Health Anxiety During the Holidays
A time of indulgence and pleasure, Christmas-time can sometimes bring around feelings of health anxiety as a result of eating and drinking a little more than normal and adopting a more sedentary way of living.
Please remember, eating more food during Christmas is totally NORMAL and we all do it! – it’s all about feeding your soul at this time of year just as much as fuelling for body and mind!
Here are my top tips for dealing with health anxiety during the Christmas season:
Try and gain some perspective: once you realise that a couple of days away from your normal routine is not going to cause a drastic tip in the scales, you will start to feel less uneasy about your lifestyle behaviours
If guilt and shame are common emotions you feel around your Christmas eating habits, take a deep breath. Don’t resist those emotions and sit with them until they soon pass. We can’t always control what thoughts we have around food, but we can certainly influence how much airtime we give to those thoughts!
Practise mindfulness: if you feel out of control or slightly inattentive towards your eating habits, try and adopt a mindful attitude when those moments of awareness do start to kick in. Then, try and extend this awareness over each eating opportunity moving forwards and examine what thoughts crop up. This is particularly important if you are prone towards binge eating. Remember that each and every single moment presents you with a new opportunity for consciousness of your choices. You don’t just have to wait until the next day, the next week, or the next year!
Most importantly, enjoy yourselves! This is the one time of year we can all try to relax and loosen the reigns a little, being less hard on ourselves as a result!