The holidays are time for relaxation and re-assessment. Picture / Getty Images
Soon the holiday season will be upon us again — it's good to remember that this is an important time to unwind and relax, not to use the precious time to keep on being busy and disconnected from what really matters — something that often seems easy to do.
There is research backing up the idea that taking holidays is important to your health — particularly your cardiovascular and mental health. Also, the act of planning holidays helps with feelings of happiness.
It's important to note though that holidays are not a replacement for regular stress management. What really keeps you at the top of your game is taking regular breaks from work and ensuring good sleep, eating and exercise in your day-to-day life.
A holiday once a year is not going to make up for a 24/7 lifestyle with no work/life balance.
As far as holidays are concerned, it's good to know if you're an "active" or "passive" relaxer. Do what works for you. If you're an active relaxer, perhaps take part in summer sports, play golf, enjoy an adventure holiday, or fun activities as this will help you recoup your energy and ensure you don't go into the new year feeling last-year tired.
Others may enjoy relaxing on the beach, going for gentle walks, reading and catching up on Netflix. Whatever works for you is what you should be doing. It's all about self care.
Holiday time is also, of course, an opportunity to be in more contact with family and friends. Human contact is important to our wellbeing and sometimes that gets neglected in the busyness of day to day living.
Talk to your friends and family, spend time with them, enjoy being relaxed when perhaps usually everything's a rush.
It's a good idea to plan your holiday time in a way that you're not making too many commitments, and make sure you spend some time assessing the year that's gone and deciding what you want for the new year.
When we're in the year, it's easy to go into "automatic" and forget to stop and wonder: Is what I'm doing right now working for me and my family? Do I enjoy the work I'm doing? Does it give me the lifestyle I want? What do I really want?
It's good to also think in terms of what you've achieved or done well in 2017 — assessing the year doesn't need to be about beating yourself up, it's about noticing your achievements at work and in your home life and looking at what you'd like to improve.
It's important to remember that your decisions from last year or years ago may not be working for you now — things may have changed: you may have had a child or be struggling with health issues, your responsibilities may have changed. Or you may have reached your goals of last year, and are thinking: What now?
What's worked for you in 2017? What do you want to continue doing? If there is anything you'd like to change, how would you go about changing it? We all know New Year's resolutions generally only work for a week or two — so how do you ensure you put into action the changes you want to make?
The advice from many researchers is that if you want to make big changes in your life (such as exercise regularly, eat better, study), it's important to look at ways to create new habits. The Huffington Post (https://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-clear/forming-new-habits-b-5104807.html) looks at a study originally published by the European Journal of Social Psychology where researcher Phillippa Lally, found that for most people it takes 66 days to create a new habit.
At the beginning of this year, I decided to test this. When I assessed 2016, I decided something I really needed to change was my sedentary lifestyle. I decided to buy a fitness tracker that would help me monitor how much exercise I was getting and help me set goals.
Of course I had awareness that a fitness tracker alone wasn't going to get the results — I had to create new habits so regular exercise became as easy and as automatic as brushing my teeth.
So, I decided to focus on just 66 days. I pushed myself to go out for morning walks and be more mobile throughout the day for those 66 days. The theory was that once I had achieved that amount of time, exercise would become automatic.
So, did it work? Absolutely. I am doing three times the exercise that I did last year — and I am now on my 313th day of doing that. I now no longer think about whether I'll exercise or not, I just do. It doesn't matter how busy I am — exercise has become an important part of my daily routine.
So it's good to assess what you want more of and what you want less of — get out of automatic mode and decide what you want from 2018 and how you're going to go about achieving it — and remember the value of creating new habits.
Val Leveson is an Auckland-based counsellor