Self-care is important all year round, but let’s talk specifically about how to take care of ourselves and our health during the holidays. 

Very often what I hear from people is that we hit a certain point in the year and then when the holidays start happening – no matter which country you live in and no matter which holidays you observe – the holidays can really throw off your healthcare routine. Next thing you know, months go by and you find yourself coming out of it thinking, “What just happened to me?” And you have to start all over again.

I want to share some tips with you so that hopefully I can help you to change that pattern and even improve your health during the holidays. These same tips will help you if you’re under stress of any type. A lot of times, if you’re going through a point in your life where there’s a lot of activity, extra things going on, extra demands emotionally and physically on yourself, that’s when we tend to take care of ourselves LESS when we should be taking care of ourselves more.

I want to encourage you that it is possible to learn to take care of yourself during times of stress. It’s start with awareness and a willingness to observe ourselves. And specifically, a willingness to be gentle and loving with yourself instead of judging yourself or being critical or harsh on yourself. 

Actually, one of the most gentle, loving things you can do for yourself is to take care of yourself during the holidays or when you’re going through stress, so that you can get through this time period and be at least as healthy or healthier on the other side.

This is something that I’ve learned the hard way. I’ve been through times in my life where there’s been stress and more than I can even imagine being able to do in a single day, barely getting any sleep and never knowing when it was going to end. It was in those time periods that I saw my health deteriorate and feeling worse and worse. 

That’s when I realized that has to be a better way! There has to be a way to SUPPORT ourselves to recover from stress while under stress. And that’s exactly what I’m going to teach you to do.

Recognizing When Your Body Needs More Care

One of the most common ways to know that you are needing more support during the holidays or when under stress is when you feel tired all the time. Feeling like you’re tired during the day, you need a nap, and/or you wish you could go back to bed are all signs from your body that it needs help to recover. 

Maybe you’re having trouble sleeping – perhaps you’re not falling asleep easily or waking up early – and so you end up burning the candle at both ends. Then you can become more and more reliant on stimulants like caffeine and sugar to get you through the day. You might also become more dependent on things to sedate you or relax you in the evening, they may actually be working against you. We might be thinking, “Oh, I’m going to drink a glass of wine to relax,” when actually it could be working against you and disrupting your sleep more.

The other things you might notice may be more frequent headaches, more frequent infections – sinus infections, bladder infections, vaginal infections, or intestinal infections. This is when I see patients develop diverticulitis or other kinds of inflammatory conditions in your body like gastritis or GERD/reflux. Other digestive issues – constipation, diarrhea, or your version of irritable bowel syndrome – starts to happen. You might also start to notice different rashes on your skin, or either weight gain or weight loss. You might notice brain fog, irritability, anxiety, and/or depression. All of these things can start to show up when we’re under a lot of stress.

Here you are wanting to enjoy yourself during the holidays, and yet if you’re not taking care of yourself, you start to feel awful. You may start to gain weight, feel irritable, and not even enjoy the holidays because you don’t feel good. 

I don’t want you to wait for the holidays and stress to be over. I want to encourage you to start making changes as soon as you realize it. You don’t have to wait in order to change the way that you’re taking care of yourself, especially during the holidays and especially when you’re under a lot of stress. You can start giving your body and yourself what you need today!

Getting Started with SelfC.A.R.E.

What are some ways to get started? I know it can feel overwhelming. Believe me, I’ve been there too, and I had to figure out how to outsmart it. One of the best ways to get ahead of it is to make it really simple, and that’s why I love the acronym C.A.R.E., as in SelfC.A.R.E.

• C is for Clean Eating. We’re going to try each day to move a little bit more toward eating clean. I’ll explain more in a minute. 
• A stands for Adequate Sleep – how do we prioritize our sleep and take steps to make sure we’re getting good sleep every night or as many nights as possible. 
• R is for Recovery Activities. These are activities that we can do, even for short periods of time each day and each week, to help us consistently recover from stress so that we can stay ahead of it instead of having the waves come crashing down over us. 
• E stands for Exercise, which means movement at your activity level and movement that you enjoy and that feels good for your body.

Think of it in terms of how you are taking care of yourself every day. Because when it comes down to it, the more we take care of ourselves each and every day, even if it’s in small increments, it adds up to a significant difference in your health.

I’m going to go through each of these categories in detail, but first I want to get clear about why C.A.R.E. is so important for both acute and chronic health conditions, and how you can make big progress with your health by paying attention to these key aspects of your daily routine.

