Suite 100, 555 West Georgia Vancouver, BC. V6B 1Z6
Holistic Help for Holiday Stress & Bay Wellness Stress Busters
October 20, 2022 Category: Blog
The holiday season start is here and we anticipate all the fun, and a lot of joy and happiness to go around! But with that tends to come a lot of stress because it also brings high expectations for all the plans we have, right? Those parties up ahead, the events with our family, can all add to stress and take away from our joy. Unfortunately, women in particular tend to overdo this and can get depleted. Perhaps there’s a perfectionist element as they want to make everything as fun as possible for their family members, their friends, their coworkers in all that they plan for them.
Of course this only adds to more stress than joy and can really hinder how we feel about our holiday season. Now, imagine if you could get through your holidays feeling good, with vitality, strong energy and happy throughout the entire season with very manageable stress? What a dream that would be.
Hi, I’m Dr Annie savage. I’m one of the naturopathic doctors here at Bay Wellness Centre. We are located in downtown Vancouver and we are currently offering both in person appointments as well as telemedicine appointments. Today, I want to talk to you about stress and how it impacts our whole body and our lives. Of course, at this time we also want to remind you that it is also the time to use your extended health benefits. Your extended benefits will actually expire at the end of the year. So if you don’t use them, you’re going to lose them. Use them to help yourself to health.
Bay Wellness Centre’s approach to your stress
Stress tends to drain and exhaust so that you feel you can’t handle a single other thing on your plate, without maybe snapping or feeling very sad and with an emotional outburst. We want to address the causes of that stress and discover what’s really contributing to it, so that you can feel your best and really enjoy your entire holiday season.
At Bay Wellness Centre in Vancouver, we take a holistic approach when we are working with you. Together, we go over all of the contributing factors of stress for you in your life. Of course, there are some things that we really cannot change, like your job for instance, but there is a lot that we can change and that we can tweak so that you feel better and we reduce the stress on your body and so that you can manage it better as well.
Your diet and your lifestyle are naturally a part of this. It includes your exercise and your sleep. To find out why you’re feeling so much stress in your body, we actually need to look inside the workings of your body to determine all the contributing factors.
You’ll find stress busting tools you can implement to reduce your stress right now at home or work or in your state of mind, while we examine next steps from the inner workings of your body and out.
How hormones affect how you handle holiday stress
Stress hits everyone differently. Some people love a fast paced environment. They love that go go go kind of setting while other people feel overwhelmed with it and don’t like that at all. Our capacity to handle stress is going to be different for all of us based on so many different factors. Our age will come into that, the amount of responsibilities that we have and just the way that we grew up – the way we were taught to handle stress or taught what is stressful versus what is not.
Cortisol, your stress hormone does a lot to drive physical symptoms of stress. So cortisol can affect your blood sugar as well as other hormones in your body. One of the ways cortisol affects you and your stress is that when it is very high, you’ll notice that you have more sugar cravings and this leads to more weight gain, especially around the belly and the midsection.
Another thing that happens when our cortisol is chronically high or elevated for a very long period of time, is that it signals to our body that we are unsafe and this may also signal that it is unsafe to have a baby or to ovulate. So you see that cortisol can even affect our progesterone levels and by dropping them over time creates an imbalance between our estrogen and progesterone. That’s why it’s so important to look at stress and lifestyle when we are working with you to balance your hormones.
Do you find yourself waking in the middle of the night with fright or panic? And you don’t know why? It’s usually related to stress and actually, it’s connected to your cortisol hormone as well.
At Bay Wellness, we strive to get to the root cause of your symptoms. It may be your stress, your cortisol, your digestive system or your female hormones. We want to find what is causing the change in what can be your optimal health. Most often, it’s all of these things together, so book with us for a new patient appointment, we can go over your entire health history, your current symptoms and untangle that pre-holiday mess that you might be feeling as we all enter the holiday season.
- Don’t forget to use your extended health benefits to support your health journey and use them before you lose them when they expire
- It all begins with you booking a consultation and getting started
Let’s make health your priority.
