Surviving the Holidays

Hi, this is Dr. Jameca Cooper, and before you go any further, make sure you subscribe to this channel. Today we are talking about how to survive the holiday season and make sure you still have at least a good sense of mental health. Or healthy mental health when it's all over with. So we have a couple holidays coming up. Um, the more common ones in this country, of course, are Thanksgiving and Christmas, or the holiday season if you are of another ethnicity. So how do you make it through it? I want to give you 3 tips today on how to do that, and 3 areas that you need to pay attention to to make sure that you survive this holiday season. The first thing, the I want you to do is make sure you pay attention to your physical health. Given the pandemic, everyone still needs to be careful and remember that we're still in the midst of it all, so making sure that you have proper social distancing, making sure that you have very consistent hygiene patterns such as washing hands, sanitizing, etc., etc., and making sure you limit gatherings that are social, making sure you limit the number of people because Despite what many people will say, everyone is not vaccinated and everyone is not masking up, which means now they bring their risk to you. So number 2, the second thing I would recommend to survive the holidays is to make sure you pay attention to boundaries. Boundaries, boundaries, boundaries. What do I mean by boundaries? They can be physical, meaning that if you choose not to spend physical time face-to-face with your family or friends this holiday season, don't, if you choose not to. There are other ways to be able to keep in contact with them, such as FaceTime, Zoom, um, phone calls, text messages. You don't have to go and be around people if you don't feel comfortable doing that. So boundaries are important, whether that's physical or whether it's mental and psychological. So let's just say you are around family and friends for the holiday. There are ways to minimize the stress or the time that you might spend with people that could trigger some of your other mental health concerns. So you could limit time by reducing the time you might go to see your family if you're going to see them in person. Or as opposed to staying days, you can make that one day. If you're going to spend time with friends around the holidays, you can limit your time to maybe a 2-hour block of time so that that's really all the time that you have to give or to be stressed out. So boundaries, boundaries, boundaries are very important, and I highlight that in many of my other videos as well. The third thing, and my third tip for you, is to always practice self-care. So even if you're spending time with friends and family over the holidays, that does not mean that you still can't practice self-care. That could look like you taking some time away from the group to read a book, to go for a walk, to go exercise, to watch a show by yourself. To go take a nap. These are things that sometimes when people are in the midst of large groups of families or friends, they feel selfish and they feel that they will be looked at in a weird way if they take time away or pull away from the group. But sometimes the only way you can make it through the gathering or the holiday is to focus on yourself periodically. So make sure you engage in self-care. So these are my 3 tips for how you can survive the holidays with or without your loved ones. Make sure you subscribe to this channel. I'm Dr. Mega.