This is Anne with your Coaching On The Go.

This is the first day in an eight-part series about how to thrive, stay balanced, happy, and healthy through the holidays. The holidays create extra responsibility, expectations, and emotions.

Everything is magnified during the holidays. If you’ve taken the whole year to get yourself into a routine for exercise, health, fitness, variation during the day for the best thinking and the most creativity, when you add a holiday season onto it, it can be more than you can take and knock you off balance.

It can destabilize you. Today I’m talking about being emotionally overwhelmed. People get overwhelmed because their expectations for the perfect holiday are unrealistic.

It sets them up for failure. Many people they had beautiful memories with in the past have passed away. Grief and loneliness show up during the holiday.

People who may wish they were in a relationship or with their extended family and aren’t, feel it. Another contributor to overwhelm is unresolved conflict or tension that brings itself right into your holiday gathering or it may cause people that you love to not show up.

I experience all these things on some level. I have a daughter who is estranged from me and hasn’t spoken to me in over four years. Her birthday is on December 30th. It’s taken me a few years to turn that from a day of grieving to a day of celebrating the birth of my daughter, wherever she is, whatever she’s doing.

I have a variety of strategies for you today if you are experiencing any of these causes of emotional overwhelm. The first one is set realistic expectations. Focus on what you want to feel and experience more than it needs to be an exact way.

I have changed considerably since I started “adult Christmasing” as a mom and grown-up. Depending on the balance of my career, whatever my parents need, and my family and partner, I balance and stagger the activities that I used to do all at once right before the holiday.

I pace things. My perfect holiday now is about enjoyment, good food, flexibility, love, peacefulness, and celebration.

It’s not the detail of exactly what has to be done, in the exact way, or for it to look like it used to look. Another strategy I use is I establish boundaries.

I have a certain amount of energy for the season to operate my 3 ring circus called Life. When I throw the holiday on top of that, I now have limits on my energy.

When it’s coming to a point where I’m going to start getting sick or I’m imbalanced I have established some energetic boundaries that have to be followed. It may look like this: I decorate more and socialize less one year.

It may look like my career and business need me more than last year so my entertaining is different, allowing me to prepare things ahead of time during breaks from work and not doing everything at the last minute. In addition to setting more realistic expectations, I establish energetic boundaries for myself so I don’t get sick.

I’ve created limiters for my health and happiness. The next strategy I have deals with when I feel sadness or grief. I talk with other loved ones about some of the loved ones that used to be here that aren’t.

We toast those loved ones or we talk about things that we enjoyed with them and how we still feel them here with us. We just allow the emotions of the holiday to flow right through us.

When I’m baking, I’m baking with my grandpa who passed away on the 23rd of December decades ago. I still miss him. He embodied Christmas and New Year’s for our family. When he passed away amidst the holiday, we had to come up with strategies to get through that.

And we did. We replaced the sorrow with joy. During the holiday, when I feel the absence of someone in my physical world, I just let that come through me and I feel it. I might cry for a while.

Then I shift to the last strategy I’m going to share with you for today. I shifted into appreciation for having had that person in my life and the beautiful traditions that came from that relationship.

It’s not unusual to feel overwhelmed during the holidays. After all, if you have a full life with a cherry on top and throw a bunch of additional events, cooking, baking, entertaining, and an intensive amount of additional activities, it’s going to make you feel overwhelmed.

Here are the strategies: Set realistic expectations.

Establish boundaries.

Acknowledge your emotions. Feel it. Feel the grief, feel the sadness. Talk to someone about it. Shift into appreciation.

Boy, this is a big topic, and it’s extensive, but overwhelm is probably one of the biggest challenges people experience that can take them out, make them sick, and make them withdraw. I hope these strategies will support you.

Have a beautiful day.