How to Deal With The Holiday Blues

The speaker talks about feeling down during the holiday season and shares her personal experiences of struggling during the holidays due to family dynamics and being away from loved ones. She emphasizes that it's okay to feel like shit during the holidays and encourages listeners to do whatever they need to make it through, whether it's indulging in self-care activities, reaching out to friends, engaging in hobbies, or simply taking time for themselves. The speaker reassures that they are not alone in their feelings and that it's important to make choices that bring them comfort and joy during this time. Welcome to Coaching Your Inner Self. I am Amy Mallory and I am your coach. Life is hard. Life is scary. Life is messy. Especially when you lack a sense of direction in where you want to go and who you want to be. I have good news though. You don't have to be lost. You don't have to feel empty. You don't ever have to settle. Everyone deserves the life they dream about. I can help you find it. I can help you find your path and embrace it with happiness and with gratitude. Let's go do the work guys. Hi there. Welcome back. Happy Thursday, December 21st. We are getting nearer and nearer and nearer to Christmas. I just got in from some Christmas shopping but I really wanted to talk to you guys about something that I have been thinking about for a little while here and that is the Christmas doldrums, for lack of a better word. The Christmas spirit is always something that we strive for. Since I was a kid, I remember the holiday season being a really happy, exciting time. As you get older and life changes and it gets a little bit more difficult, it doesn't seem as joyous and exciting anymore. I really have been thinking a lot about that lately and I've also been feeling that way lately. I just wanted to pop on here and do a quick podcast episode about feeling like shit during the holidays and how it is absolutely okay to feel like shit. I came from a divorced family and I always had a hard time during the holidays because I was either on one side of the family spending the day or I was on the other side of the family. Another remarriage happened between my mother and my then stepdad and he came with three lovely stepdaughters and that became a whole other different kind of Christmas for me. I've always, for a long, long time, felt like shit during the holidays. As we age, unfortunately, it's not as exciting as it once was. Whether it's relationships or in-laws or any other extenuating circumstances separating you from your family during Christmas time, it can be tough. I beat myself up about it a lot and it wasn't until a couple years ago where I finally gave myself the okay to feel like shit during the holidays. I moved to a different state when I was in my early 30s and that was a challenge as well when it came to Thanksgiving and Christmas because it was more like just a season I had to fight to survive because I was alone. I was without my family and my job did not allow me the ability to travel home for the holidays. I spent a good 10 years living in Florida just trying to survive the holiday season by myself. I hated being without my family. My holiday celebrations usually involved a couple of bottles of wine, some shitty food, and then a really bad fucking hangover. I'm just here to tell you guys or tell whomever is listening to this that whatever reason, whatever your reason, you can do whatever the hell you need to do to make it through the holidays. Do I recommend consuming excessive amounts of wine or alcohol to make it through? No, I don't, obviously, but you got to do what you got to do. For me, for a few years, that was exactly what I needed to do and that was exactly how I got through. The holidays aren't what they used to be when we were little. There's no excitement like there used to be. There's no waiting for Santa and believing and feeling that in your actual heart. There's just not a lot of joy associated with holidays as you turn into an adult and that's okay. You don't need to be happy on any given day, whether it's a holiday or not. You don't need to be happy. You don't need to feel joy all the time. You don't need to buy presents or do anything or go anywhere or pretend to be anyone that you don't want to be. You can do whatever the fuck you want and if that just involves you surviving the day or the week or the month, then that's okay. It's okay to feel like shit during the holidays and I promise you, you are not alone. If you want to try to at least make something out of these days, out of Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Year's Eve, New Year's Day, if you want to at least try to make something out of these holidays, you can do that too. You don't have to just lay around and feel sorry for yourself all the time. If that's what you want to do, fine. I fucking congratulate you for choosing you and putting your needs first. But if you want to at least try to make something out of the day that doesn't involve family and it doesn't involve stressing and being upset and obsessing over the things that you think you're missing out of this holiday, there's a bunch of stuff that you can do and a lot of the stuff that I started doing once I became a little bit more adjusted to the new norm of being an adult during the holidays, a lot of the stuff that I did, it helped to make me feel better, even if it was just for a little while. Maybe your Christmas Day is going to be like mine was for a long time and it's a wave of ups and downs. You try to fill certain hours of the day with things that make you happy and make you feel a little bit better. And then you go home and you feel like shit and you go to bed early. It is what it is. There's no rules. There's no fucking reasoning behind suffering through a holiday just because it's a holiday. So do something. And my number one thing recommending anybody that they feel like shit on any occasion for whatever reason is to go outside. Go for a walk around your neighborhood. Go for a hike around your town. If you can get out into the woods or the hills or the mountains or down the beach, go outside. It doesn't have to be for the whole day. But the best way that I find to get yourself out of that gloomy, shitty, down-in-the-dump feeling is to get some sun on your face, get the wind