61: Be Less Irritated by Your Family by Supporting Yourself During the Holidays

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The holidays can be a major trigger for some (maybe most) people 

More time together, more expectations, more financial strain, more to-do yet during a time when your mind, body and soul is screaming at you to rest and slow down and savor the moments. 

Here’s how to keep your sanity and keep your loved ones feeling loved: quality time, clear communication, intentional self-care.

How to stop being irritated by your family all season long

Hey, my friends. The holidays can be a major trigger for some, okay? Maybe most people we’re spending more time together. There’s more expectations. There’s more places to be, things to do, more financial strain, and there’s more to do Yet during. It’s all occurring during a time when your mind, body, and soul is screaming at you to rest and slow down and savor the moments.

I feel like this creates so much internal conflict and it creates so much family conflict at the same time. I feel like it can be very frustrating and hectic and stressful when it’s supposed to be the most wonderful time of year. So what do we do about this? Alright, awareness here is key. How do we make it the most wonderful time of year?

And keep from constantly bickering with those around us. All right, so I wanna talk today on how to keep your sanity and keep your loved ones feeling loved by you. All right. My simple solutions to this are quality time, clear communication, and intentional self care. All right. Now when I’m talking about quality time, quality time is not sitting in the same room.

Staring at your screens, playing on your phone on the couch together is not quality time. That’s just passing time together. Okay? There’s a reason that sitting on the couch together, playing on your phones does not fill you up, and it actually feels more distant than being apart. All right. It’s subconsciously in a way, saying that I’m in the same physical space, I have the dime, and yet I don’t want to deeply connect with you.

All right? Yeah. It’s fine sometimes to go ahead and sit and just. Veg out, like watch a movie or play on your phones or, you know, independently do your own thing in the same space. That’s okay, but we can’t confuse it with quality time. We can’t try to replace quality time with just existing in the same space.

You get what I mean? All right. That is just passing time together. It’s not connecting and growing in your relationship at all. So it’s not quality time. It’s not gonna fill up that cup you have that requires connection with these people who live in your house, right? So quality time is found in conversations, in playing together, in baking together, in sharing your troubles and triumphs with one another.

All right? Quality time can be a lot of things. There’s a lot of ways to spend quality time together. The key here is to be mindful of the time you’re spending. Yeah, it’s okay to spend time that’s not quality, but you don’t want all your time with this person to. Lacking quality, right? There has to be a balance in there in order for the relationship to really thrive and to feel good and for you to get that connection.

Cuz otherwise, like you just feel so empty about your relationship with a person when you are not intentionally connecting with them. And we do this just by going on autopilot a lot. It’s because we’re not paying attention to the kind of time we’re spending together. So again, awareness is key.

Mindfulness is a must. Our number two thing is clear communication. Now, clear communication. This is ensuring that what you are saying is being interpreted by others in the way that you’re intending it to come. All right, so for example, if you’re saying the words, I love you, some family members might hear that and feel nothing because they don’t, they don’t feel love by hearing it all right, yet, hearing it might be the way that you feel it from others.

All right, so do some people. I love you from actions or from a more meaningful personalized statement. Something that says like, I see you, so if you look into like the five Love languages, then you’ll understand a little bit more on where I’m coming from. This. All right, so communication is more than talking.

It’s more than what you. It’s what you mean and how your words, actions, posture, are interpreted by the other person. All right? Many of your family’s conflicts, or many of my family’s conflicts are simply misunderstandings. And it’s because what’s being said isn’t what’s being heard. So for example, when you always give your kid three chances to do something.

Before there’s a consequence. They don’t pick up on the fact that you’re irritated to ask three times before you get mad. They learn that they get two more chances before you really mean it. So they learn to expect your maximum asks as their minimum before they have to take action. So that is, that is a miscommunication happening there because you’re asking ’em the first time, wanting them to.

But they know from past experience that you’re gonna ask two more times before you get angry. Before you get visibly angry. I’ll say,

So this is, this is a misconnection, a miscommunication because you’re not telling them up front in a way that they understand, I need you to do this. The first time I ask, here are all the reasons why it’s important to me. This is how it makes me feel when you don’t listen. Instead, their past experience is simply that you’ll ask three times before you really mean it.

So they will wait until that third time you ask, because to them they’re not interpreting, you’re upset to ask that many times. They interpret that you’re upset after you’ve asked that many times. Do you get that kind of, so there’s so many ways that we can miscommunicate by, you know, like, have you ever.

Heard that example of like directions to make a peanut butter sandwich, a peanut butter jelly sandwich, and like someone writes out the directions, but if they don’t write every single step in exactly the right way, the person making the sandwich just intentionally misinterprets the instructions and they make the sandwich totally wrong because someone didn’t say, you know, you take the lid off the peanut butter and then you use your.

to scoop the peanut butter out and then to spread it on one side of the to the bread like that is such a great example of how we miscommunicate things all of the time, simply because what you’re saying is not what they’re hearing and what they’re saying might not be what you’re hearing. , and this can lead to so many, so many conflicts in your relationships.

