Grounding for the Holidays

Principles

The holiday season is upon us.🤯 You’re not alone if you have mixed emotions about the holidays. On the one hand, there’s the anticipation of experiencing the magic and joy of the holidays with our kids. On the other, the effort to create that magic for our kids can feel overwhelming, often setting the stage for romanticized and unrealistic expectations about how the season should unfold.

Today, we’re offering a few go-to TIPPs for you to rely on over the next handful of weeks — especially in those moments when things feel like they’re veering off course. Temperature, Intense Exercise, Paced Breathing, and Progressive Muscle Relaxation (aka TIPPs) are a set of grounding techniques from Dialectical Behavioral Theory that can help you reset when you’re feeling overwhelmed or stressed. Here’s your cheat sheet for each one:

• Temperature: Changing your temperature can help you respond to the physical sensations of overwhelming emotions. Cooler temperatures can help reduce your heart rate, which is helpful when you're feeling stressed. You could try splashing cold water on your face, holding an ice cube, taking a quick cold shower, or sticking your head in the freezer.
• Intense Exercise: When you're distressed, it can help to spend your pent-up energy through movement. This doesn't need to be an extended workout, just 10-15 minutes is enough to expend and reset your energy. For example, you could go for a brisk walk, dance, do jumping jacks... anything that feels good in your body.
• Paced Breathing: You can reset your breathing anywhere, anytime to help reset the physical sensations of stress. Try breathing in deeply, filling your belly for a count of four. Then breathe out of your mouth for a count of six. Continue for 1-2 minutes.
• Progressive Muscle Relaxation: Your muscles tend to tense up when you're stressed. You can intentionally release this tension, along with your sense of stress, by releasing the large muscle groups in your body. While sitting, turn your attention to the muscles in your neck and upper back. Tighten them for 5 seconds. Then let go. Feel this whole are loosening. Continue to intentionally tighten and release throughout your body: your arms, abs, back, glutes, legs, and face.

A Few Perspectives

Mindfulness, yoga, and meditation teacher Jillian Pransky highlights the vital role of grounding for connecting with ourselves:

In order to feel 'okay,' we need to feel safe. And in order to feel safe, we need to feel stable and grounded.
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from Deep Listening: A Healing Practice to Calm Your Body, Clear Your Mind, and Open Your Heart

Author and journalist Matt Haig shares this simple yet powerful way to bring yourself back to the present moment:

Wherever you are, at any moment, try and find something beautiful. A face, a line out of a poem, the clouds out of a window, some graffiti, a wind farm. Beauty cleans the mind.

from Reasons to Live

Pause for Reflection

What helps you ground and reconnect to the presented when stressed?

Continue this reflection in the Moment for Parents app

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