When Feliz Navidad Turns to No Mas!
How to Flip the Script if Your Christmas Isn’t All It’s Cracked Up to Be
It’s the season of enforced fun but, when our body, mind and spirit tell us, no sale, what’s really going on?
For many, of course, Christmas is dandy. For many others, it’s a time of mixed feelings and a time when our bodies, minds or our (Christmas) spirits can hijack our best laid plans. During the season when we are told peace, goodwill and enforced ho-ho-ho should reign, what can we do if feliz navidad turns to no mas?
The moment you stop work to enjoy a couple of bank holidays, the lurgy hits. The day before, you were crunching spreadsheets for the boss like a boss and, the next, you were a snivelling, coughing wreck wondering if your emergency Covid tests are still in date. Or, three days into the festivities, you can’t stop crying and a feeling of dread is dogging you and, somehow, your back and shoulders feel like they were hefting Santa’s sacks. And, underneath it all, you’ve got a gnawing anxiety that something terrible is going to happen precisely because it’s Christmas.
Chemical Christmas Cocktail of Hormones
Your cheerleading gang at WillPowders are here to reassure: it’s not you! Ok, so it’s happening to you, but you’re not alone and the likely culprits are your body’s menacing mixologist’s mess up in your stress hormones. Experiencing a flux in mood or dissipating feelings of wellness are a well documented phenomenon known as the ‘let down effect’ when adrenaline levels drop after stress, and you finally quiet the noise to hear what your body has been bellowing at you since early November. You thought you were doing so well, curating gifts like Mary Portas, Queen of Shops, and making your home a sanctuary of carefully coordinated colours in your celebratory baubles, when, actual fact, you were accruing stress.
Suddenly, you can hear your cells sobbing, too much, no more, please stop! Ironically, given our drive to get to the finish line during the festive season, we can all be guilty of tuning in to our bodies just that little bit too late. Now the old nag called Recovery Time has seen its chance and bumbled out of the stable, limping in vain looking for the home stretch through its one good eye.
Christmas Stress and the Ghosts of Christmas Past
Some time in November, your amygdala, just one part of the fear activation centres in your brain, detected you were under stress preparing for winter festivities. Worse, it detected that Christmas is a time that can be riddled with nostalgia, also known as old fears. So, although the Ghost of Christmas Past is unlikely to visit us in our beds, under stress, our brains are not so hot at discerning the difference between threat and safety. This can be particularly true if we have lived through difficult and stressful circumstances in the years up to now and we haven’t quite processed what our nervous systems perceived as trauma [*].
Time moved the circumstances of our life on so we can think that we’ve processed these events because, for the majority of the time, we function, but our nervous system can lose the ability to differentiate between stressful situations then and the time that has elapsed since they occurred. In these circumstances, we experience disordered patterns of fear and worry. This is why the stress of Christmas can also become the stress of every broken heart we’ve ever had, every bump of the car, every medical intervention, every HR meeting we’ve ever been called to at work. You name it, your anxiety is reacting like it’s right now.
The fact that it’s fallen at this time of year can further multiply the fear and stress as we perceive it’s all rather inconvenient as the agenda the rest of the world subscribes to is one of seeming merriment, mulled wine and the odd Christmas miracle. No one wants to be found sobbing into their turkey because we think it would be a buzzkill for everyone else. This is particularly true if we are female with the knuckle in the back perceptions we have been forced to inherit that mean we suffer from perma-guilt if things aren’t just so.
Suddenly, we are in a negative feedback loop - old fears are high, new fears of being seen having old fears means more old fears surface which means more immediate fears of having to pretend we’re ok when we don’t have the energy surface. No wonder the doctor’s surgery is full of people with anxiety and dread come Betwixtmas - by then, we think the Ghost of Christmas Future is surely going to come for us because we have dramatic symptoms such as chest pains, heart palpitations, numbness and tingling in our limbs and brain zaps that, we think, must surely mean we’re having an aneurysm.
Positive Steps to Self-Care Start in December
Downshift stress as an Advent Practice with Deep Rest
Sleep can be a minefield this time of year, but rest is important for adjusting exhaustion levels, which is one of the tools we have control over when we can’t get rid of the external stressors. According to Dr. Gavin Francis, author of Recovery: the Lost Art of Convalescence, even when we’re suffering post viral fatigue, whose symptoms might include, ‘breathlessness, difficulty concentrating, forgetfulness, mood changes, insomnia, weight loss, exhaustion, muscle weakness, joint stiffness and flashbacks’, we can do things about our energy levels, our exhaustion and our levels of stress [*].
We can take some of the pressure off by using 10 or 20 minutes of NSDR: non-sleep deep rest. NSDR is a concept of Andrew Huberman, PHD, at Stanford School of Medicine. It draws from more ancient practices such as yoga and hypnosis or more modern progressive muscle relaxation. Allowing our brains to feel offline from the hullabaloo can help redress the balance that we need in terms of rest when sleep is hard to come by and it can provide a boon during the day to let our body get on with the job of recovery from those old fears that surface under stress. (It’s worth noting that old stressors and fears don’t have to be raked over in talk therapies - the nervous system can regulate given downshift time and it can be as simple as sitting and sensing within - but, we are aware that it’s the one thing many of us don’t want to do!).