Why This Matters for Every Health Condition

SelfC.A.R.E. matters no matter what health issue you may be dealing with. You might be following me because you have high-risk HPV virus and an abnormal pap smear. This is absolutely what I recommend for helping you to protect yourself from HPV. This is also what I recommend if you’re dealing with perimenopausal symptoms, because we know perimenopausal symptoms are absolutely going to be more severe when you’re under stress without enough recovery.

This is also true if you’re working on fertility and wanting to get pregnant. To do that, we need to be taking good care of you every step of the way so that your ovaries are getting the best signals. The ovaries need to have calm signals in order to get the best ovulation to happen and the greatest likelihood of catching a pregnancy and maintaining a pregnancy.

I encourage you follow these tips whether you’re wanting to address an acute condition like joint pain or surgery recovery, and also to prevent more long-term conditions like autoimmunity, heart disease, diabetes, dementia, or bone loss. This is going to help all of those things at once. That is why this is such a great approach to help in so many ways because you’re simply taking better care of you. There’s this beautiful ripple effect where taking C.A.R.E. of you ends up helping throughout your body.

SelfC.A.R.E. is also essential for maintaining your health improvements. When you achieve a healthy, normal pap smear, or when you are able to reverse autoimmunity, get your cholesterol levels down, your blood sugar levels optimized, and your cortisol optimized, then you’re going to use SelfC.A.R.E. to help you maintain those benefits over time. 

The new way of taking care of you is your new normal, and you’re going to be able to maintain that for years to come. This is a way better strategy than to make quick, temporary changes and then fall behind again and have to catch up. For example, when we follow an extreme diet, lose weight, and then for the next six months gain it all back again. That just isn’t the best strategy for long-term health.

The best strategy for long-term health is something that you’re going to do on a regular basis so that your body can benefit from it each and every day over time. We want to be able to create habits, or routines—I call it your self-care routine—that you can follow day in and day out. There are going to be some days where it’s a little bit off track, but you’re going to know, “I’m going back to my self-care routine,” because that’s what’s going to help you maintain over time.

When patients come to consult with me, at first, they’re starting off with a lot of different symptoms and a lot of different variables. I become the detective who comes in and says, “Okay, we can figure this out. We can figure out what is causing what, which foods are causing which symptoms, which issues need to be addressed, which hormones are out of balance, and which nutrients are out of balance.” 

We start addressing all the imbalances caused by stress and you start feeling better. Little by little, all the labs come back to optimal and you start feeling good. By the time you go through this process, you’ve got a new, beautiful self-care routine in place that you can continue to optimize moving forward. You never have to fall back to the old chaotic place of feeling out of control of your health.

Clean Eating: The Foundation

Let me give you some specific tips. These are not one-size-fits-all. I really encourage you to know yourself, your body, and to use these tips as a starting place.

Let’s start with Clean Eating. What I mean by clean eating is eating foods that are healthy for your body with nutrients that your body needs and wants, and not the things your body doesn’t want or need. This includes avoiding pesticides, so choose organic foods. We can also make sure to choose foods that are non-inflammatory. If you’re eating foods that are inflammatory, then you’re adding inflammation to your body and that’s going to works against you. The most common inflammatory foods are gluten, dairy, and sugar. 

As best as you can, avoid gluten, dairy, and sugar. The more you drop your inflammation levels, the more you’re going to increase your immune system function. You’re also going to improve your digestion, which means you’ll also improve absorption of nutrients, and that means your overall health will benefit.

I find that these inflammatory foods – gluten, dairy, and sugar – are very highly associated with abnormal pap smears in women of all ages. They’re also associated with bone loss, weight gain, skin rashes, autoimmunity, thyroid issues, heart disease, diabetes, and dementia. By avoiding inflammatory foods, you can solve the most health problems at once. Think: “I’m going to clean up my diet and in doing so, cross a lot of health issues off the list.”  Then we can see what’s left.

Yes, I do recommend doing a food sensitivity panel if you haven’t already, because then we can find out exactly which foods are inflammatory for your body. You can find the one I recommend here. If you’re not yet ready to do a food sensitivity panel, then I would start by avoiding gluten, dairy, and sugar because those are the most common inflammatory foods in humans. When women take this advice from me, they often tell me “I finally decided to avoid gluten, dairy, and sugar and I’m already starting to feeling better.”

