Cecelia Baum Mandryk (00:01.422)
If you ever told yourself next year I’m going to actually enjoy the holidays, I’m not going to get so stressed. But somehow you still find yourself right back in the same swirl of tension, pressure, and shoulds. This episode is for you. And as I was saying that out loud, I recognize that this could just be on a random Tuesday because, you know, you could just say tomorrow I’m not going to feel stressed. Tomorrow I’m not going to react like this. So this is for the holidays because we’re getting
I’m not sure when this is going to come out, but we’re getting towards the end of October, beginning of November. This is kind of when the holidays start, maybe even before this. But this is for you, whether you want to feel less stressed this holiday season or just in life. Because when you want to feel calm, even when you know what would help, your human brain usually has other plans, right? It likes to kind of do what it has already done.
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (01:45.654)
The holidays, almost more than any other time of year, bring out all of the triggers, right? Family dynamics, expectations, endless decisions, the pressure to make everything meaningful for yourself, for everyone else, for this to be a core memory, right? You want it all to feel magical, but your body feels a little bit more like it’s running a marathon or perhaps an Ironman instead.
In this episode, we’re going to talk about what’s really going on, not just from a do less perspective, because honestly, that’s just so not helpful, right? I’m just going to do less. I’m just going to care less. That doesn’t work. If it doesn’t work for you, you’re a human. It doesn’t work. For most of us, it doesn’t work perspective, but from a brain and nervous system based perspective, right? How you can actually work with your brain to feel calmer and why it can feel so hard to feel calm when life around you is not.
how we can shift back into peace even in the middle of chaos. By the end of this episode, you’ll know what’s happening in your body when you’re overwhelmed, how to support yourself in real time and how to define calm in a way that actually feels human and doable for you, not for anybody else. You might take a breath. You might sort of feel into wherever it is you’re seated or standing. You don’t need a perfect holiday to feel grounded. You don’t need a perfect Tuesday to feel grounded. You just need to understand your human brain a little bit better. Okay.
Holiday stress isn’t just about a long to-do list. It’s the emotional layering of expectations. You want to enjoy the season and make it meaningful, perhaps for your family, perhaps for your friends. You actually want to not disappoint anybody. You want to rest and make everything special. You want peace and feel obligated to attend events that don’t bring peace at all. Then there’s also the family dynamics, right? Maybe you’re back in a childhood home or in a childhood town. You’re answering questions about how you parent, what you eat, what you believe.
It’s a perfect storm, nostalgia over stimulation, that deep desire to make everything feel right. So you might pause for a moment and notice what part of this hits home for you, or you could even pause this episode and ask yourself, what about the holidays feels most stressful for me? Another way of asking that question is saying, if I had to have a magic wand, if I had a magic wand and I could change one part of the holidays, what would it be? What is the part that I most want to change? Or what are the five parts I most want to change? As you do that,
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (04:06.498)
Take another breath. Maybe notice if there’s any tension in your body where it is. That’s just your nervous system, feeling the feels. You might even remind yourself you’re safe right now in this moment as we talk about this. It’s safe to believe something different around the holidays. It’s safe to actually look at these beliefs around the holidays so we can feel different. Okay, let’s talk about calm. Because I would like to redefine it, right? Calm is not the Zen monk meditating in the middle of Times Square.
That’s not the version we’re going for, at least not for people who listen to me generally, although that is possible if you want that. It’s not pretending you’re fine while silently losing it. I’ve done it. I know most of you have probably done it. I’m fine. It’s fine. It’s fine. You’re not fine. We all know you’re not fine. I’m not fine. When I say that, I’m definitely not fine. And it’s definitely not trying to control everything around you so that you can feel peaceful, right? That propensity that most of us have to just kind of like micromanage.
every little thing around us, thinking that if all the details have worked out, then we will finally feel peaceful. Real calm feels like being grounded enough in yourself to know who you want to be and how you want to be in any given moment. Even if things around you are a little bit messy, right? Even if people are being how they are, it’s the knowing that things can kind of go wild around you without going wild within you. And it’s knowing that you don’t need
perfection outside to feel safe inside. So a client who is in my group who’s been doing this work for a while had this, shared this win the other day. And she said, it’s kind of interesting. Everything is still very much the same outside of her in life. But right now she feels a little bit like an observer on the sidelines watching the chaos, but not feeling the need to be involved in it. And she doesn’t feel removed in the sense that she’s like,
like in a bad way. It feels really good, right? She feels calm. There are all these other things happening. But instead of trying to force change or trying to manipulate things around her so she can feel a certain way, she is actually just feeling calm. So that’s that feeling. Calm is authenticity with kindness. It’s staying in your lane emotionally. It’s taking responsibility for your own state, but not for everyone else’s.
