Our WebMD expert Kenneth Goodrick, PhD, associate professor of family and community medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston offers this next piece of advice for relieving stress at the holidays: "Exercise every day. That's especially important when you're eating more. 'It's hard to be sad if you're physically fit...' Goodrick says."
This must be aimed at the family members who are the beneficiaries of the meals and the festive household decorations. Because whoever is the primary provider of the meals and decorations is getting plenty of exercise. In southwestern Pennsylvania, most of the homes have a basement, a first floor and an upstairs. So in order to take care of any activity of daily living in the home, the home maker can easily get in the recommended daily allowance of 10,000 steps.
The problem with getting your exercise this way is, it doesn't seem to have the same impact on the endorphins, which help arouse the pleasure zone in our brains, as going to the gym. After two or three trips down to the laundry room and back upstairs, and the realization that you have enough clothes to cover the entire population of a small third world country, you can get a little depressed.
So you will probably need to get out of the house to get the kind of sustained exercise you need to cope with the holidays.
Another reason to get out of the house is to avoid eating up the goodies that have begun to pile up at home. If its not your own baking, its the stuff coming home from work and the plates of goodies brought by the neighbors.
The food gifting seems to operate something like a cake walk at a school festival. You cook something, drop it off at another house, they cook something, drop it off at another house, and this goes on around the community until you start re-gifting the food platters because you can't possibly eat that much and you're tired of baking when there is a perfectly good chocolate zucchini loaf sitting there in plastic wrap all tied up with a bow. Who will ever know you didn't bake it yourself? In fact you could become widely heralded as the best zuchinni bread baker in the neighborhood and you never baked a single loaf in your life - it came from aunt Martha in Punxy!
So by all means, get thyself to the gym during the holidays. Plug in your iPod, put yourself on auto-pilot and resist the temptation to make mental "to do" lists while you're on the treadmill. If you do this it will break the cycle of stress that you left back at home. You will be better equipped to deal with those food temptations and other urges - like the urge to strangle the next person who leaves their dirty sox on the bathroom floor when the laundry chute is only six inches away.
Other articles in this series:
Family holiday survival strategies part one: Simplify
Family holiday survival strategies part two: Don't spend so much
Family holiday survival strategies part three: Turn off the TV
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