Are you having post-holiday fatigue?

Feeling tired of the new year already?

Holiday breaks are meant for refreshment and recharge, yet many of us find ourselves feeling more tired, and more reluctant for work coming back from the break.

Yesterday, I was having lunch with a friend. In the conversation, we both brought up dealing with ascending road rages in the new year on our way sending kids to school - and school has only started for 3 days! One of us ran into road rage twice in a single minute - was completely following the traffic rules to go in front of the other car, triggering mad horns.

Moments like this puts us on our nerves. We both almost never, ever honk. On the other hand, we can almost feel the pain of the person in the other car. How much tension that person must be carrying in order to produce such behavior on such trivial things?

That conversation made me realize many people are starting the new year off. Coming out of a well-deserved long holiday break, they are unprepared, unmotivated for the new year. It just feels like the work is forcing up on them, the kids are forcing up on them, the traffic is forcing up on them, and ultimately, life is forcing up on them. They need a break, but wait, didn’t they just come out of break? Somehow it didn’t feel relaxing or resting enough, and they need another break to recover from the end of the previous break - This paradox can send many of us to a deep despair.

You know things are really wrong when a break does not get you rested: “How in the world can I find balance then? I’m fed up by all of these!”

I understand, it may feel like a deep well to climb out of right now. But as your brain and body start to pick up orders and targets from the new year, day by day, you will climb out of the well, and get re-established in routine. Sometimes, we feel that we’d rather continue this routine, or have shorter breaks like weekends - at least we won’t need to feel this sharp pain immediately coming out of a long break.

But the long breaks are there, and our bodies need it. How in the world are we supposed to live the long break, so coming out of it, we are re-energized and recharged, ready to tackle the demands in the next journey?

It may sound counter-intuitive, my advice to you is to - take time to feel this pain now - feel the sharp pain of coming out of a long break, facing the daily grinds unprepared, pondering the dilemma of coming out of break, needing another break to cool down.

While in this feeling, ask yourself - if you are granted another chance, another break - how would you spend it, so you have the confidence that you’ll be ready for the next period of your life?

How would you spend your holiday more consciously? What can help you maintain your consciousness during the holiday? What can help you boost your readiness?

Believe it or not, living conscious holidays can be a tougher challenge, a more advanced game, than living conscious normal days. Because, we typically have a structure in our normal days - having interaction points with other people that continuously give us feedback and shape our days into structure. When we are on holiday, all of those structures are, all of a sudden, dropped - and we are left in a void, with a tired body and an exhausted mind.

That’s our most vulnerable moment. If we do not put conscious thoughts beforehand to think about how we want to spend the holidays to be ready for the next wave of challenges, we can easily fall into our lowest denominator needs - overeating, overdrinking, oversleeping, over-entertainment, over-partying, etc.

It sounds work and undesirable. But the sharp pain you’re experiencing right now, can be the key needle-mover on making your next holiday a more enjoyable experience - that you take a little bit of effort before your holiday next time to think about how you will maintain your consciousness, safeguard your personal space, and build your readiness before the journey is up.

And it doesn’t need to be a grueling holiday. You can still enjoy nice meals, have free tickets to fun things you don’t normally do, have drinks, watch shows, etc. - but do them in the context of personal checks and control, so you’re not indulged, forced to wake up from them feeling crushed on the ramp up to a new height of challenges.

Actually, spending holidays this way can be even more fun and more enjoyable. Because everything you do, you do it with a personal feeling of things being in check and balance.

Specifically for me, I set my intention to spend my holiday consciously this time, and it showed up in 3 ways:

1. Travel plan. Before the holiday, my family suggested we go to Las Vegas. Having imagined what a Las Vegas trip might look like, I opted it out and suggested we might regret spending the end of year and beginning of a new year in a highly material place like Las Vegas. And we changed our trip plan to a more conscious and laid-back location - Portland.

2. Journal everyday. On the trip, we are tied together as a family, and I don’t have the luxury of having my own private room. Living this way for just a couple of days, I know soon my conscious thoughts would fade and I would fall to the lower threshold of the family. Journaling allowed me to maintain my personal mental space by having a conversation with myself to process the pleasant and unpleasant daily encounterings.

3. Maintain my food intake. One special threat on holidays is that I have access to many more yummy foods that I don’t have access to on a daily basis. With that, the animal nature in me tends to devour as much as I can. But I know the feeling of mental sloppiness, physical dullness and emotional guilt after a gluttony holiday. I reminded myself to not overeat in my journal; and if I overeat one night, then I would eat less the next day. With this, I was able to largely maintain my mental and physical sharpness over the holiday.

By the end of the day, it is our effort of continuously maintaining consciousness to stay ready that prevents the guilt of forgetting and scrambling from creeping in later on.