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (06:23.896)
Right? You cannot make other people feel any certain way, but you can influence how you feel. Take another breath, right? We’re going to incorporate these into the episodes maybe. You might take it put a hand on your heart or on your belly, right? Breathe into your belly. Give yourself that reminder. You might ask yourself, what would it feel like in your body to know that peace doesn’t depend on other people? Peace doesn’t depend on everything outside of you happening perfectly. It depends on you working with yourself.
in an empowering way, right? Okay, here’s what’s happening underneath all of it. Here’s what’s happening in your body. Your brain is basically in fight or flight mode for most of, I originally wrote December, but honestly, like, I don’t know, starting now, starting like mid-October, it’s in fight or flight mode for most of us, because you’re juggling extra responsibilities, the overstimulation of everything that’s happening, the old emotional pattern, that itchy sweater when it’s really hot inside. Your brain is scanning for threats everywhere.
And it blames everything that’s happening outside of us. Slow shipping times, Uncle Joe’s comments, the kids meltdown, the burnt cookies on the stress rate on what’s happening within us. What’s actually happening is that your nervous system is dysregulated. You’re in that sympathetic nervous system response. And when that happens, your body, your brain is saying like, danger, danger, danger, danger. And this part of your nervous system, this part of your brain doesn’t really know truth from fiction, doesn’t know time. And so even just thinking about the holidays can often put us in
this danger mode and this stress mode. And we have this impetus to fix external things, to force ourselves to do more, to try and make things perfect because we think, or just to disconnect, right? That’s the other thing. We’re like, I’m going to Costa Rica for the holidays this year. I’m like, I’m just out of it. Which of course you can do if you want to do. But if you’re running away from this sensation and this feeling,
That’s not the answer because it’s not going to bring regulation, right? Regulation comes from helping to regulate yourself, from acknowledging what’s causing the dysregulation and moving into it. The fix is not to control all the external things because you can’t. I know I’ve tried, you’ve probably tried, doesn’t really work. It’s not to, it’s to, the fix is, it’s not to do the outside thing, right? The fix is to turn inward and listen to what’s happening within you and work with yourself there.
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (08:48.322)
Provide the regulation for yourself so that you can show up how you want to. Meeting yourself where you are, regulating your system, bring yourself back to peace because that’s all within your purview. Those are things that are actually quite possible for you to do. If you’re someone who usually handles everything, the one who makes the magic happen, the season can hit especially hard.
Actually, the season can hit especially hard for so many different reasons, right? Your own childhood around holidays, this desire to make everything happen really perfectly, watching other people and how they make it happen, all these things. The holiday, so you could even ask, again, why is this so hard for me? What do I think it is for me? But the holidays are basically a mirror for your brain’s perfectionism, your brain’s people pleasing, your brain’s, however it handles other stress, you’re just seeing it more in the holidays.
You probably already have high standards. You probably already want to do things really well. You probably already tell yourself that if you do things well, things will turn out better. You’ll be happier. And the season adds in, be thoughtful, be festive, be organized, be emotionally available for everyone, be everywhere all at once and enjoy it and have fun, right? And your brain thinks that if you just get it all right, you’ll finally feel calm. But in fact, that’s backwards.
Right, calm doesn’t come from performance. comes from permission, permission to let things be imperfect, permission to be human, permission to choose you and small movements. Calm comes from that regulation, from that meeting yourself wherever you are in each moment.
So you might ask yourself, where am I trying to earn calm through control? Where am I trying to control or contrive my way into the sense of peace? Let’s bust a few myths around calm because I hear them all the time. Calm isn’t everyone around you acting perfectly. It’s not life lining up exactly how you pictured, right? That view in our head. You know, I have this like picture of one of my kids drawing something. And me, I mean, I don’t even have to put it on my kids. I can picture myself. I wanna draw something, right? I wanna create something.
