A New Tradition

Ahh Christmas traditions. I’m a sucker for them. Going and getting the tree, leaving a mince pie and a glass of sherry by the chimney, and waking up super early on Christmas morning to check whether Santa’s been. There’s something wonderful about the familiarity of it all. But this year, I want to challenge you to start a NEW tradition. A tradition of taking care of yourself.

In particular, a tradition for self-care at this time of year could be making sure that you put things in place ahead of time – for example getting a budget sorted before you start spending money, or planning out gifts you might want to get people well in advance – to make sure you don’t end up with a last minute rush and stress.

Or it could be as simple as factoring in a day during the festive period to treat yourself – doing things YOU enjoy doing, with the people YOU want to be around. There can be lots of compromises at Christmas, so don’t feel at all bad for making some time for yourself, for the sake of your own mental wellbeing.

A tradition that I think would be particularly worthwhile introducing would be to sit down and actually talk with your family through Christmas. About how you’re all feeling, what you’re struggling with, how you can support each other, and how you might be able to move forward together. There can be a lot of pressure for Christmas to be “perfect” or “the best Christmas ever”, which can lead to stress and tension within a family – but talking openly about what you’re feeling and why (and doing it in a calm way, without instigating a food fight) can help to make everyone feel valid – which I think is something we all want.

I did some research before writing this blog post (at least I got SOMETHING out of a 3 year degree other than crippling debt – I can prepare a bunch of research ready to write an essay) and started looking at the difference between traditions and habits. Because making a habit of self care is actually probably easier than you might think.

So there’s research that suggests that repeating an action for 66 consecutive days makes it become an automatic thing that your brain does without needing to think about it (for example, you don’t really need to think about what you’re doing every time brushing your teeth now, because you’ve repeated that so often). So if you can make the conscious decision to take care of yourself, to do things that keep you mentally healthy, and to do something positive as a reaction to a negative situation – whatever that may be for you, whether that’s taking time to meditate, or do something creative, or even just talking – if you can do that for 66 days, then it’ll become a habit, and you’ll catch yourself being good to yourself without even realising it. It’s worth noting though that 66 days is the average – sometimes it’s more, sometimes it’s less, just keep sticking with it, and soon it’ll become automatic.

I also found out that things can become habits that you don’t consciously think about by simply happening over time. Small exposures to certain behaviours can lead to that becoming the “go-to” behaviour – so there’s a couple things to take from this.

1: to introduce a positive change is gonna take time and a lot of baby steps so don’t expect a miracle overnight but also

2: every time you put yourself down, beat yourself up (physically & mentally) or expose yourself to negative things (like triggering images on a tumblr for example) you’re reinforcing that negative habit. Making that the “go-to” reaction when you’re next feeling down.

3: However exposing yourself to positive stuff, giving yourself even a small bit of love, and letting go of things, and having positive coping strategies in place you can start to bring about good habits and steps in a positive direction. Which eventually will become automatic.

So basically, it’s repeating actions and giving them time to become something you don’t think about that makes something into a habit. The difference between a habit and a tradition is apparently that a certain action needs more time to qualify as a tradition – we’re talking years, rather than 66 days. Which is hard. It’s hard to keep something up for years on end, so don’t feel bad if you have the odd slip up; you’re only human. But the other thing that makes something a tradition rather than a habit, is when the actions affect a wider group of people than just one person. So in order to make self-care at Christmas into a tradition, you need to include other people too. Get your family involved with activities that help keep your head above the waves. Get your friends all talking about how you’re feeling and ways of coping. The thing about traditions is that they carry on because they can bring people together, make people happy and there’s something comforting about familiarity, no matter how small the tradition is. So this year, why not start a habit then tradition that leaves everyone feeling able to cope the whole year round.

Wherever you are and whatever you’re doing, I hope you have a happy and peaceful Christmas.