Episode 23 – Holiday Hacks Part 1: Prioritizing Your Health
In most cases, the idea of the holiday season brings us so much joy!
We eagerly await all the parties, dressing up, eating, time-off, traveling, family gatherings, and so on but 9 times out of 10, the reality of what it ends up happening is often nowhere close to what we imagined.
I’ve created a 3-part series on Holiday Hacks to help you get the MOST out of this Christmas period and really enjoy the experience with no regrets.
In this first of 3 episodes, I talk about easy, daily tips for prioritizing your HEALTH and why that’s so important.
Of course, we’d benefit from doing that every day of our lives but it’s especially crucial this time of year because we’re presented with more opportunities to make bad decisions.
Prioritizing our health above all else doesn’t mean we don’t enjoy ourselves at all… it just means we are more conscious about our intentions and can more effectively maximize on all the GOOD parts the holiday season has to offer.
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Episode Transcript
Welcome to the My Inner Tiger Podcast. I'm your host, Sidney DeCamella. I'm also a wife, mother, Master Life Coach, Course Creator and Spiritual Sherpa. Over the past few years, I have overcome extreme anxiety, depression, addiction, infertility, and chronic illness. And as a result, I've made it my life's mission to teach other women like you that no matter what battle you're up against, you have an Inner Tiger, a power within, to create and manifest whatever your heart desires. If you are tired of being a victim and ready to be the boss of your life, you have come to the right place. Each episode, I'm going to share tools, teachings, and techniques I have used and taught countless other women so that together we can create a life beyond our wildest dreams. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that your Inner Tiger is just waiting to be unleashed. I'm so happy. You've tuned in. Let's get started.
Hello, gorgeous souls. And welcome back to the My Inner Tiger podcast. Do not mind my voice. I am recovering from some God awful respiratory thing that I've had for the last couple weeks, and it just doesn't seem to want to go away. But anyway, so I sound kind of bad, but I'm feeling much better, which is awesome. And I'm excited to be recording today's episode, what I'm gonna be doing for this one. And the next couple going forward is a three part series for basically hacks for getting through Christmas. Christmas is such a beautiful fun season that we all look forward to. I mean, maybe not everyone, but I'd say the majority of us look forward to putting up the tree. We look forward to the parties. We look forward to the family time, and it's all just this big anticipation of, of goodness, which is really fun.
Especially if you live in a cold climate, you know, where things are a little old dreary, you just spirit Christmas comes along and lifts our spirits. So it's, it's just a wonderful time of the year. And the truth of it though, is the anticipation is awesome. It's wonderful. But when we get into the nitty gritty of actually going through the Christmas experience, yes, it has plenty of fun parts, but if we're really honest with ourselves, there's a lot of not so fun parts. And I say that because, you know, we, we look forward to going to these parties and dressing up and that's super fun always. But at the end of the day, what we end up doing is drinking a lot, eating a lot, lots of times we find ourselves in weird conversations with the family things don't always go the way we planned.
And we end up with hangovers and feeling fat and just all kinds of things in the reality of the Christmas season can go a little south. That's why, you know, a lot of people do get really sad during the holidays, even if they didn't expect to they do, because maybe they feel lonely or you know, what, but the things that contribute to a lot of that, that we don't talk about much are some of, of our behaviors and our habits during the Christmas season. So not to be the bear of bad news at all. I'm not at all saying that. I just wanna point out the reality of what's really going on and help us to really maximize our experience and this beautiful holiday that we have so much to celebrate on. Okay. So in this one of three episodes, I'm gonna talk prior, I'm gonna talk mostly about prioritizing your health.
Okay. And in the future, we'll talk about family and maybe some other things. But in this one, when I say health, I mean physical health, mental health, because these are the things that really tend to suffer at the end of the day during this season. So like I said before, we think about Christmas and we think about the drinking and the parties and the eating, and then the vacation and what do we do on vacation? We eat and we drink <laugh> and then what happens at the end of the year or at the end of the night or the next morning, we just wake up feeling bloated fat hungover. And what does that do for our vibration? It lowers our vibration dramatically. Okay. It leaves us into things like it can cause us to feel depressed. It can cause us tons of self doubt.
It can cause us to feel grief or embarrassment or guilt or lack of empowerment. All of the things that we actually don't want to feel. So how can we actually combat these feelings? How can we combat these experiences and, you know, really live our best lives during the holiday season? And so that's what I wanna go through. So I've put together a little tip sheet that I wanna share with you guys. And I know it will help you because I'm gonna be implementing it this year, myself. And I would love to have a little chat social media about anyone else who chooses to commit to putting their mental and physical health first above all else, putting on the oxygen mask and saying, you know what, I'm gonna make the most of this holiday season and find that fine balance between having fun and not regretting my decisions.