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (10:56.536)
want to make a cake. And I have this idea in my head of what it’s supposed to look like, taste like, be like, how an event is supposed to go. And when things in reality don’t line up with what goes on, what I think needs to happen in my head, there’s a lot that dissonance causes so much stress, right? It’s other people’s, calm is not other people never saying triggering things to us or other people behaving exactly how we think they should. It also doesn’t mean having no external demands.
Right, isn’t something that happens when reality behaves. Calm is something that happens when you finally decide to create it for yourself, when you decide to meet reality differently. Okay, before the holidays, how do you work with yourself? Right, so we’ve talked about, and you might not have even needed that whole intro part, like why do you feel not calm during the holidays? Most of us can probably list that off. Most of us would probably come up with a list of everything outside of us. And so,
What I want you to take away from that first part of the episode is that while we think that the calm will come when everything outside of us behaves, and we want to blame everything outside of us for us not feeling calm, in fact, the calm comes from within you. And you have the capacity to help yourself feel calm, no matter what is happening outside of you. And this doesn’t mean lying to yourself or gaslighting yourself or turning a blind eye to the realities of the world around you.
It means actually acknowledging them, working with your own thoughts, and then deciding how you want to show up to them. This is what, if you want to have a calmer holiday season, let’s get into some exercise on how you can actually help yourself, right? So before the holidays, right now, you might sit down with your calendar and look at what’s actually on it. Not what you think is on it, but what’s actually on it. Look at the reality of what’s happening, right? When are you traveling?
If you’re very organized, might have something on there like when you want to order your holiday cards or order gifts or whatever it is, right? You can make your calendar as detailed as you want it to. But as you look of even just the rough outline of what it is that is already on your calendar or what you think you have to do this year, so you could also write the list of what you think you have to do this year, you might ask yourself, what is most important to me? How do I want to feel this holiday season?
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (13:19.36)
What is a demand that I have versus a true desire? And who do I want to be through all of this? So can write those questions down, you can come back to them, you can pause this episode and work through them. If you work through them, you’ll learn a lot about yourself. The clarity alone in this is a nervous system regulator because you’re actually becoming aware of all these things that are in your brain, these kind of subconscious threats and
triggers and these kind of like things that these like strings that are pulling on us that we don’t even know they’re pulling on us right and even just just seeing them is really helpful right that’s there i’m feeling the demand to do all of these things right i feel the demand to make to i don’t know do 10 of these things that are on this list that i don’t actually really want to do
Becoming aware of your own intentions for how you want to feel is also really powerful because that starts to direct your brain when you say I want to feel connected during the holiday season or I want to make sure that we have a few moments of a little bit of magic whatever that means for me this season then you can kind of feel into that you can ask what that might look like and you can start to Call things on your list or you can start to arrange them based on your own desires during the season
or just during life, when things feel really stressful, you might pause and ask yourself, what’s really coming up right now? What is triggering me? What is the story within me that’s creating the feeling within me? Perhaps what am I trying to control on the outside and how do I think I’m, what am I trying to do outside of me? And how do I think that’s going to make me feel on the inside? Because that’s the real teller, right? I people to give me space so I can feel like I have time to, right? You really actually want the time.
What story am I telling myself that’s causing this stress? What part of me feels unsafe? What is the story that I’m telling here that’s maybe an old story that feels like a story that I could reframe, maybe something that I could start to work with? And again, even before you work with it, just acknowledging it is really crucial. The key, which is what I just said, you don’t have to fix all of it. As you notice, you regulate yourself. And sometimes you might literally ask yourself, if this stress wasn’t from the outside, where would I find it in my body right now?
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (15:40.142)
What is the thing inside of me that’s causing the stress? What is the story inside of me that’s causing the stress? I can usually feel, once I can feel into this, right? Feel the tight chest, the clenched jaw, I can feel the stress within me. And it’s a sign to slow down and breathe, do a little tapping, ask for help. So this happened the other day, this weekend in fact. I’m trying to make a lot of stuff for a fall fast at school and
There was a lot happening in the house and I could feel myself, like I could feel the tension start to come. And I was multitasking, watching my kids, right? All that. There was like some tightness. There was like a clenching, a general clenching in my body. I don’t even know if it was specific to my chest. Old me would have powered through it. Maybe I would have snapped at somebody and I would have felt guilty. I would have felt like that’s not how I want to show up. That’s not who I want to be. But because I’m familiar with this and because I’ve been doing this a while,
As soon as I started to feel that, I could stop for a moment and I asked myself, what’s really happening within me right now? It was nothing about the potluck, right? There were these old things. I’m afraid I’m gonna fail. I’m afraid no one’s gonna like my food and they’re not gonna like me. I’m afraid nobody cares about me. I’m afraid that my needs don’t matter. Now I got to them very quickly because I’ve done this a lot.
