Seasons Beatings - Mental Health, Wellbeing At Chr****as

No time of year is more anticipated or written about than Christmas. This is a brief tour of some of the problems that come up for people’s emotional health, along with suggestions that may help in addressing them. While many of us with mental health vulnerabilities find the season uplifting, the anticipation alone can have major downsides. As with much in life, fear of events can often be worse than the events themselves. But with weeks of buildup for one day, the arithmetic doesn’t stack up too well, and it’s not only Stooge-level curmudgeons who view much of the affair as an imposition. Yet there’s a solid reason we have a festival at the darkest time of the year. Our shortest day is on the 22nd December. In ancient times, the return of the sun started to become clear a few days later. Even Christians acknowledge that the celebration of Jesus’ birth is superimposed on to a pagan festival, and many Christmas traditions are Pagan, Victorian or secular. So when Christmas brings up problems, it may less to do with festivity in principle, and more to do with expectations placed upon us, either by those we know or by broader society.

Expectations, real or imagined, are linked to a sense of loss of control, which can easily be triggering. Our boundaries can be tested when relatives and colleagues and others, who we may not bother much with for the rest of year, make requirements on our time and space. A sense of dread about upcoming obligations can be helped by some assertiveness in favour of those boundaries, perhaps around compromise.

Do we really have to spend huge and intense amounts of time with people, or have our space constantly subject to their presence? Chances are that we probably don’t. Hopefully we can balance a sense of obligation with self-care.

Would people really hold a grudge to a slight change from expectation? If they would, are they the type to hold grudges easily in any case? Is it worth running our lives around their demands?

Another issue during this period is bereavement, especially for those in the early years of bereavement, or those who lost their loved one around this time of year.

Without wanting to be too blunt, our departed loved ones are going to remain departed from this realm for each Christmas henceforth. Sooner or later, we will benefit from doing or seeing things differently and appreciating that they wouldn’t want every Christmas of our lives marred by their leaving.

Keeping Christmas in perspective

Then there are the extreme commercial pressures of Christmas. These arguably pull us in the opposite direction from any spiritual or higher things that the season often is supposed to be about. Commercialism is notably hard when it comes to children, whose expectations probably need to be managed as best as possible year round.

Lots of these situations can be helped by a change of routine. Many people do the same things each Christmas, as if personal or family traditions are enshrined in law. But it’s healthy to challenge the assumption that anything “needs” to happen at Christmas. It’s more common now to go out for a meal on the big day, with plenty of people from non Christian backgrounds happy to be paid to do the work. It’s still not too late to change up the dynamic  by volunteering or inviting someone around who may otherwise be lonely.

Though many of us have a demanding work and family schedule at this time time of year, it’s often a time when regular structure goes at the window and the days blur into one another. Throughout the year, many of us have found that simple routines around such things as exercise, good diet or meditation are immensely important to keeping us stable or helping us flourish. If you have built up such habits, try not to let the momentum slide in late December. In fact, the days from around the 27th to 30th are a great time to build a head start on a New Year’s Resolution

Obviously, it’s a time of year famous for the opposite of good habits, enjoying more food and drink is perfectly normal, but are numerous mega-binges (plus after effects) really so necessary? What do they have to do with the more wholesome and well rooted values of Christmas? For spiritual and religious people, relationship to the divine is highly personal, but for agnostics and atheists it’s a very good time of year for reflection. Building in time for this may take a deliberate effort with so much else competing for our attention. In all these things, perhaps the thing to keep most in mind is to make sure at least some part of the season is our very own, and not somebody else’s Christmas.

Have a good one :-)

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