Surviving the End of Year Craziness

This time of year can feel incredibly full and at times overwhelming as you try to close out projects at work, tidy up loose ends, keep up with an increasing amount of social commitments and plan for the upcoming holidays. When everything starts feeling a little out of control, it’s important to pause and put some time aside to get intentional and deliberate about how you want to spend your time and energy.

HERE ARE 4 WAYS TO HELP YOU SURVIVE THE END OF THE YEAR CRAZINESS:

1. Get clear on your intentions

When you have many things that you’re trying to juggle, it can be so easy to get trapped on the treadmill, going through the motions and running for your life. It’s in busy seasons like this that it’s more important than ever to pause and take a moment to reflect on your intentions.

• How do you want to feel in this final month of the year?
• What’s most important to you in December?
• How do you want to show up at work this month?
• How do you want to show up in your personal life this month?
• What support do you need to be able to do this?

Take some time to consider these questions and write down your intentions for the rest of the year. What would it mean to you to be able to stay true to those intentions and end 2023 in a way that feels good to you?

2. Take time to rest and restore

One of the best things you can do to survive the end of year craziness is to give yourself mini moments every day to rest and restore. In fact, restoration is one of the most important aspects of wellbeing and it’s one that often gets missed because we think that we can’t justify the time. The counterintuitive thing to understand is that when you rest, and restore your energy, you’ll actually have more time to do everything you want to do. At its core, rest is about how you are renewing your energy and restoring yourself on all levels. If you’re looking for ways to bring in more rest this holiday season, you might like to read our recent article on 4 Steps to Restore and Protect Your Energy.

3. Identify your boundaries for the holidays

The way that you can protect your time and energy this holiday season is by getting clear on what boundaries you need to set. If you’re wondering where a boundary might need to be set, often you can be guided by your emotions. Any time you are feeling angry, annoyed or resentful toward someone, that is often a sign that one of your boundaries has been crossed. Or it could be that you actually don’t have a boundary where you need one.

Tap into your emotional state. How are you feeling? Where do you feel put-upon? Where do you feel that someone’s taking advantage of you? Where do you feel resentful? You said yes. And you really wanted to say no. How can you pull that back and put a boundary in place so that you don’t have to feel like that anymore?

When you think about the intentions that you’ve set for the rest of the year, what are the boundaries you’ll need to set to stay true to those intentions? Who do you need to communicate those to? How will you make sure you maintain those boundaries?

4. Celebrate your wins from 2023

Another thing that often gets missed as we race towards the end of the year, is taking a moment to pause and celebrate the wins that we’ve had in 2023. Spending some time reflecting on what went right this year can really help to have a healthy perspective and amplify those positive feelings that help us feel good and thrive.

Set some time aside to journal about this for yourself. What worked well for you this year? How did you grow professionally? How did you grow personally? Where were the moments when you were at your best? What were the highlights from the year? What are you most proud of?

If you can, take some time to look back through your calendar and remind yourself of the projects, activities and events you’ve had this year to jog your memory of the wins from 2023. We have something neurologically called the recency bias - a memory bias which gives greater importance to the most recent event and means that we can forget about all the things that came before that. Sometimes it’s not until you have the opportunity to sit down and look all the way back to January and start pulling out the things that you’ve achieved, month by month, that you realise just how much there is to celebrate.