Brainy’s Top Tips For Surviving The Holidays

Between buying expensive gifts, preparing holiday meals, family gatherings, and social commitments, the holidays can be incredibly stressful. Is it any wonder that 88% of Americans, (according to some heartburn medication distributor), consider the holidays to be the most stressful time of year?

Many people find the holidays tough emotionally. Amid all the holiday cheer some folks feel sad, isolated, or even lonely.

Fortunately, we at Brained are here to help! Today we’ll share our top six holiday survival tips while subtly disguising attempts to convince your brain to part with your money.

1. Plan ahead with your holiday gifts

   Planning ahead can help ease the anxiety around finding the right gift for your narcissist brother who never buys you anything good. How? Funny you should ask – share the gift of a non-science-based self-help newsletter like Brained. It’s fun, it’s easy, it costs 1/5 of what one Prozac pill will cost you, and, it makes the perfect gift for that creepy uncle you loathe.

2. Stay calm and find the funny

   It’s a well-known fact that laughter can help get you through stressful times like the holidays, and what better way to laugh than by subscribing to a wonderfully humourous newsletter like Brained, for example, or Fetal Position, to whom we are not affiliated in any way*.

   *We are, in fact, very affiliated.

3. Resist comparing your holiday to others

   Mark Twain said that comparison is the death of joy - he must have spent a LOT of time on Insta. Instead of making the same mistake this holiday season, drop your phone in the toilet and do your own thing. Be yourself, run your own race, find your own passion, such as subscribing, restacking, and sharing a relatively obscure newsletter like Brained. See? It’s obvious that Mark would have recommended us if he were still alive.

4. Take time for self-care

   It’s important to set aside a little time for yourself occasionally and the stressful holiday season is no exception. You could meditate or do yoga but that would mean getting out of bed. Reading on the other hand, requires little movement and is an excellent alternative, providing uninterrupted ME time.  And with almost every Brained post taking less than three minutes to read, it’s a fantastic option for getting all the self-care you need.

5. Try and focus on the positive

   It may sound like ludicrously over simplified mumbo jumbo, but positive thinking has been said to build resilience and a small fortune for those selling it. Finding three good things in your day has been known to improve your mood for 0.03 seconds. Even with the holiday stress, there must be three good things about this endless season. Maybe it’s those shitty socks your aunty bought you that are too hideous to regift but would make a great cleaning rag. Those mince pies that taste like squirrel intestines but would make excellent fertilizer. Perhaps the esteemed father of positive psychology Martin Seligman said it best when he recommended the extremely positive newsletter called Brained. He hasn’t recommended it, of course, but he might have, had he heard of it.

6. Seek support when you need it

   Knowing when to call in the big guns is key to surviving holiday stress. You could get professional advice from a qualified therapist but that would require a three day Google search, a hard look at yourself, and plenty of dosh. Instead, why not get non expert advice from complete strangers on some random online community? For this, we at Brained highly recommend an excellent Substack called Brained.

We hope you find our holiday survival tips helpful and feel free to chime in with a few of your own.