Book a consultation and we would be happy to go through everything with you and find the best solution for you on your health journey.
If you’re ready to discover how the four pillars approach can improve your health, book with us, today. You’ll find a convenient booking link below or you can call us directly or email us.
At Bay Wellness Centre we provide personalized nutrition and hormone plans and detoxification plans for you so that we can address all of your health concerns in a step-by-step fashion.
In the Four-Pillar Health Series, we address each pillar of health on its own. You’ll get the information that will help you determine the next steps you can begin on your own and also see the larger picture balanced on the four pillars your health is dependent on.
Get our free Ultimate Guide to Managing Menopausal Hormone Imbalances by visiting the Bay Wellness Centre website. You may also like the blogs we have for you and that our patients have told us they love for the reliable information on topics of interest to them.
Ready to make wellness your priority?
Dr. Annie Savage
Dr. Megan Maycher
Your holistic health advocates &
Founders of Bay Wellness Centre
Connect with us
Book a consultation online here
Phone: 604-569-0099
info@baywellnesscentre.com
We’re social at Instagram Facebook YouTube
Visit: Suite 100, 555 West Georgia
Office is downstairs
Vancouver, BC
Minimize holiday stress with these Stress Buster Tips to start with now
Part 1 – October — Warm up to what you can control!
Holiday stress, unlike other types of negative stress we may encounter in life, is predictable. It begins and ends of a schedule that most of us can anticipate, so we can take measures to reduce it!
1. Set Your Priorities
Right at the outset of your new outlook, choose what you want to spend your energies and time on – what is important and also realistic.
Do those things that bring you closer to what is important to you. You may choose to prioritize connection, celebration and time spent both alone and special times of togetherness with just one other person or small group. Find what honours the purpose of the holidays as you want to experience it – in your family or within your community, or your faith.
2. Learn the Power of ‘No’
Two little letters, that used appropriately can restore control, preserve energy and keep compassion in a form it belongs – without running yourself ragged with meeting any and all expectations – especially then ones you take on for yourself.
At the holiday season, saying no may keep you from being overwhelmed and eventually feeling resentful at work or to family members. Everyone understands the need to remove something or not attend to keep a balance and to get all the rest done. They are probably wanting or needing to do it themselves. So lead the way on saying no to getting too carried away!
3. Pass on Perfection
Clarity about your priorities may help you to stop overwhelm before you get entangled in too many activities that add stress to the holidays. Decide what traditions or new activities offer the most positive impact and eliminate everything else, at least for this year!
For most people this means really looking at how much shopping, caroling, baking, visiting or card sending as just a few examples, they really have room and energy to fit on their schedule.
4. Be Realistic
Your holiday season doesn’t have to be ‘the most wonderful time of the year’ by being picture perfect or exactly like every other year. So much has changed in our world!
Families, ease of travel to gather, we grow and even time honoured rituals and traditions are modified. Why not pick what is most special, most important to hold onto and maybe even create some new traditions. If the last few years of global change has shown us anything about the holiday season is that we can celebrate together in many and new ways. We can share photos, send emails, create videos, or gather virtually via video.
We’ve all learned to see celebrations and togetherness in a new light out of both reality and new ideas.
5. Best to Budget
The same as you looking at your resources of time and energy to prioritize your holiday activities, you can also find balance with a budget!
Imagine deciding how much money you can afford to spend – before heading out to shop for gifts and for food and décor. The biggest sleigh full of gifts cannot buy happiness or more soul satisfaction, especially if after seasonal Santa leaves, and the bill for all that stuff arrives.
Would you consider these gift alternatives?
- Donate in someone’s name to a charity.
- Make and give homemade gifts.
- Do a gift exchange within the family so every ONE receives a meaningful and special gift just for them.
- Create coupons or personal vouchers that promise time spent in fun or helpful services or making special events possible.
Find more Stress Busters in the next month’s posts as we count down to the holidays and the New Year. Don’t forget to access your extended health benefits before they expire!