Discardia_ More Life, Less Stuff - Dinah Sanders [73]
This is the season to say thanks to yourself. Seek out the right choices you've made in the past year, great and small, and acknowledge your good sense in curing those causes of dissatisfaction.
You have a supportive framework of good habits, can see the rewards of your decisions and what you did about them, and have replaced some of your less exciting quantity with energizing quality. Now it’s time to turn up the volume on the awesomeness and build the habit of upgrading your experiences.
Think back on your past:
What did you learn from good but not ideal apartments, jobs, and relationships?
Are there patterns or antipatterns that point you in the direction of positive change in your life today?
Add this question to your mental toolbox: “What does this look like when it works?” You can apply that to any functional object, space, time, or relationship that is currently less than ideal.
This mindset leads to other good questions. For example:
What do I want to see (and not see) when I walk in the front door?
What is bedtime like when it leads me into a great night's sleep?
What would a good mentor provide me now?
Give that part of your world a nudge in the right direction.
First step: Do better than just survive December.
Symptom #28: Holiday Stress
Solution #28: Freedom from Obligation is the Best Gift
I've reached that peculiar but serene stage in life when all I want for Christmas is less.
—Roger Ebert, writer and critic
The weight of the season
Even the luckiest of us feel a bit of extra pressure around the end of the year. In a 2006 survey by the American Psychological Association (APA) over half of respondents reported that they often or sometimes experience stress, irritability, and/or fatigue during the holidays, with the leading stressors being lack of time, lack of money, and commercialism or hype (in contrast to work and money, which lead at other times of year).
It’s not just Christmas. The whole season is enough to make anyone rebel against all that pressure. I’m not the only one to invent holidays out of that stress: Buy Nothing Day and Festivus owe their origins to some of the same forces that launched Discardia. From the moment we lock the front door on Halloween night and poke through the leftover trick-or-treat candy, we jump into a wild, obligation-ridden bobsled run, whisking us through Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve, until we’re dumped headfirst into the cold, slushy snow of the first bleak week of January.
We feel the whirlwind begin as ads suggest “the perfect gift for the such and such on your list.” This list is assumed; of course, everyone has a list. Everyone must be buying. Post-turkey Friday comes and the retail frenzy begins. The crowds and the sensory overload of enforced commercial festivity. “Bring on the cheer, dammit!” seems to be the underlying message of the barrage of Christmas music, holiday movie promotions, and red and green advertising plastered on every surface. Sometimes it seems like you couldn't throw a rock without hitting a Santa—and, as December barrels on, the temptation to do so grows.
Let's not forget the family pressures. Whether anyone in your own family applies it, pop culture is more than ready to step in with the traditional holiday guilt. “Welcome to December! Here's your script. You know your part. It’s magic time! As our sponsor would like to remind you, magic means presents, so shop ’til you drop! Charge it! After all, doesn't your family deserve a joyous holiday season?”
Friends and families gather together for whatever holidays they celebrate. Events are planned with all their special rituals, running the gamut from two separate kinds of cranberry sauce for differing tastes right up to Midnight Mass and Auld Lang Syne in Times Square. People are pulled from their normal surroundings—or worse, have to tidy them up for an onslaught of visitors—and are forced to do particular things at particular times, always a potential source of stress.
There is no time of year more likely