it’s time  for you tto think both inside  and outside of he box, with or without the wrapping.

No it’s not the success hot line challenge although that’s very important. 

“Oh my, what could be more important than that?”

I looked up what is meant by the Christmas spirit -oh and first, i am talking about all different holidays here, not just the Christian one so please understand that i’m using Christmas so i don’t have to spend 2 1/2 minutes each time to list all of the different observances. 

Back to the meaning –  my AI buddy told me it’s:

1-A sense of generosity

2-Warmth and togetherness

3-Hope and renewal

4-Joy and celebration

5- Reflection and meaning

If you’re crazy enough to be out today, Black Friday, then i bet these 5 things were not at the top of your list. Mine would have been:

-selfishness

-rushing

-taking

-exhaustion

-stress and pressure

-competition 

-success -I beat the other guy to the deal”

oh and a fair amount of complaining too

I know all of you that are doing the success hotline are busy with the challenge but here’s my challenge to you

When i said think inside the box – it was meant for you to continue your reflections that you’ve hopefully been doing over the past week. You owe it to yourself – and to your loved ones to take care of you. This is a time of immense stress and pressure. You have to make your sleep, hydration, nutrition and some sort of exercise a priority, even if it’s just gettiing up and walking around for 1 minute every half hour. You’ve heard Dr. Gilbert talk to us about how stress kills. It does and i am a personal testimony to how it can make you very very sick. But, i think i’ve told you all that story before.  use the next 6 weeks to practice taking care of yourself.

If you do that, THEN you can go about thinking outside the box – doing for other people.  But we should go beyond material gifts. 

I bet you’ll be as surprised as I was to find out that the suicide rate does NOT increase during the holiday season. It does increase slightly around New Year’s Day and that week. 

What does increase and this is where i would like you to pay attention, is in depression symptoms or any other symptoms if someone has a mental heath disorder. 

Depressive symptoms increase for a variety of reasons: financial pressure, grief or missing loved ones, family conflict, social isolation, disrupted routines, and the gap between idealized “happy holidays” imagery and a person’s actual situation.

Surveys of people living with mental illness show that roughly two-thirds report their symptoms get worse around the holidays, and about one-quarter say they get “a lot” worse.

Polls in the general population show that around 40-41% of adults say their stress or emotional strain increases between November and January compared with the rest of the year

We’ll continue with this next week