You can try Huberman’s protocols as follows: 10 minutes and 20 minutes.
Calm the Negative Feedback Loop
The body and mind are in a wonderfully peculiar relationship and, you know us at WillPowders, we do like a biohack. We can go someway to biohacking out of the negative feedback loop this time of year by taking WillPowders Calm. Taking Calm in the build up to Christmas and continuing over Christmas could potentially help you dodge the jitters. It contains L-Theanine, an amino acid found in green tea that can help soothe the nerves and calm the brain. In this way, because we feel less jittery, our minds don’t need to go ranging round for reasons that we feel like the sky is going to fall in. The calmer we can be in the stressful run up to Christmas, the better our chances of not experiencing ‘the let down effect’ when the stressor goes but the fear begins.
Self-Compassion in Self-Talk
Even if you can’t summon up the energy to be kind to yourself because you’re running on fumes this time of year, you can choose to not tell yourself off. Don’t be your own tyrannical leader who cruelly demands you carry on regardless and berates yourself for not ‘feeling it’ when the Christmas Spirit seems to have visited everyone else. That self-admonishment will only make things worse - your body believes what you tell it. And, if you don’t think that’s true, we are in the best season of the year (when we see lots of images of snowflake crystals) to consider the findings of Japanese scientist Masaru Emoto who discovered that the molecules in water respond to our thoughts, words and feelings.
His before and after images of water treated in loving ways - for example with appreciative words - reveal amazing transformations (we might say, at this time of year, water on the naughty or nice list) is a salutary lesson for what we might be doing to our body’s oceans when we forget self-compassion. We’re made of a high proportion of water, afterall.
Make WillPowders ElectroTides for hydration part of your daily practice in December too to support hydration and macronutrients that are key to keeping the body’s electrical systems up and running. With the added bonus of a flushing out of the old with the help of diuretics dandelion and horsetail, we like to think that your water molecules are camera ready!
Self-compassion has become an all too rare commodity in the modern get back to it culture we live in and there are few people (particularly women who are conditioned to people please) who enjoy what person-centred therapist Carl Rogers describes as ‘unconditional positive regard’ so allowing ourselves to follow the mind, body and spirit’s need to recover, even when it turns up at the most ‘inconvenient’ of Christmastimes, can be a positive step.
Hangxiety - Alcohol and the Paranoid Android
Some feelings of, ‘What the actual f*ck am I doing with my life?’ are more easily avoided than others. For many, alcohol opens the door to paranoia and anxiety. It’s not that you lack moral fibre; it’s the fact that your brain chemistry, particularly in terms of the natural production of serotonin and GABA, can be disrupted by drinking. But, when the festive cheer arrives, it’s really easy to dive in with both feet, drink and be merry. Until, of course, the morning after arrives. Then you feel nothing but queasy, in need of grease and there’s a whole new frenemy in bed with you - well, hello, Paranoia, you new bedfellow!
While you’re drinking, alcohol impairs cognitive functions, meaning you don’t read social clues quite so well. Did you really tell Great Auntie Edna she should invest in a vibrator? What photos are going to turn up on WhatsApp later, making you question, WhatsUp with me, ffs? Suddenly, getting the official title of Designated Driver on your CV seems like a great move going forward. Abstaining from alcohol is always an option if you think that the ‘let down’ effects of stress is going to pay you a call this Christmas.
However, if you do fancy a little glass of sparkle and fizz from time to time during December, you may benefit from WillPowders Rise and Shine, to appease the bleurgh feeling that so often accompanies the odd glass of vino. It also has the potential to support your liver with all the rich food we consume this time of year.
Amino Acids and your immune system and mood
It’s a long established fact since the 1970s that branched chain amino acids are part of your immune system’s healthy functioning [*]. Which kind of makes you wonder why, for the past thirty years, we have been consistently advised by public health guidance to make carbohydrates the loves of our lives, rather than more protein rich foods.
If we think we are likely to be heading towards the effects of ‘let down’ in our body and brain chemistry, then making sure we eat full proteins on the run up to Christmas might be a positive step. Certainly tryptophan, which is key to the production of serotonin and melatonin, the Happy and Sleepy of the Seven Dwarves (!), has the potential to make a difference to your mood. You can read more about the effects of stress on amino acids here. But, it might also serve us well to remember that branched amino acids play key roles in our immune systems [1].
You can cut the stress of taking an amino acid register on a daily basis by adding full proteins to your diet. Eat from nature, of course, and consider swapping empty calorie, sugar snacks to amino acid packed WillPowders Protein Powders to nourish. OurChocolate Protein Powder is award winning, don’t you know?!