Okay. So the first thing that I'm gonna highly recommend you do each morning, whether it's, you know, what's the first thing you do in the morning, whether it's going in the bathroom to go pee or brush your teeth or take a shower, whatever it is when you get in front of that bathroom mirror, I want you to take a look at yourself and say, I choose to put me first, no matter what I'm tempted to do, I choose to put my health first. I'm prioritizing my health today, whatever that sounds like for you. I want you to look yourself dead in the eye and make that commitment. And that's where it's gonna start. Okay. Then each day, pick one thing to do for your mental health and one thing to do for your physical health. Now, these are things that we love to live by.
I mean, this is all stuff we would vastly benefit from doing every single day of the art, right? But it's just really important to make the commitment this holiday season, because it's a season where, you know, we're not really on top of our game. Most of us are not, and it's just easy to fall into that slippery slope. So if we make the conscious choice to look at ourselves dead in the eye and say, I love you. And I choose to put my health first today. And so then pick, like I said, pick one thing to do for your mental health and one thing for your physical health. Now let's talk about some things that you can do for your mental health. One option would be a gratitude journal, just take five minutes in the morning and write out different things that you're grateful for.
Now, I did an episode on gratitude last week. So if you wanna go back and listen to that, it will give you some more in depth tips on how to really practice gratitude, which is so, so, so, so, so, so powerful, but you can just do it by writing down things each morning in a journal that you're really grateful for. And it doesn't just have to be the big things. You can start off with the big things if you want, but you know, little things like something nice that your husband did for you yesterday or something sweet that your kids did, or, you know, just think about things that are going well in your life. It's really a lot more powerful than you might think. Trust me. Another thing you can do is a guided meditation. I I did a podcast on the power of meditation.
If you wanna go and listen to that, look for that in the previous episodes meditation, incredibly powerful. If you just do it for five or 10 minutes, that's all you need to do. We're not talking about these huge, you know, I want you to commit to doing something, but you don't have to like, think of this as this big elephant in the room. Like, oh, I gotta do this big thing. I mean, I think, listen, I'll be the first to admit that every time I try to implement something new into my morning routine, I'm like, oh, it's gonna take up so much time. It's so huge. I don't have the time for that. But if you just do the small things, the small little things that don't take long at all, if you don't have five minutes, you don't have 10 minutes. We need to talk, okay, we need to talk cuz you don't have life.
Now just take those short little minutes and just commit to doing something. Youtube has great meditations. That's where I do all of mine. Insight timer is another app you can get with free meditations. There's the calm app, any just there's tons of apps out there. Meditation is a great way to do this. Sit in silence and visualize your day, set an intention, set an intention. So this just means just sitting in silence, which can be really hard to do for some people, but closing your eyes and visualizing how you want your day to go, setting an intention for how you want, you know, what's something that you want to happen that day. You know, even if it's just to, like, I set the intention to be in love all day today, you know, no matter what I do, I put love first, I choose love today.
And that can be exponential for dealing with your children or your coworkers or your boss or your husband. If you just say, you know, today, no matter what happens, my reaction is going to be in love and marinate and sit on that intention, write it out in a journal, just visualize how you want your day to go. It's amazing what your mind can do when you set that intention. Another thing is just a general journal, how your day's been going, you know, yesterday or how you want your day to go, write it out. If you wanna just write in your journal, just getting quiet with yourself is really important. Do the Tony Robbins priming exercise. I have that link in the episode. I'll put it in this episode as well in the show notes, but put go back and listen to last week's episode on gratitude, where I talk about the power of the priming exercise grounding go outside and just stand with your feet on the bare ground and just, you know, put your hands down out as if you're like giving thanks and down beside your waist and just close your eyes and ground and just feel like the roots.
You have roots coming up from the earth into your body and you're just taking in the magic and the grounding of the planet and just finding your center. Okay. Breathwork is awesome. Any kind of breathwork you wanna do is something I do a lot in the morning. I take a breath in for a count of five seconds. I hold it for a count of 10 seconds and I breathe out for a count of 10 seconds. So breathe in five, hold 10, breathe out 10. It really does wonders for my nervous systems. It's kinda like the magic number for me. But you can, you know, fiddle around with the numbers and see what works well for you. But there's a million different kinds of breath work out there. Just trust me, do some breath work. Or you can just sit in silence.
