Coping with the Holidays! – Eating Disorder Video #7

The holidays can be stressful for anyone, but especially someone with an eating disorder. If you think about it, everything we do around any holiday involves food, and is therefore stressful for anyone who has a difficult time with food. The purpose of this video is to offer three helpful tips to assist you in dealing with the holidays. The first tip is to journal about the stress and anxiety. This can give you a safe place to vent and express your concerns and/or frustrations with the holidays. Just make sure you keep it with you so that you can always jot down things you may want to write more on later and also so that you can journal wherever you are.  The second tip is to keep your relaxing music mix with you and accessible at all times. When you start to feel the anxiety of going to dinner at a friend or families house creep up on you, turn on this mix. It will be most helpful if you take the time to place songs that you could fall asleep to/breathe deeply and relax to. The last tip to help you with the holidays is to step away. As we all know, holiday events can be unpredictable. Maybe we thought we would be eating at 5 and it is 7 and the food is still not ready and now you feel like binging etc. Sometimes it can help to just step away from everyone for a moment and take a deep breath and relax. Maybe take someone’s coat into the coat room for them and stay in there for an extra minute or two.  Sometimes all we need is just a moment to gather our strength. Also, so not hesitate to comment below or follow me on twitter so that we can start to create a safe place to talk and comment about our struggles and our successes so that we can help each other get closer to a healthy mind, healthy body. It is my hope that leveraging social media whether it is YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn can help me reach more people and spread the word about eating disorders and how destructive they can be to the people who suffer from them as well as those closest to them.

TRANSCRIPT:

Hey! It’s Kati again.

Well here we are in the midst of the holidays and it is crazy. Everybody’s freaking out. People are freaking out that don’t even have eating disorders to deal with, so I understand you’re really stressed out.

And that’s ok.

I know that a lot of times we have a lot of trouble around the holidays because everything seems to revolve around food meeting with friends to give gifts over food Thanksgiving is a meal. Christmas is a meal a lot of times followed by another meal. And then we have New Year’s which can be about food and drink from midday all the way through midnight. So I know you’re freaking out. It’s okay I’m gonna give you three tips and coping skills to get you through it and I know this will help trust me, I have worked with hundreds of patients and these are definitely really helpful tips.

The first one being:

JOURNAL

Like I said before in my older videos, you can look them up, always have a journal. Purchase a journal if you don’t have one and make sure it’s small enough if you’re traveling that you can take it with you all the time.

Maybe fit it in your purse or back pocket or side pocket whatever you’re traveling with… I want you to have it with you all the time. And the the reason being is that when you’re feeling really anxious and stressed out and maybe you can reach somebody because it’s Christmas eve at eight o’clock everyone is with their families, JOURNAL, tell your journal about it pretend you’re talking to me pretend your talking to your best friend.

You can start out with “today i feel”… or “right now I’m FREAKING OUT and this is why”… you can “list” if you don’t like to journal. That can kind of help you and like i said before there’s that journal “All About Me” book that begins little sentences for you, like “I feel anxious when”… and you can go with that as long as you need to until you feel your level of anxiety kind of being brought down.

Also the other tip that I gave you before: MUSIC. Music can be so influential you know, you’re in the car you know you are just jamming and you feel so relaxed those of the songs that you should have at this time. Relaxing songs. I don’t want anything with a really fast beat that can get the anxiety pumping a little bit more than we need. We want to be relaxed.

So make sure that’s available to you. If you’re traveling, put it on your Ipod, Iphone or whatever you’re bringing with you. If you’re driving somewhere maybe make sure it’s on a CD and you can throw it in your car and you can listen to it as many times as you need, just make sure you have it with you.
Lastly, I know when your with your family, your friends for the holidays, sometimes it’s just overwhelming and we tried the music, we can’t really journal, we’re in the middle of a “freak out” STEP AWAY. You can go somewhere for just a minute if it’s in the room like “Hey! let me take a jacket for you I’ll put it in with the coats” walk in the room, shut the door for a minute, just have a breather. It’s okay, take a little time for yourself.

Ahhh… and then we go back. Because the most important thing about the holidays… the people. It’s not about the food. It’s about the people. A lot of times those friends and family members we don’t get to see them all year, until this holiday and they want to know what’s going on with you. They love you. They want to hear about what’s happening in your life, and they want to tell you.

I want you to be able to be “present”. We’re gonna get through this together and I would also encourage you to comment below to leave questions or comments. You can find me on Facebook and Twitter. We can be talking and commenting and everybody giving advice to each other through this.

Wouldn’t that be great? You shoot out a tweet “I’m really freaking out, my grandma made this, I used to binge on it” and somebody can respond really quickly “hey I used do that to you, know what i do to help myself out”? Share that advice, this is a great place to do that and don’t forget to subscribe because next time i post a video you’ll get notified and we can keep supporting each other and growing to a Healthy Mind and a Healthy Body!