The Rush to Recover
When ‘normal service’ won’t resume until the New Year, having to manage feelings that arise and need processing during the festive season can leave us in a recovery wasteland. Not in the least because the art and science of recovery seems to be a lost knowledge in modern life. We are expected to buck up and do it pronto! Work needs us back as they measure attendance against a standard measure, our children and partners and parents seem to be waiting for us to re-set, whether we’re grieving, laid up or mending. Our biggest fears are that, God forbid, we should be called a malingerer or be accused of hosting a pity party.
Modern life and medicine has shown us that we can swallow an antibiotic to get better from an infection quickly, or we can endlessly consume analgesics of our choice - food, fashion, homewares, boxsets, whatever is our salve - in order to detract from the wounds of emotional harms. Expecting recovery at Tik Tok speed, not least because there’s another Christmas meal to get through and a smile to stitch on, is unrealistic. Sometimes, come the New Year, the best thing you can ask your doctor to prescribe might be time while the body does the work of getting you back on track.
Build Your Cocoon, Not the One You See on the Adverts
If you have succumbed to the lurgy or the anxiety associated with ‘let down’, then let Florence Nightingale be a port of call in terms of recovery. It’s a somewhat forgotten skill in our modern lives. In her work, Notes on Nursing (1859), she details that recovery involves, ‘the proper use of fresh air, light, warmth, cleanliness, quiet and the proper selection and administration of diet’. We can take a leaf out of The Lady with the Lamp’s cocooning suggestions with a few tweaks to the Christmas itinerary.
Whatever we might be recovering from, we need safe spaces and time to do it. At Christmas, the disruption to routine and the compressing and/or expanding of our perception of time can feel like an invasion of what would normally be our safe spaces: our body, our home, our routine, the ‘comfort’ of our occupation, control of our finances, the people we surround ourselves with, and so on. But, we do have a say over how much of the Christmas madness we let in. For most of us as children, we’d never heard of a Christmas Eve box or whole family liveries of pyjamas - these are added extras and, while they may be fun, they are completely unnecessary add-ins that the world of retail has added to our lists. Decide if you want to go along with it all in your environment. Would a chair by an open window and a good self-care book or novel on Boxing Day feed you more than wearing the same pyjamas as your significant others? Probably. Broadening your vistas by reading books means your brain is not concerned with the day to day grind of Betwixtmas or spectres of the past, present or future.
At WillPowders, we also love the fact that Flo seems to be onboard with using diet as a nutraceutical. Eat close to nature to support your body.
Kudos, Florence!
The Rest Cure
‘The Rest Cure’, described by Weir Mitchell, allowed the body to regenerate during times of illness, ‘millions of dead molecules are being restored in such better condition that not only are you become new in the best senses - renewed, as we say - but have gotten [sic] the power to grow again’ [*].
However, the idea of retreating to bed and not getting out, no matter how much you might want to this Christmas does deserve some quizzing. Retiring to bed comes with its own set of problems in periods of recovery, not least the fact that it is socially isolating. The human body, in times of recovery, seems to also benefit from occupation. Now is the time to gently resume a hobby or interest of some sort. If you need to energise the brain, try a nootropic like WillPowders Brain Powder so that you can dabble in your Christmas pastime. Tell the family to p*ss off, you’re taking up macrame!
Go West!
Weir Mitchell also, Dr. Gavin Francis tells us in Recovery, was also a supporter of the ‘West Cure’ method of recovery and convalescence when faced with what were known as ‘nervous conditions’. Interestingly, this tended to be prescribed for men (so if you need to ditch menfolk this Yule, have a word!). It involved seeking work in a ranch in the West of America, often among the mountains, and sleeping on the ground. There was definitely something in it - the Indigenous Peoples of America knew about the power of sleeping on the ground and its benefits to health.
More recently, Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman and other scientists studied this phenomenon more formally, ‘Earthing research, observations, and related theories raise an intriguing possibility about the Earth's surface electrons as an untapped health resource—the Earth as a “global treatment table.” Emerging evidence shows that contact with the Earth—whether being outside barefoot or indoors connected to grounded conductive systems—may be a simple, natural, and yet profoundly effective environmental strategy against chronic stress, ANS dysfunction, inflammation, pain, poor sleep, disturbed HRV, hypercoagulable blood, and many common health disorders, including cardiovascular disease. The research done to date supports the concept that grounding or earthing the human body may be an essential element in the health equation along with sunshine, clean air and water, nutritious food, and physical activity’ [*].
Lying or standing on earth in December is pretty hardcore, so, getting a grounding sheet might be wise. WillPowders have stylish towels, such as the gorgeous raspberry or lime ones we have here. The copper ions enhance the body's connection to Earth's natural electrical rhythms when it’s on the ground. Fold it up and pop it on the patio and step on with your bare tootsies - because, Baby, it’s cold outside!
Wellbeing is learning to balance
Dr. Gavin Francis suggests, ‘Anyone whose life is moving in the direction of more dignity, understanding, and in accord with their wishes, is in some sense on a journey of recovery’ [*] so, even if you do get The Lurgy or The Fear this Yule,or, worse, both, making some of the adjustments we suggest here are positive steps in moving you towards recovery.
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