Stress less: Expert advises replacing holiday madness with gratitude

In a popular Christmas song, Andy Williams exclaims, “It’s the most wonderful time of the year.”
This is especially true for children who look forward to this time of year with wonder and excitement. Visions of sugar plums dance in their heads as they dream of what Santa will bring, participate in holiday pageants and help deck the halls of their home.
But as people get older, the Christmas spirit can fade and instead is replaced with stress, anxiety and a general distaste for the holiday season.
Christmas caroling is replaced with aggressive Christmas shopping, and Christmas cookie baking is turned into a rushed event just to get enough cookies on the plate for a classroom party.
According to Jean M. Brinker, RN, BSN, integrative medicine practitioner at Highlands Hospital in Connellsville, the key to managing holiday stress is gratitude.
“I call this living the attitude of gratitude. To understand the power of gratitude, you have to understand everything is energy vibrating at different speeds,” she said. “When you think about how you feel when you are afraid or when you are angry how that feels in your body and where you feel it, that switches on the fight or flight in the body. When you are afraid, think of the physical changes. Your heart rate goes up, your pupils dilate. Those are the markers of fight or flight. On the other hand, think of how you feel when you wake up in the morning, and you’re grateful that you can get up in the morning. That you have a nice, warm place to stay. Your breathing becomes more of a belly breathing. You are more relaxed. All those things come from a thought of being grateful. Love and compassion, they are all on the same frequency, different from the fear and the anger and the hate.”
A lot of stress around the holidays can be attributed to concentrating on the wrong aspects of the season, she said.
“Because they (people who are stressed) focus on what they don’t have. A lot of time you have the family pressure,” said Brinker. “You don’t have the perfect family or the beautiful Thanksgiving dinner you see in the magazines. You can have a simple meal and be just as nourished and have one friend or one pet. It is best to look at what you have, not what you don’t have.”
Brinker said there are three ways to bring more gratefulness into one’s life.
“The first is to have daily meditation that increases what you are grateful for,” she said. “The second way is just being more conscious and aware of the little things in each moment. Just think of the fact that the grocery store is full of wonderful food that is available to you. Take that time you are waiting in line to be thankful that you have food, and you can even buy that food. We all have that choice you can look to the positive or look to the negative.”
Brinker said may not realize that looking at the negative can also affect those around them.
“If you find one person that is cranky, it can send the whole office to be cranky. It takes courage and bravery to be the one who is positive,” she said.
The third way to add more gratefulness into life is through a journal.
“When you write something, it changes your brainwave. It is even more powerful. It reinvents that thought. You are taking that physical action and rewires your brain. That gives you a hard copy to go back and look at,” she said. “Something you write you can go back and refer to. The gratitude is the antidote for negativity in the mind. It is something you have to embrace and actually do.”
Another trap that people fall into during the holidays is overcommitting themselves and saying “yes” to every opportunity that presents itself.
“You have to set healthy boundaries for what you can reasonably do. When you say ‘yes’ to everything, you are trying to please other people. But, you really have to honor yourself. If you overcommit, the person you are tearing down is you. You become negative and resentful,” said Brinker. “Set healthy boundaries for what is reasonably possible for you to do with a happy heart. It is taking an assessment on what is possible for you to do in a healthy manner.”
Amid the last-minute Christmas shopping and hustle to get the baking done, Brinker says one simple expression can change the entire mood — a smile.
“When you smile, your whole body is physically changing. You have to use those muscles to smile. While scowling at people in traffic, you are sending that hate and negativity, and you are sending it as an expression. But, a smile, that is the opposite of that. It can change someone’s negative feeling in an instant. That smile expresses that for you,” said Brinker. “Smiles are contagious, and so is negativity. It is what you are sending out in the world. Who are going to be the people that builds us up? Who is going to do that job?”