Holistic Bonfire

Suruchi Saini, MA, LPC, CCTP, TMHP, CYT

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How to Have Stress-Free Holidays

The holiday season is fast approaching, and with it comes the chance to break bread with family and friends, express gratitude for all that you have, adorn your home with lights and decorations, and witness the excitement of the festivities through the eyes of your children.

Unwelcome guests, however, can also show up in the midst of what should otherwise be a time of merriment. With parties to attend, feasts to prepare, gifts to buy, travel arrangements to make and more, depression and stress can easily pop up unannounced.

Rather than letting stress and depression ruin the holidays for yourself and for your loved ones, heeding some practical tips can help you enjoy the season for all of the wonderful things it has to offer.

To help you minimize the chances of stress cropping up in the first place, or to minimize the effects of stress that’s unavoidable, it’s best to know ahead of time what specific events cause you anxiety during the holidays.

Are you concerned you won’t have enough time to get the house spotless before guests arrive? Does spending time with certain family members make you tense? Do you worry your gift budget isn’t adequate?

Plan Ahead

Great preparation is the key to overcoming these and other obstacles that often lead to holiday stress. If you spend time before the holidays creating a realistic plan, you’ll be able to relax more when the occasions are upon you.

If you’re hosting a dinner party, plan your menu well in advance. Make a comprehensive shopping list of what you need, and if possible, go to the store during nonpeak hours. Rushing around at the last minute to buy necessary ingredients will undoubtedly spike your anxiety. Also, be sure to enlist help from friends and family before and after the feast. People like to feel useful, and no one person should be responsible for cooking all of the fare, baking all of the deserts, and cleaning up the entire mess.

Don’t Shop ‘Til You Drop

Try to get your gift shopping done in one day. It helps to take a list of ideas so that you don’t waste time once you’re at the store. Also, take advantage of online shopping, especially during excellent sale days like Cyber Monday (the Monday after Thanksgiving).

Using a calendar is a great way to help you keep track of the numerous activities that can fill the holiday season, and the Calendar app gives you access to your schedule whether you’re standing in line at the post office waiting to send packages or you’re at the store buying decorations.

Get Assistance

You can kill two birds with one stone by asking friends and family to help you complete your tasks. You’ll be spending time with loved ones, and you’ll be getting things done. Decorating, baking, and wrapping presents are ideal activities to do with others.

Also, know that it’s okay to decline invites. Rather than exhausting yourself by going to every party and get-together, save up your energy for the few you truly want to attend.

Be Realistic

No holiday season is the same year to year, so don’t put pressure on yourself to repeat past occasions. Understand that as families grow and change, so do traditions. Incorporate your favorite rituals into this year’s festivities, and consider adopting new ones as well.

Finally, bumps and hiccups during the holidays are inevitable, so don’t burden yourself before they even get underway by expecting everything to be perfect. The main focus should be on celebrating your kinship with family and friends, and enjoying the holidays for the wonder that they are.

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Effects of Social Media on Physical Health

flowers

In the third and final installment in the series about how social media use affects our mental, social, and physical health, we’ll look at the physical effects of using social media in our hyper-connected (yet strangely dis-connected) world.

Social media use has skyrocketed thanks in great part to the growth of smartphone technology. It seems that everywhere we look, people are glued to their smartphones. Awkward moments of silence and small talk in the elevator with strangers are now gone due to the ability to stare at a screen and look busy.

Looking at the mental and social impacts of widespread social media use was more straightforward. But how are we being affected physically?

Most physical effects of social media use have to do with the increased amount of time we spend staring at our phones or our computer screens. What damage is being done in our effort to always be connected?

Posture

Numerous medical and scientific studies have shown alarming results when testing people who use smartphones for more than four hours a day and those who don’t. Smartphone users tend to develop rounded shoulders, spinal curvatures, vertebrate disorders, and associated neck pain and headaches caused by these ailments. It makes sense. Using our smartphones often involves being hunched over. Our posture suffers, and we alter the muscles and bones in our torsos over time.

Eyesight

Smartphones emit blue light, which is very bright for our eyes. Looking at our smartphones in bed is especially harmful, as this direct exposure to light can be damaging to our retinas, which can lead to macular degeneration (i.e., worsening eyesight).

Also, a growing number of ophthalmologists are beginning to believe there’s a link between smartphone use and cataracts, with younger and younger patients experiencing cataracts instead of the typical 75-and-older crowd.

Disrupted Sleep

Sleep is one of the most important factors in our overall health. In order to achieve and maintain healthy sleep, our bodies need to be able to naturally produce melatonin. Staring at smartphone screens in bed is like tricking the body into staring into a brightly-lit landscape, which delays melatonin production and prevents us from having quality sleep patterns, resulting in a host of health issues.