Yes, it’s possible to avoid gluten, dairy, and sugar during the holidays. For example, for Thanksgiving (a holiday in the United States) you can have turkey – turkey doesn’t contain gluten or dairy – potatoes, sweet potatoes, and vegetables. These foods are gluten-free, dairy-free, and no sugar needs to be added. You can have beautiful, delicious, healthy foods during the holidays. Or if you want to have bread or something made from bread, you can get a gluten-free version. Butter is okay to eat because it doesn’t contain dairy proteins, or you can use a different oil or fat like avocado oil, olive oil, or ghee, which is clarified butter.

If you’re wondering how you’re going to eat clean for the holidays, then I recommend you download my gluten-free, dairy-free Holiday Recipe Guide, which is free and includes my favorite holiday recipes. They are recipes that we use in my family every year.

The other thing that I would do is clean drinking, which means having filtered water. It also means avoiding or decreasing your alcohol intake. While a little bit of alcohol can be okay, it doesn’t take much to go over too much. We know from research that when we have too much alcohol on a daily or weekly basis, it increases the risk of all different health issues, including high-risk HPV virus and everything from heart disease to diabetes and dementia. 

So why drink something that’s going to increase your health risk? You may find that you can have one alcoholic drink once a week or twice a week. To me, however, one drink can be too much, especially if you’re trying to get HPV to negative. I would just commit to saying, “This is going to be a dry holiday for me.”

Right now I’m drinking green tea, which I’ll often do at holiday events. I’ll go for filtered water. It can be sparkling water, or you can get a flavored sparkling water if you want to make it a little fancy. There’s also other beverages and mocktails that can be very tasty and delicious and don’t have to include alcohol or sugar. I encourage you to look them up and experiment and find your favorite drink without alcohol for during the holidays and any time of year.

Adequate Sleep: Essential for Healing

A is for Adequate Sleep. What I recommend is that you start paying attention to how many hours of sleep you’re getting right now. Pay attention to what time you went to sleep the night before and what time you woke up today. If you’re not getting at least seven hours on a regular basis—I mean like seven hours straight through, not being woken up five times in the middle—then we need to start taking action.

It may be that you need to communicate with other people in your home about what time you want to go to bed so they don’t wake you up accidentally, including your pets. Make sure your bedroom is dark, and that no lights are going to wake you or disrupt your sleep. Maybe you need to do some cleaning and decluttering so that your bedroom feels like a perfect place to sleep.

If perimenopausal symptoms are disrupting your sleep, we can address that. That’s something I help patients with all the time. It’s very common that perimenopause disrupts sleep, whether that’s from causing night sweats or simply just by causing you to wake up too early. These are things that can be addressed by addressing your hormones. 

We can look at, is your progesterone too low? Do we need to start supporting your progesterone levels? There are very safe and effective bioidentical (natural) progesterone in creams and oral forms that we can use. Progesterone not only helps regulate your menstrual cycle, if you still have one, but it also helps calm your nervous system and can help you stay asleep. And after menopause, you can use both estrogen and progesterone to help with sleep.

One of my favorite ways to help with sleep is to look at your cortisol and neurotransmitter levels, because if you have high cortisol at night, or if your cortisol is going up too high in the morning, it’s going to wake you up early. Or if your serotonin is low or your adrenaline is high, they can disrupt your sleep. What I always recommend is you can start by doing the Stress Type Quiz on my website – that’s a free online quiz that’ll give you a sense whether your cortisol or adrenaline need attention.

Then what I recommend doing, in order to get very specific about your case, is to do a urine-saliva test. In the urine we can measure serotonin, dopamine, adrenaline, and GABA. In the saliva we can measure your cortisol levels throughout the day. Once I have that level of detail, I can help you solve any imbalances. That’s the process I developed over the past 25 years, known as the Stress Recovery Protocol. You can find it in my book, Master Your Stress Reset Your Health. I’m happy to guide you to implement the Stress Recovery Protocol as a one-on-one patient or in the Stress Warrior Program.

If you are still having trouble with sleep, then we need to look deeper at potential nutrient deficiencies, gut health issues, or something else going on, such as mold toxicity. If that’s the case, I recommend reading my other book called “The Natural Insomnia Solution.” Then come meet with me so I can guide you to get better sleep.

Sleep is huge. Sleep is when our body does so much repair. Our brain integrates our day and our memories, our body does all kinds of healing, and our immune system protects us from infections. A lot of times, even just by getting better sleep, people will find that they lose extra weight, infections stop happening, and they get a normal pap smear. It’s amazing!

Recovery Activities: Calming Your Nervous System

Let’s move on to R, which is for Recovery Activities. Recovery activities is everything from solitude or quiet time for yourself, to deep breaths, even if it’s ten deep breaths when you’re in a stressful moment, to calm music. I always encourage you to have a playlist on your phone that you can play when you’re doing the dishes, when you’re driving, and when you’re going about other activities, so you have calm music communicating to your nervous system that everything is safe.