across your face, and breathe in the fresh air. And you can do that all by yourself. And none of taking a fucking hike around your town involves a holiday. It doesn't involve you thinking about all the shit that you're missing or all the family that you think you're missing. Literally just going for a hike just means you're going for a fucking hike. So go outside. Or you could reach out to friends and see what they're doing. I know it's hard as we get older. A lot of friends and family, friends especially, have gotten married and they have kids. And I have lived the single child free life. So I don't have a lot of friends that don't have children, but I do have a couple. So reach out. Reach out to spend time with the people that will support you through these days. Even if it's just an hour. Even if it's just a cup of coffee. Do something that can shift your mind from feeling like shit and feeling sorry for yourself. Watch TV shows. I don't watch holiday television on the holidays when I'm feeling like crap. I watch Law and Order. I watch scary movies. I watch reality television shows. I have been known to throw on Sex and the City because I've seen it a million times and can recite every episode word for word. But that will get me through any mental crisis in my life ever. So watch a TV show or a movie. Start a book. Read a whole fucking book. I mean you've got the whole day or days depending on your situation. Start and finish a book. Even if it's the only book that you read this year because people don't really read anymore, read the fucking book. Read a self-help book. Read a comedy. Read a romance. Read a murder mystery novel or an autobiography about some amazing woman. Do something that will take your mind off of feeling like shit. Hopefully all of us out there have some sort of hobby. For me, it's writing. It's podcasting. Honestly, I'll admit it. I do paint by numbers on my iPad and I fucking love it. But there's hobbies out there for everybody. So spend time with your hobbies. It's not really that often that we get an entire 24-hour or 48-hour window for ourselves where we can literally do anything. And if we do find ourselves in the opportunity where we're away from family, we're out of the state, we're feeling like shit, our family is kind of at odds, take those 24 or 48 hours and spend time on the shit that you want to do. Go exercise. Take a day trip somewhere. Go drive to a nearby town and experience their scenery. Catch up on your sleep. I mean, a lot of us are working. I work so many hours a day and so many hours a week. It's just absurd at this point. So catch up on some sleep. Take a nap. Cook yourself a meal or maybe take yourself out to dinner for an expensive steak. I mean, treat yourself. There are restaurants that are open during the holidays. God loves them. So go out and have a great meal. Whatever you need to do to make it through the day. It's okay, like I said before, if you want to feel like shit and hide inside in your pajamas and don't brush your teeth and don't brush your hair, don't talk to anybody, drink an entire bottle of wine and sleep the day away. That is totally fucking okay. Or choosing to do something a little bit better for yourself, a little bit more positive, something that won't leave you with a raging hangover and feeling like shit about yourself in the morning. You know, there are plenty of things that you can do. The most important thing that we need to understand about this whole process is that we have the choice. And we need to actively choose during these difficult times to not accept just feeling like crap. You know, we can go either way. And either way is totally okay. Because at the end of the day, it's literally just 24 hours. It's so blown out of proportion sometimes and taken so seriously. And it's literally just a day. The sun rises and sets like any other day. And there is nothing different about that day except for somebody decided to make it a holiday. You know, sometimes it makes certain people feel like shit. But it's okay to do whatever it is that you need to do to get through the day. You are not alone out there. I'm telling you. You know, I'm in my early 40s and I've probably spent a good 25 years. God, maybe even more than that. 28 years feeling like shit about the holidays. It's okay. Because the majority of people do feel like shit about the holidays. There's people that are married with children and they've got family coming out their fucking ears. And they're dreading the holidays. We all go through this. We all feel this way. You're not alone. You're not alone in feeling like crap. You're not alone in feeling sad and feeling like you're missing out on things. Because life in some way or another has not worked out to make your holiday, you know, the way that it used to be when you were a kid. It's okay. It's just the fucking holidays. It's not the end of the world. It feels like it and it hurts and it's sad and depressing. But I promise you, you're going to make it through. No matter what you choose to do in your day or days, you will make it through. There is a light at the end of the tunnel. The holiday season does fucking end. And then all of that shitty, gross, painful, heavy emotion that you feel, it does go away. And it will go away. You know, it's really hard being single during the holidays. It's really hard being a single woman without children during the holidays. And you take away the family or the friends or whatever circumstance and suddenly you're alone. And I've been there. And it happens. It happens a lot. And it's okay. You are okay. Do whatever you need to do to make it through. The holidays don't last for very long. And then they're done and we're moving on. So I really just wanted to get that out there. I really just felt I'm feeling that way. So I know that there's somebody out there that is also feeling that way. And I promise you, it's going to pass. And it's okay to feel like shit. I just really wanted to talk about that today. If I can even have just one person listen to this podcast and feel a little bit better about their day or their week in the holiday season hell that they're going through, I've done my job. And that's what I'm here for. So thank you so much for listening. I hope you have a happy, happy holiday. Or if you don't, that's okay, too. Fuck it. It's almost over. Talk soon.