The Mental Health Hack To Turn To This Season

Every year I approach the holiday season with trepidation. I have this feeling that settles in like I have been here before and have never been here at all. Mostly because each holiday season is different. Yearly my mental health toolkit acquires more tools on how I can cope with the month of December, but it’s any one’s guess if the old tools will work.

The one hack that has never failed me during the winter holidays, death anniversaries, or other hard grief day is this — make plans you can break.

The unpredictability of how we’re going to be feeling on a certain day is a fact. If you’re like me, on hard days when you’ve committed to plans you may historically push through with them because you feel guilty or indebted to someone else to do so. But, as I’ve learned through trial and error, forcing yourself to be somewhere you don’t want to be or to partake in an event you don’t want to partake in, especially during a hard-for-you day is a recipe for disaster.

Instead of constantly putting myself in that situation, I started making plans with friends who wouldn’t mind if I broke them. People who deeply understood that I couldn’t anticipate what I would 100% want on a given day, but I could play my odds and have as many options open as possible.