It might not come up so quickly for you right now, but even pausing and asking what’s really going on with me right now, what’s really happening? What’s the thing I’m really afraid of right now? What’s the thing that’s really bothering me? The first answer might be the fact that my kid is like screaming at the top of their lungs, walking around the house, carrying the broom, singing Hark the Herald, Angel, Sing. One of my children does that right now. It’s not that, right? And you ask again, okay, but why is that bothering me? Well, that’s bothering me because it’s making me feel like
I don’t have the concentration. Okay, well, why is that a problem? Well, that’s a problem because I feel like I’m going to mess up the recipe and then I’m going to fail. interesting. So this actually, it’s not about my kids singing the song, although that’s certainly perhaps adding to the mental load in my life. The stress is actually feeling like I’m going to fail. And so then I don’t have to get mad at my kid. First, I can actually regulate myself and heal myself. And then I can actually talk to my kid from this place of regulation and wholeness.
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (18:02.562)
rather than saying you need to act different for me to feel okay. So naming these things brings relief because I’m seeing them, and I’m seeing the things that’s actually happening within me. And it also reminds me, this isn’t about the food or the noise, the schedule, it’s about my human brain trying to protect me. It’s about me having stories, old stories that I need to work through. And in fact, if I work through them at a root level, they might not show up so much next time.
or I’ll be more aware of them next time and they won’t show up in exactly the same way. And every time I work through them, I work through them kind of on a holistic level. Once I saw these things, I could take a breath. I did a little tapping. I asked for a little bit of help. I asked for a little bit more calm. I also grabbed my noise reducing headphones. A couple of people went outside and I started to feel calm with myself. So there were some outside things that happened, but actually the calm happened before any of that.
Right, those were result of me actually feeling into my own calm. And that means that I got to live my life in that moment and show up how I wanted to in that moment. And it wasn’t perfect, but it actually felt pretty good. Okay, so here’s what I want you to remember this season. Stress isn’t from the outside world. It’s from inside stories. It’s from your nervous system. It’s from your brain. It’s stories your brain is telling in response to the world. Also, generally very old stories, stories it’s had for a long
And that’s really good news because it means that you can work with it way easier than trying to control everyone around you. You can meet yourself moment to moment. You can be in the calm, not in the chaos, not because life got suddenly easier, right? Or you just hightailed it out of here and had a holiday alone. Although you can do that totally aloud if that’s what you’re into. Because you stop trying to control everyone and everything and start listening to yourself.
So you might take one slow breath. You might see if you could bring 1 % more ease into your body. And you could start practicing asking yourself, what is it that I actually need right now? What is one way I can support my nervous system today? How can I show up for myself? And maybe you can write something down, write something like this down later, something to remind yourself and you can come up with your own words, but I’m gonna provide just a little bit. I can meet myself in this moment.
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (20:25.666)
I can get curious about what’s actually happening right now. I know I can regulate myself. I know I can help bring regulation into myself in this moment. I know that calm is possible and available for me. And that’s the practice. Not doing it all at once, just meeting yourself in this moment and then doing it again in the next moment and then in the next moment because I know that you can do it moment to moment. Okay.
This is for the holidays, right? So I also have a workshop that I think I’m before this episode comes out, but that you can grab the replay about kind of changing your mental struggle during the holidays. I’ll go a little bit more into this, that I can offer the replay to people. So if you want more of this, let me know. Thank you for being here. Thank you for taking the time to do this work, because when you take the time to…
change how you show up to the holidays, other people get to show up to the holidays differently too. We didn’t even talk about like family dynamics that much in this one. So maybe we’ll have a whole nother episode about interacting with family during the holidays because that is such, most of us just have so much stuff around that. All right, thanks for tuning in. Come say hi on social media. Let me know if you like this, leave a comment or review if you feel called to do so. And I will see you the next time I see you, bye.