Are honestly kind of unnecessary because it all stems from a misunderstanding and a miscommunication. That’s why it’s very important to be practicing clear communication within your family because it will lead to fewer conflicts and quicker resolutions.

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 I love you, friend. Make great choices.

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Your last sanity saver during this busy season or any season really is intentional self care. When you’re spending more time with others, you’re likely to start getting annoyed quicker by their less desirable traits and vice versa. You’re not the only one who needs to practice intentional self care.

Mama. The whole family does. But they will pick up on you to set the tone on that. When you start practicing and being the example of caring for yourself, they are more likely to follow along. All right, so the best thing to do about getting annoyed with each other is to be mindful of when you feel annoyed and step.

Self care isn’t always going out and doing something spectacular for yourself. Sometimes it’s as simple as making sure that your basic needs are cared for, your hydration, your nutrition is getting enough sleep. And sometimes it’s noting that you’re very irritable and that your mindset is going off the rails.

All right? Sometimes self care is just realigning with gratitude and getting grounded in truth and affirmation when your thoughts are tearing you down. I’m gonna share with you this list of at home self care during the holiday season, ideas that I put together for myself. Salt and oil bath. That’s number one for me.

Just some like a cup of eps and salt and a few drops of like, a balancing essential oil, some kind of calming oil, and then some body oil too, just for the soft skin of course. Nature walks, get out in the fresh air, go be in nature, go be outside. Change of scenery. Go drive around and look at lights.

That’s one you can do as a family, that’s really enjoyable for us most of the time. Journaling, everyday. Journaling, all kinds of journaling. Reading your favorite young adult novels shamelessly. Bust out your favorite, your favorite young adult novel and read it. I don’t care if you’re 45. If you like young adult fiction, then read Young Adult Fiction, that is a comfort genre for me, and I know it is for many others. Go for it. 

Christmas movies, you can watch ’em with the family or you can watch ’em by yourself. Go watch a Christmas movie in the bathtub with peppermint tea. Absolute perfection, peppermint tea. Drink that savor it. It is coming. And seasonal and delicious. Honestly, I think peppermint tea is way underrated. Baking. If you’re into that, do some baking. Create a holiday bucket list, like you don’t have to actually even go out and do all of it as self-care, but creating the list can help you kind of brain dump all the things you wanna do, and it helps clear out your brain from.

All the things that you’re thinking about right now. Cause there’s so many things that you need to do, so many things you want to do. So go ahead and make yourself a bucket list of all the things you wanna do, whether it’s by yourself or as a family, or just, you know, whatever. Make your bucket list. Write a gratitude list for each person in your family.

That is a big one. That is a huge mindset shifting tool, like that can change your entire personality basically to get in a routine of writing gratitude lists for the people in your life that can really change how you show up in your relationships. Write down all your negative thoughts and burn them in the cozy fire while you’re drinking hot chocolate.

You know, meditation, deep breathing, breath work, yoga, laying down with your legs, up a. If you know what I’m talking about, you know what I’m talking about, it’s where you lay, like you find a spot on the floor where you can put your legs up the wall and you’re just laying on your back on the floor and you’re, you know, in an l shape.

This literally, you stay there for six minutes and it will, um, it will reduce the cortisol, the stress hormone that’s in your body. Plus, it just feels good and it is six minutes to just sit and do nothing. Don’t play on your phone while you’re doing it. Just chill. Two birds, one stone. Do the legs up the wall while doing some breathing or meditation, like a guided meditation.

Good time for that. Create a vision board of all the traits that you want to em. All right. I know we’re coming up on the new year and everyone’s always like creating vision boards of everything they wanna do in the year, everything they wanna have. But what about what you wanna be, what about how you want to be perceived by others?

What are those traits that you wanna take on? Patience, kindness. Slow to anger, loving. Create a vision board based on the traits that you wanna embody. Mindfulness just being present right here and now. Wherever you are, you can practice mindfulness, doing internal checks of your body. Just paying attention mindfully.

How is my body doing? How is my brain doing? How is my spirit doing? , how’s it all doing and where do I need to make adjustments? Where do I need to fix things? Where do I need more support for myself?

Definitely right now. Definitely in the holidays is a great time to be focusing a little bit more on your marriage and. Aligning more with the love, letting go of, um, a lot of the small, mundane arguments of the season with the financial stress and having to get everything done, miscommunications that happen, missing out on quality time together can happen and it can really, I think we all know, like arguments with your spouse, increase over the holidays big time.

So being intentional about the way you’re thinking about your marriage and the way you are practicing gratitude in your marriage and the way that you’re showing up in your marriage. Letting go of your stubbornness and your pride and just be the bigger person, you know, , it can be tough, it can be rough, but it’s very much worth it to get ahead of that and to just let go of all the small things and understand that you are both humans.

Give each other a ton of grace and keep on showing up for each other and loving each other, even though you might not agree on everything, even though you both might be feeling like you’re doing everything.

That clear communication, that quality time again, is gonna be really important here, as well as practicing your intentional self. All right. I love you friend. Please have the happiest of holiday seasons. I’ll chat with you again soon.