Simplify the Holidays to Reduce Stress

As the holiday season nears, I hear a lot from others that things get increasingly hectic for them from about Halloween all the way through New Years.  There are a lot of varied factors that contribute to this stress, but one of the biggest is that of making things too complicated.  So finding ways to simplify it all can reduce your stress and get you through the holidays. 

Travel is one of the more common and expensive complications during the holidays.  Ways to simplify traveling include booking your flights early, taking turns every other year or more with relatives to not always be the one traveling, tap in to relatives and friends who live in the destination area to help you with transportation, and always travel light.

Cooking and meal planning are also tasks that can quickly get out of control if too many details and dishes are included.  Meal events can be much less stressful by asking everyone to bring a dish, see if others are willing to help out with some of the usual tasks like table setting, dishes, carving, entertaining guests and so on.  Keeping it simple with just the basics of food can only be helpful and avoiding long and complicated recipes that have high risk of failure when something more simple would do just as well.

Holidays are also a time when many people get sick.  General Adaptation Syndrome explains the way in which chronically high levels of stress will push us through the three stages of Alarm, Resistance, and finally Exhaustion.  When holidays finally come, the body can fall into the third stage of this series making us susceptible to illness due to a lowered immune system.  Ways to counter this are to utilize the time off, not for more stress or unhealthy behavior such as drinking or over eating, but using the time and opportunity to rest, relax, enjoy oneself.  It can be a time for focusing on eating a healthy diet while the opportunity presents itself for a break from the usual stressors of life outside of the holidays.  In other words, don't make your holiday break more complicated with excess, but instead try to simplify it with less.

Holidays don't need to be complicated and stressful.  Instead, they can and should be relaxing events where everyone can reenergize, relax and enjoy a break from the usual rushed and hectic schedule of everyday working life.

You can find my prior blog entry about ways to simplify the holidays here. 

"I am beginning to learn that it is the sweet, simple things in life which are the real ones after all."     ~Laura Ingalls Wilder

Thanks to Faith Goble for the great photo, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Less is More: Reducing Stress by Simplifying Life

If you find yourself feeling like you want to simplify life--clear the clutter and downsize to less "stuff", less spending, less accumulation, desire and want--, part of the battle will be to define what simplicity means to you, personally.  For some it can look pretty complex when compared to what simplicity might mean to others.  If you think owning twenty pairs of shoes is simpler than the fifty you have had for years, someone else might find the thought of owning twenty pairs of shoes a challenge in finding storage space.  If shopping just once a week is a nice reduction from your usual daily spending, someone else might find that shopping on a weekly basis would be a treat compared to the monthly time they permit themselves to go a little bit beyond what the budget allows.

There are several different ways to look at the concept of "simple".  It is frequently just thought of as "natural", meaning that nothing artificial or complicated has been added.  But then we'd have to get complicated already and define for each individual what "natural" is, and this starts getting away from the idea of simple real fast.  So let's just take one of the most common descriptions of simple, and that is that simple has "few added parts".  Or we could just simplify that even more to say that simple means "fewer".

When we say that "less is more" we mean that having less brings you more of something else.  You gain more peace of mind.  When life is less complex it's like lessening the load of a heavy backpack you've been carrying for too long.  And that pack can be lightened of more than just the material weight of items not needed anymore.  It can be lightened of worry, excessive stress, ruminating thoughts, traumatic memories, bad habits,  and even wasted time, like surfing the net or watching TV.

So what will be defined as simple or natural to you is going to be unique to you, and you might continue to expand your definition over the years.  For some it can eventually mean a remote existence in the deep forest, and for others it could mean a downsized city life with the least number of complications and needs allowable.  The main task will be deciding for yourself where you feel your life is too complex in the first place.  Is it in your work?  Your home?  Perhaps your finances or your relationships?  Or maybe the biggie for most of us...and that is in our thinking styles.

Simple doesn't have to mean dull and lifeless.  We can look at the beauty of Ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arrangement, to see that simple can be deeply beautiful and full of life and color.  A place where less is more.  

So here are some ideas for simplifying your life.  Keep in mind that this is very individualized and your concept of "fewer" is going to be different when compared to what others see as "less" in their lives.  Be self compassionate and give yourself permission to know what feels right for you.  What can you do with less of?  In what areas of your life would "fewer" work?

• Notice places in your environment where you have stocked up on several of the same item.  Determine how long it's been since you've actually needed all the "extras" and determine if keeping just one or two would actually work out just the same.
• Take a scroll through your phone contacts and determine how many phone numbers you are scrolling through that don't need to be there anymore.  Maybe some you've hung onto for so long you haven't dialed in years.  Can some be deleted?
• What clothing items hang in your closet or take up dresser space that have not been worn in over a year?  Or two years?  Or five years?  Do they really need to be there?
• You may find that there are items in your kitchen that were outdated a year ago.  Maybe longer.  Check the back of the shelves and inside the drawers and see if you can rid of some things that can never be used again.
• Carry items around before buying them.  Even in your electronic carts online.  Leave things there and come back to them later to see if you really still think you need or want them.  Sometimes we buy less by just sleeping on it.
• Set a timer when surfing the net.  After 30 minutes, get up and go do something else.  Less is more when you can enjoy more of life and not spend all of your time on the computer.
• Create less opportunity for others to interrupt your personal time by scheduling it for yourself and not letting anyone take it from you.  Having an appointment with yourself reduces the concept of FOMO (fear of missing out).
• Set limits at your place of employment, even if you are your own boss.  Be firm about quitting time and stop letting work gobble up more and more of your precious time.
• Use Mindfulness practices to interrupt unwanted or repetitive thinking and ruminations.  Joko Beck, in her book Everyday Zen, suggests noticing what you are thinking throughout the day and labeling the thoughts, or placing those thoughts into categories so you can raise your awareness that we each have a set of thought categories we return to repeatedly.  "I'm not doing enough" thoughts, or "Something bad will happen" thoughts.  Discover what your most frequent thought categories are.  Intentionally noticing them and categorizing them, according to Joko, helps them begin to dissolve.  This happens because we move from "generating" thoughts, to "observing" thoughts.

           It's a good thing to be satisfied with what one has."    ~Buddha

Thanks to crabchick  and terrance rengarasu for the great photos, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/