Surviving the holidays, part 1
I’m going to do a few posts on surviving the holidays in December, with my digital resource pack being released in a week or so. (A bit late for thanksgiving in the US/Canada, I know, but hopefully still helpful).
Also thank you for being a paid subscriber! I really appreciate your continued support as I’ve moved from substack to buttondown, and my health affecting my writing. Here’s to a more consistent 2025!
It’s December, which means the holidays are in full swing (if you’re in Canada or the US, you’ve already had Thanksgiving, so you’ve started the holiday festivities/stress).
In 2020 I made a surviving the holidays resource pack to help people get through the holidays in the midst of the pandemic, and this year I want to bring it back. It’s a bit delayed but the first draft is complete and I’ll be sharing it very soon.
What I wanted to talk about today is something new that I’ve included in the pack: reflection.
Whether you celebrate the holidays or not, this time of year tends to make us want to reflect on the past year. The end of the calendar year, plus the longer nights in the northern hemisphere make me want to look inward.
I have often fallen into the trap of using end of year reflections to try to make myself into a Whole New Person in the new year. That’s a lot of pressure to put on myself! Especially going into cold, grey January, which is often colder and more wintery than December in the UK.
I’ve been trying to do more gentle reflections to lead to more realistic planning in the past few years, and I wanted to share some of my tips with you all.
Reflection is about spending time with yourself.
Yes, you can find insights and plans and new ways of being, but that’s a side effect, really. This is why reflection is so difficult. We want to find answers or solutions, and so reflecting for the sake of spending time with yourself can feel unnecessary and not productive.
You build a relationship with someone by spending time with them, learning about them, learning how you relate to them. You build a relationship with yourself by doing the same thing. When you make a friend, you don’t really have a goal, there’s no achievement unlocked for making a friend, it’s a joy in and of itself. The same can be said for reflecting.
Slow it down.
What I’m finding over the past few months is that slowing the reflection right down and focusing on how I’m feeling in the present moment is really helpful in reflection. If I can’t figure out what’s going on with me, or if I’m not sure where to go next with reflecting, I bring myself to the now and write about how I'm feeling. This can be emotional or physical. Am I tired? Energised? Anxious, grateful etc.
Reflect on good things.
As I’ve been going through healing and my journey to being a counsellor, I often focus on reflecting on things causing me distress, or blocking me from learning. This is necessary because it’s how you learn and grow. However, as I’ve written before, you can learn from your successes: https://buttondown.com/SelfCareBackpack/archive/learning-from-your-successes/
But aside from that, spending time with yourself, and celebrating yourself is important for building a relationship with yourself, and learning what good feels like for you.
Break it down.
If you want to do some end of year reflections, I highly recommend thinking about a few events or projects or moments you want to reflect on, and then use those as the basis for your reflection.
Don’t try to reflect on the year as a whole, because it’s a long time, and humans tend to focus on negative things more than positive things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias. This means you’ll likely evaluate the year on a negative bias, because that’s how we tend to work.
So, use your calendar, messages, journal, social media, etc to find a handful of things you want to include, make sure it’s a spread of good and not so good, and focus in on those.
It doesn’t have to look any particular way.
However it needs to look for you is fine. I like writing by hand to rain/thunder sounds. Preferably after a walk to help me get myself in the right frame of mind. Maybe you prefer typing, or recording a voice note and grabbing the transcript.
I tend to free write, either using an open prompt, or a tarot card to kick start the process. Maybe you want more specific prompts, maybe you want to go full stream of consciousness, or something in between.
This work is just for you, and the practice is more important than what the results look like.
I plan to release my holiday survival pack in a week or so, and that has some tips for specific holiday scenarios, links to other resources, reflection prompts and more.