Hi everyone! My name is Diana Garcia, and I’m a Licensed Mental Health Counselor in Florida and the owner of a private practice called Nurturing Minds Counseling. 

This is Day 4 of 12 of my Holiday Self-Care Series, where I provide 12 tips to help you deal with any holiday stress. As much as the holidays can be filled with joy, connection, and gratitude, they can simultaneously feel hectic and stressful. I hope to equip you with some tools to help you deal with some of the overload during the holidays with this series. 

So far in the Holiday Self-Care Series, I’ve covered the following:

  1. Holiday Self-Care Series: Day 1: A quick way to practice some mindfulness skills by practicing a three-minute breathing exercise.
  2. Holiday Self-Care Series: Day 2: All about listing your triggers during the holiday season.
  3. Holiday Self-Care Series: Day 3: Helped you notice the specific thoughts associated with your triggers. 

If you haven’t read those yet, you could benefit from checking those out first. 

Holiday Self-Care Series: Day 4: Naming The Feeling

Today’s tip is about identifying and labeling the specific feeling(s) that are difficult to manage. If you prefer to watch the video on this, check out the video here. If not, keep scrolling to continue reading the blog. 

Video on Holiday Self-Care Series: Day 4: Naming The Feeling

Learning how to identify and cope with feelings is a learned skill. Unfortunately, most of us haven’t learned how to dive into our emotional realm and manage difficult emotions. 

Why it is important to name the feeling? It is very similar to naming our thoughts; once you can name the feeling, you can start to identify what you need to do to move through it. It helps your mind when you know and name something versus if you don’t know how to describe what’s happening for you internally. 

You’re more likely to feel overwhelmed, especially since our mind is a language-processing machine. Naming a feeling helps to reduce some confusion, and it’s going to help you move through that feeling. It’s also much different from saying, “I feel frustrated versus I feel raging!” What you need to get through the experience could be different based on the range of these emotions. If you’re frustrated, maybe it’s enough to acknowledge it and give yourself permission to ride it out. Whereas, if you feel rage, you might decide to do some physical exercise to channel the rage and get the energy out.

Holidy-self-care
Photo by Hello I’m Nik on Unsplash

 

One way to become more proficient at naming feelings is to increase your emotional vocabulary. Moving from simply having the following limited options of mad, sad, and glad to expand your options of feelings words. Here’s a small list of feelings to start with (some feelings lists are much longer), but I sometimes find this is an easy way to begin expanding your knowledge. 

Feelings:

Anger Joy/Happiness Fear Sadness/Hurt Shame Surprise
Annoyed Enthusiastic Anxious Fragile Embarrassed Delighted
Frustrated Grateful Confused Helpless Insecure Encouraged
Furious Hopeful Intimidated Hopeless Inadequate Excited
Irritated Invested Nervous Lonely Small Moved
Resentful Loved Rejected Lost Vulnerable Inspired

Have this feeling list somewhere readily available so you can routinely see it and it can act as a prompt to help you check in with yourself emotionally.  For example, I have a magnet on my fridge, and you’ll see this chart used often with kids because it’s an easy way to start to increase your emotional intelligence. When I spot it on my fridge, it’s a great reminder for me to stop for a moment and see what’s going on for me emotionally. 

Let’s apply this next by building on the two previous posts. I encouraged you to know what your triggers are for the holiday season and write down the associated thoughts that are related to that trigger.  So today, you take the next step by labeling the feeling related to that situation.

I’ve been using the example of having difficulty situation with a relative at a family gathering. And let’s say the associated thoughts that come up are something like, “She must think I’m such a failure because of my career choice. And she might be right!” The next step would be to identify the specific feeling(s) that appear. So if you refer back to the feeling list, you identify feeling inadequate, embarrassed and annoyed at your aunt. And out of these feelings, you can further identify which one is more difficult to cope with. 

Maybe you can handle the feelings of annoyance and embarrassment, and you can brush those off pretty quickly. But the feeling of inadequacy is harder for you to sit with, and it gets you all wrapped up. We will leave it here for today’s tip, but again, it might be helpful to map out the following so far. 

  • Trigger:
  • Story (thoughts):
  • Feeling(s):

Next Steps

To recap, Day 4 of the Holiday Self-Care Series is about knowing and naming what that feeling will come up for you in that situation. Especially throughout this holiday season, when you notice some things going on many times, you can just stop and ask yourself which feeling you are feeling. Ask yourself, ‘Am I feeling disappointed, sad, scared, or frustrated?’ It’s just very important to start by naming the feeling!

Alright, guys, I hope the fourth day in the Holiday Self-Care Series is helpful.  

Check out these other resources to take care of yourself during the holiday season:

Lastly, I hope you continue nurturing your mind, body, and soul, whatever that looks like for you.