Sit in silence. One thing I like to do when I'm sitting in silence is clearing my energy center. And if you don't know anything about your chakras, we have seven chakras, look it up. They each have a color that represents each one of them. And I like to sit and, and marinate or meditate on each energy center. So for example, down at the base of your spine, you've got your root chakra and it's the color red. So I would sit and just meditate on the color red and watch it expand, see this like an energy bubble of red energy, just expanding out into, you know, a foot in front of you, three feet in front of you and expanding, expanding, expanding out into the state all throughout the planet. Just like you can take it as far as you want, but just seeing that energy center expand, expand, expand, because every day as we take on different energies, those energy centers constrict, and they get smaller and they block us from living in our full energy potential.
And so, you know, just doing this meditation on the energy centers, you can get guided meditations on the energy centers as well. That's another thing. So there's all different kinds of things you can do, but just commit each day to one thing, whether it's five minutes, 10 minutes, 20 minutes, you might find that you really enjoy it and you wanna keep going. Awesome. Just commit to one thing and then do something physical. And this needs no explanation. We all know what it means to exercise and work out, move your body. Okay. If this is just a walk, get out and walk. If it's 10 minutes fine, I would love to push you to 20 because 20 is kind of like a good number to just get your body really moving more is awesome. It doesn't matter. As long as you are making a commitment to do some kind of physical activity, it's always best to do it in the morning.
Doesn't have to be first thing in the morning, but sometimes in the morning is good. If you have to, if time only allows for afternoon, fine, as long as you're committing to do it and you stick to it. Okay? So those are my tips for each day. Look in the mirror and commit that you are going to put yourself first. You love yourself and you're going to put yourself first, then do one mental activity, one physical activity and boom, you are golden. Okay. What I also wanna say about the drinking and the eating. I'm not here to tell you not to drink or eat if you choose not to. That's great. Good for you. You're gonna feel 8 million times better the next day. But I mean, of course we all like to have fun on the holidays. So if you're gonna have some drinks, have some drinks, enjoy yourself, but just be conscious of how much you're drinking.
If you wanna set a little limit for yourself before you go to that party, just say, you know what, I'm gonna have two drinks, three max or one max, whatever. Everyone's gonna be different here, but set yourself a limit and say, no matter what, I'm gonna commit to myself to just keep myself in a certain boundary so that I feel good the next day, because yes, it's so fun to go out and go wild and have a great time, let loose, but you spend what a couple hours doing that. And then the next whole day, or maybe even a couple days, you're ruined, you're ruined. If you drink too much, it's just the worst. It's the worst. So just think about that before you go out, make a little, get in the mirror again and say, you know what? We're just gonna have X amount of drinks tonight.
We're gonna have a great time. I don't need extra, extra, extra drinks to make me have a great time, gonna have a great time regardless, and just make the commitment. Also with food don't you don't have to deprive yourself of all the cakes and the treats and the goodies. I mean, Christmas is full of so many good things to try. So by all means do it, but just again, make the commitment to say, I'm gonna limit myself. I'm not gonna eat a whole piece of cake. I may have a couple bites or, you know, try different things here or whatever works for you. Just remember that you're making the commitment each morning to put your health first. And if you can just mentally decide to put your health first, everything else is going to be so much more enjoyable. Your relationships are gonna feel better.
All of your, you know, your, your mental, your thoughts are gonna be more empowering. You're just gonna feel so much better about yourself. So I hope this helped, and I would love to hear it from you. If you're doing this each day, getting in that mirror, making those commitments and doing the activities. Please let me know. I would love to walk through this holiday season with you full of love and joy. And then we can look back at the end and you know, pat ourselves on the back and say like, look, I don't, I didn't gain 10 pounds. You know, I don't have dark circles under my heads that actually feel really alive. This is the best Christmas I ever had. I want that for you. That is my intention for you. All right. I love you all so much and I will catch you on next week's episode.
Thank you so much for tuning into this episode of My Inner TIger. Before you go, I have a free gift to offer you. If you're anything like me and struggle with overwhelming feelings of stress and anxiety on a regular basis, I invite you to download my Freedom In Five Formula, where you'll discover how to change your state in less than five minutes. This is my beautiful gift to you and costs $0. So head on over to myinnertiger.com/freedom to download this now. Also, if you loved what you heard today, please rate and review this podcast on iTunes so I can keep the ball rolling. And finally, if you're not already, follow me on Instagram @myinnertiger for more juicy and fun inspiration. I can't wait to connect with you there. Now my dear friend, go out into this world and create some magic. I'll catch you in the next episode.