What Can We Do?

Not using our smartphones at all is extreme and not pragmatic in our modern world. However, there are many things we can do to prevent the negative health effects associate with too much use. Simply being aware of the potential dangers of excessive smartphone use is the first step, but changing our habits is the hard part.

Here are some great habits to apply to your life to limit the amount of negative health effects from using your smartphone every day:

  1. Be aware of your posture. While using your smartphone, focus on keeping your shoulder blades back, chest out, and core engaged. Don’t hunch over your screen.
  2. When using a smartphone for a prolonged period of time, take frequent breaks to focus your eyes on the horizon. This reduces eye strain.

Don’t take your phone to bed. Use an old-fashioned alarm clock and set your phone to “Do Not Disturb” so that only calls from emergency contacts will come through. Don’t stare at your screen in bed. Instead, read a book or lay quietly in the dark and allow your body’s natural melatonin production to take place.

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Social Media and Personal Relationships

relationshipThe first installment in the three-part series on how social media affects our health covered the potential negative aspects to our mental health that excessive social media use can yield. This post will explore how the rise of social media has affected personal relationships and what we can do to ensure that we foster fulfilling and meaningful relationships in our hyper-connected world.

How Social Media Has Changed Relationships

Social media, mainly in the form of Facebook, has changed how we interact and communicate with each other at societal and personal levels. By enabling us to connect in a very personal way to long-lost acquaintances, friends, and extended family, our personal lives are easily accessible to anyone within our network.

The average Facebook user has 338 friends. A Gallup poll in 2011 showed that the average American has only nine friends they would consider “close”.

This discrepancy means that the vast majority of our social media connections are superficial. The danger of this is that being connected to so many people who don’t provide any level of fulfillment can be a terrible substitute for deep relationships.

In addition, using Facebook to connect with a friend or family member can prevent meaningful communication from taking place. Instead of a direct phone call, a text message, an email, or a handwritten letter (if you’re old-fashioned), we now simply check our friends’ profile pages. We’ll see where they live and what their life updates are, and we’ll glance through a few pictures.

Aside from “liking” a post or picture, or perhaps writing a comment, that’s the extent of the interaction. This is how “being connected” can breed loneliness.

Social Media and Intimate Relationships

The positive and negative effects social media has on intimate relationships are tougher to fully understand. This is because different generations use social media differently, and online behavior among couples can vary considerably.

A number of studies have been done to determine how social media affects intimate relationships, and one thing is certain: excessive social media use by one part of a couple can lead to problems in the relationship. This can include the partner who is not online feeling excluded.

For older couples who are secure in their marriages, Facebook is less of a problem and more of a connection tool to extended family. However, the younger the couple and the shorter the relationship, the more that excessive Facebook use can breed insecurity, jealousy, or suspicion on behalf of one or both partners.

Is There an Upside?

There are, of course, benefits to using social media such as promoting businesses, getting in touch with long-lost friends, and more. The question is how to use it to create fulfilling, meaningful relationships.

There are steps we can take to make sure we take advantage of the relationship-building benefits of social media without experiencing the negative effects, and those include:

  • Limiting the amount of time we spend on social media
  • Communicating directly with friends to ask questions about their lives instead of periodically checking their profile pages
  • Being careful about what we self-disclose to our social network and remembering that whatever we post can potentially be seen by hundreds of people
  • Being transparent with our romantic partners about our social media activities

With a mindful approach, social media can improve our relationships and connect us with long-lost friends and family members. However, if we’re not careful, excessive and incorrect social media use can lead us to feeling disconnected and lonely as well as negatively impact our personal relationships.

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Effects of Social Media on Mental Health

Suruchi Saini, MA, LPC, NCC, CCTP
Suruchi in meditation pose

Social media has changed the way humans communicate and relate to each other in a significant way. Facebook enables us to connect with high school classmates or extended family in order to stay up-to-date on their lives. Pinterest allows us to discover new ideas related to our interests. Twitter is a global conversation about every topic imaginable. LinkedIn connects professionals and enables prospective employees and employers to learn more about each other. Instagram shares our lives through pictures.

So what’s the downside of these new ways to relate with our friends and family? According to studies, social media use can be considerably detrimental to our mental health.

To understand why, it’s important to think about why we use social media in the first place. While the practicality of connecting with friends and family is the most obvious reason, psychologists have found that our need to “self-disclose” aspects of our lives stems from the same reward system in our brain that makes us feel good while eating food or having sex.