If you’re a musician, you can play your instrument. Playing an instrument is shown to help reduce stress. Recovery activities also includes things like meditation, mindfulness, as well as yoga. Yoga crosses over into exercise as well because yoga is both a stress recovery activity and an exercise – a way to practice balance, movement, and flexibility.

There are so many more stress recovery activities—everything from spending time in nature, spending time with pets, spending time with loved ones, calling a friend, and journaling. There’s an endless list of possible things you could choose as recovery activities, and they don’t have to take you all day. It could literally be something that takes you five minutes in the morning and five minutes at night.

As soon as I wake up, I put on a meditation. I do some journaling. This is a practice that I learned: when you wake up in the morning, write down with a pen and paper any fears or resentments that are on your mind. Because when you write them down, and then shred the paper or throw it away, you release the fears and resentments so that you can focus on your real priorities for the day with clarity and purpose.

You can also use the morning for movement or getting outside in nature. There are so many different ways you can introduce recovery activities, even in small increments of time, even for ten minutes in the middle of the day or ten minutes at the end of the day. These are things you can do with your children or with your loved ones.

All the recovery activities I’ve mentioned have been shown in research to help us recalibrate our cortisol and our nervous system, so that we’re not in such dysregulation. You’re actually telling your nervous system, “this the time when you can relax, recover, and destress,” so that you can reset all your hormones and your immune system and heal, instead of being in a constant state of stress that’s perpetuating the message of stress throughout your system all the time.

Exercise: Moving Your Body to Heal

Then the E stands for Exercise. I encourage you to begin at your activity level. There’s no judgment, no expectation, and no need to push yourself hard. It doesn’t require perfection. It could simply be five minutes of stretching. 

What I like to do is pull up a YouTube video and do a five- or ten-minute workout. I recommend starting with abs, which will help strengthen your core. It could be some squats or bicep curls, or it could be taking a walk with your dog.  Start with some movement, and then you can build from there.

One of my favorites is dancing. You could go to a dance class, but you could also just put on music you enjoy and move in your own kitchen or living room. Dance like no one’s watching! It’s a beautiful way to shake out the stress and move your body, and it counts as movement and exercise.

We often make a big mountain out of the idea of exercising, and that prevents us from doing anytihng. I encourage you to just let that all go. Shake it off. It doesn’t require perfection. It’s just about taking small steps in the direction of taking better care of you.

More than anything, it’s about you getting to prioritize you, and that means that you’re increasing your self-love, your self-respect, and you’re in more alignment with yourself and your body. Again, be gentle with yourself. Say to yourself: “I’m going to do what I can, and I’m going to have learning opportunities along the way.”

Learning in terms of what to eat, what recovery works best for you, and learning from others. What are they doing that works for them? What are they enjoying? This gives you something to talk about when you communicate with other humans, whether at a holiday party. You’re in a state of curiosity and learning, which is a beautiful way to connect with others and to connect with yourself at the same time.

Making SelfC.A.R.E. Your Priority

There you have it. Those are my tips to help you take even better care of you when you’re under stress, whether that’s the stress of the holidays or any stress that might be popping up in your life. 

The priority is taking care of you. When you’re taking better care of you, then everything else goes more smoothly. That becomes your point of reference. And that’s the goal because when selfcare is your focus, you’re going to see the biggest shift in your wellbeing, your life, and your health.

I’m glad to get to connect with you here and share this information with you. I look forward to your comments down below. I’d love to hear what was helpful, what worked for you, and what your questions are. 

If you would like my help, please don’t hesitate to reach out to my office so we can understand what your needs are and talk about how I can help you. Whenever we’re struggling with any health issue, we need to consider what is underlying, and very often the underlying issue is lack of recovery from stress, trauma, and toxin exposure. 

I can tell you that it IS possible to heal from stress and trauma, to recover from anxiety and depression, and to rebalance what was disrupted by stress, such as hormones, digestion, neurotransmitters, and immune function. And in doing so, we can also prevent long term health issues, including risk of dementia, heart disease, and cancer.  

I love to support patients to recover from stress in my practice, no matter how it is showing up in your body. I can help you virtually – by phone or zoom – wherever you are in the world. Get started by setting up an initial breakthrough session here.

Thank you, everyone, for listening in to How Humans Heal. If you found this information helpful, please make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss future episodes of How Humans Heal.

Happy Holidays to you! I look forward to connecting with you soon.

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