How did we get here? It feels like I blinked after Halloween, and suddenly Santa is about to drop down the chimney. Are you feeling the same?
If you’ve been working on improving your health habits over the last year, you might be a bit worried about maintaining consistency over these next few weeks. Between holiday parties, travel, family visits, shopping, and endless to-dos, your schedule is probably bursting at the seams, which doesn’t leave a whole lot of time to prioritize your needs.
And to make it all work, maybe you’ve already had to cut back on your workouts or strip down your meal prep to absolute basics.
But before you get caught up in the negative spiral of self-talk about how you should be able to do it all, I want you to cut yourself a Christmas cake-sized slice of self-compassion. The only thing that should-ing all over yourself will do is let disappointment and guilt creep in and stuff everything you’ve accomplished this past year into a single word—and that word is FAILURE. Do not let this happen!
Our brains our wired to blatantly ignore the overwhelming amount of good things that we’re doing, only to hone in on the teeny-tiny number of things that aren’t going according to plan. Think about how that works for your brain.
Where have you been showing up and absolutely crushing your goals, only to ignore that progress to focus on the miniscule number of things that you haven’t been doing?
Try this scenario on: Over the last three months, you committed to eating high protein breakfasts seven days a week, for a total of 84 high protein breakfast opportunities. But yesterday morning, you were running behind and grabbed a muffin at work.
What would you focus on? The 83 breakfasts that you nailed, or the one breakfast that you “failed”?
If it was the one breakfast out of the 84, you’re not alone.
With that insight in mind, I want you to reframe how you’ve adjusted your wellness routine in the face of the busy Christmas season.
Dialing things back a bit is not a failure and doesn’t mean you’ve let yourself down or given up on your goals. What it might mean is that you’re being realistic about the number of hours in the day and what you can accomplish without compromising the other ingredients of good health, like sleep or managing your stress.
As you move through the next few weeks until all the schedules are back to normal, instead of thinking about what you should be doing, think instead about what you can do.
To make the holiday season work for you, you’ll absolutely have to say no to some things so that you can say yes to other things. Remind yourself that what you might be saying yes to is adequate sleep, time with your family, or streamlining your schedule to reduce overwhelm. What you might be saying yes to is supporting your health in a way that allows for flexibility, instead of stress-inducing rigidity.
Adopting a lens of self-compassion doesn’t mean you give up on your habits altogether, it means that you recognize that you’re doing enough.
And with that, it’s a good time to remind you of my favourite dose of reality: You can do anything, but you can’t do everything.
Embody that statement by taking control and focusing on what you can do—not what you think you should do. Know where you need to dial things back to prioritize rest and recovery, understand best how to manage overwhelm, and trust in yourself that when your schedule slows down, you’ll get right back to the systems that fuel your best.
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