpected

As hard as we try to stick to a routine and plan our days, we should always make room in our schedules and our minds for the unexpected. The best way to do this is to leave plenty of breathing room in your routine.

When you pack every minute of your day full, there is no room for things that pop up.

Try looking at your daily to-do list each morning and picking three items as your top priorities. If you have these completed, you won’t feel so disrupted when the unexpected happens, and you must take care of something unexpected.

5. Learn To Say No

My last tip is to master the art of saying no. We are trained to believe that saying no to commitments is negative and brings with it a sense of guilt. Well, if you get rid of one thing from your life, let it be this notion!

Learning how to say no will make you feel lighter, more relaxed, and more present for yourself and your family daily. The golden rule for implementing this is if it’s not a heck yes, it’s a heck no!

Implementing these habits now will help you avoid being overwhelmed and maintain balance in your life at home and work during the sometimes chaotic seasonal and holiday changes that will be creeping up on us before we know it.