If you write a post on Facebook to announce a new job or post photos of your latest vacation, for example, you wait for “likes”. The more likes you get, the happier, more validated and more important you’re likely to feel. If you fail to get many likes, however, you may feel the opposite.

Social media has specific effects on depression, anxiety, and narcissism that originate beyond mere disappointment over a lack of “likes”, however.

Depression

Facebook, being the most popular social media platform, is used as an “image management” platform, according to psychologists. We use it as a sort of personal public relations page to represent who we are to hundreds of friends, family members, and acquaintances. Studies show there’s a correlation between depression and how extensively Facebook is used to manage our image. So the more time and effort you put into carefully updating your profile page, the more depressed you are likely to be.

However, the severity of depression related to Facebook use depends on how it’s used. Studies show that the more interactive the experience is on Facebook, the less depressing it is. Alternatively, more passive browsing of other people’s profiles or the “news feed” leads to more symptoms of depression.

This makes sense: browsing through other people’s “highlight reels” can cause us to compare our lives to theirs. Inevitably, our lives seem less fulfilling or successful. We fail to take into account the fact that few people show their failures or struggles in such a public way.

Anxiety

Smartphones allow us to access our social media networks anytime, anywhere. This convenience has enabled compulsive behavior.

Social media users of all ages, but especially younger generations, are checking their social media profiles very frequently. Anxiety stems from any interruption or impediment to being able to check social media. An interesting and common symptom of this anxiety is “phantom vibration syndrome”, where people report feeling vibrations from their cell phone even when it’s not in their pocket.

Narcissism

Narcissism is a trait associated with self-importance, fantasies of unlimited power, vanity, excessive self-promotion, and failure to form meaningful relationships. Obviously, social media is a perfect place for somebody with narcissistic personality disorder to flourish.

While those suffering from such a disorder tend to feel happier with increased social media use, it actually exacerbates their condition. In users without the disorder, excessive social media use can contribute to increased narcissism.

Social Media in Moderation

Like most things in life, negative effects can mostly be avoided with mindfulness and moderation. Be aware of how and why you use social media. Also remember that nothing can replace face-to-face interaction with our friends and family members.

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Perfectionist Tendencies and How to Cope with Them

Perfectionism is a person’s desire to achieve flawlessness. It is often accompanied by setting impossibly high standards, and being overly self-critical if those standards are not met. There are both positive and negative aspects of perfectionism, as we saw in the first post of this two-post series, but when it becomes too controlling or too pervasive, it’s important to curb perfectionist tendencies.

Are you a Perfectionist?

PhD Max Belkin says that “perfectionism often stems from childhood experiences with primary caregivers.” Parents especially can become exceedingly dedicated to raising highly accomplished children, and then be critical of their children when they fall below those standards.

Regardless of how you were raised or what you encountered during your formative years, there are many signs that indicate if you’re a perfectionist:

  • You’re quick to find fault in others, yet you also get defensive when you’re criticized.
  • You’re extremely eager to please.
  • You have an all-or-nothing attitude; either you excel in something or you don’t bother with it in the first place.
  • You don’t think there’s room for error.
  • You’re incredibly specific about how things should be done.
  • You procrastinate, waiting for the “right” moment to start something.
  • You set nearly unattainable goals.
  • You become depressed if you fail to achieve your objectives.
  • You often spend much longer on a task than is needed in an effort to perfect it.
  • You aren’t happy even when you succeed; there’s always more to accomplish.

How to Tame Your Perfectionist Ways

If you identified with a number of the common attributes of a person with perfectionist tendencies, there are many steps you can take to cope with this trait. Few of them are following:

  • Acknowledge your positive attributes: make a list of healthy relationships you’re cultivated, things you like about yourself, and meaningful experiences you’ve had.
  • Build relationships with people who value family and community over money, status, and tangible items, the latter of which are commonly seen in an all-or-nothing light.
  • Try to squash the idea that it’s all or nothing, and tell yourself it’s okay to not be the best at something in order to garner respect.
  • Set time limits to help curb your penchant for procrastinating, and know that spending too much time on one thing means you’ll have less time to work on another.
  • Focus on being more patient when others make mistakes, which will likely help you shed your fear of being criticized by others as well as the habit of being overly self-critical when you happen to error.

Looking Forward

It’s not inherently healthy or unhealthy to strive for the best in whatever you do. When correctly approached, such determination can affect positive results. However, if you’re constantly criticizing yourself for not performing up to your lofty, often unrealistic standards, you may develop self-loathing, anxiety, and depression.

It’s great to set goals, and work hard to achieve them, but make sure they’re realistic. And if you fall short, know that it’s okay, and know that perfectionism is more often an impediment to success than it is a helpful factor.

Do your best by all means and do not forget to appreciate yourself often!