Holiday Hangover

1/03/2019

Hey Warriors,

I feel like I've been gone for a really long time. The holidays had me a bit scatterbrained and took a bunch of energy to stay on the off-schedule that I was on.

I want to touch on a few things I did during the holiday season, both good and bad since I'm all about transparency!

​I started off December at a good speed; we had only been on a night schedule for a couple of weeks. With the excitement of baby girl's birthday and introducing her to Elf on the Shelf, I was truly running on pure excitement. 

As the days passed, I started sacrificing myself for the family. That meant I was not prioritizing 'me' time because I knew the family as a whole was already stressed not to mention each person individually. 

Everyone's sleep was off which also meant our eating was off but I rationalized giving up healthy eating because I was still being aware of everything; as in my food intake and mindset. Now we are not a clean eating family, but I try to stay away from processed food for myself. My body just doesn't like it!

So I still had asked myself the questions before I ate, although I was eating junk-processed food. I just justified the bad eating by reminding myself of my lack of sleep and it is easier for everyone. Big mistake among others...

While I was maintaining the basics of my self-care with daily gratitude, I had resorted to negative self-talk because I couldn't get back on the schedule that I had before the holidays started. 

It was sneak self-talk too. Not the easily recognizable negative junk but deeper. The talk wasn't challenging me as a person anymore but was challenging the work I've done so far. "If you really felt peaceful you'd be back on schedule."

I didn't stop it with the pure logic that, not only was the family switched to nights but I wasn't eating healthily anymore OR taking self-care time. It had nothing to do with the work I had done and everything to do with the work I had stopped doing. 

So although I maintained a grateful state and a positive outlook; as each day passed, I was growing resentful because I wasn't taking my 'me time'. Not specifically resentful towards anyone either just generally resentful.

I started to feel like just the thing that was taking care of everything and holding things together. Felt very much like I was fading away again. 

I brushed these feelings away with gratitude because I just didn't have time to switch things up. We dropped the hubs off at work at 5 pm, which had us home between 6-630 pm with rush hour traffic. By 730 pm the kiddo went to bed, laying in her room at least! Then I'd get her up at 145 am to pick him up, she'd be awake until about 330 am and back up for the day by 6 am... 

I couldn't sleep while she slept because I was terrified of oversleeping and him waiting outside in the cold. I was lucky if I got more than 20 minutes at a time and waking up startled searching for the time became anxiety building. So I ran on 2 hours a night max.

Now I know you are thinking that it sounds like a perfect time to take my self-care bath but no can do, it keeps the girl up... "momma, what are you doing?"

So night-shift with lack of sleep, crappy eating, and toxic self-talk only took a month before surfacing in my relationship as well.

Now I'm pretty good at maintaining patience with my kiddo, but the hubby gets a tongue lashing every now and then. 

He is my comfort and the one place all the frustration and pain disguised as anger can come out. Now we are leaps and bounds better at communicating. so I've really been able to express my pain as pain instead of anger but that started slipping when my self-care did. 

I became frustrated with him for something, I don't even remember that's how insignificant it was. 

Since I've been working on my thought processes in relation to my emotions, I can step away from the emotions easier. The goal is to figure out if the process was warranted or if I was just triggered into an emotion. 

Because of this work, I was almost immediately able to recognize my very irrational response to him. 

So I started reflecting on myself to find the change. It didn't take long to see that I had taken zero time for myself in the past month. I didn't even do my salts/bubbles in my baths and those were significantly shorter in duration as well. 

If you saw my TWO mental health days on Instagram around Christmas, this is why.

It only took a month for my cup to drain to the point of snapping. I wasn't happy that someone else had power over me again but I didn't sit there. I immediately reflected, made a plan and acted!

I talk about my struggles during the holidays, so you can see that even during good times there are struggles. The struggles aren't what matters, what you do with the struggle is what matters.

I did good stepping up, and we had a successful Christmas. I chose to sacrifice self-love AND food instead of sacrificing more sleep. I probably would have been better off keeping my clean eating style and only lightening up on my self-love but this is my learning journey!

So now we are in the first week of the New Year, and I'm struggling from my month-long choices. The pain is worse, and my body is actively fighting something. My opinion is my body is fighting all the toxins from the food because nobody else in my house is sick! 

So I'll leave you with this;

There will always be struggles but you can decide how to handle those struggles. Just don't forget that your choices can have a lasting effect so slow down and keep your self-care game strong so those choices are easier to make. 

If you decide to sacrifice your Self-Care, everything will start to suffer so next time I'm going to only lighten my self-care and try to continue clean eating the best I can.

​Keep going Warriors, even when its hard, don't ever give up.