You are invited to a 15 minute reset.
Overwhelmed with "magic making"? Try this fifteen minute hibernation hack and to reset your nervous system and get back on your way.
Hello from the deep trenches of Holiday Magic Making. 😵💫 Let’s talk about something you may need right now: a reset for your nervous system. A breather. A nap, perhaps. Every year, the combination of holiday excitement and end-of-year overwhelm hits me all at once during this particular week of December. I’m not going to explain why—because you already know why. (We spent forty-five minutes last night trying to chase down Santa hats for our kids to wear to “holiday hat day” at school today.) We found them. Don’t worry.
I digress. The months of May and December are just bananas for everyone. That’s why it’s important to have a toolkit to turn to when it all becomes A LOT and you need to regulate down a little. I call it a reset for my nervous system.
No one can make good decisions when they’re pulled in several directions at once. So, instead of choosing a direction to focus on (end-of-year school parties, memory-making, where’s the elf going to go tonight, all the gifts to wrap), we press pause. We pump the brakes and tend to the most important asset in all of these areas: ourselves. You are the asset. Don’t forget that.
Sometimes, our hamster-wheel minds can make us forget that we are people with needs—and agency. We can decide if and when it’s time to press pause, reset, and regroup before starting again. Hibernating (for lack of a better term) is my way of resetting my nervous system. Even if my brain doesn’t want to stop barreling through my to-do list, I make myself pause, find somewhere quiet, and reset with my eyes closed.
This change in environment immediately tells my body it can stop running the race it’s invented in my head. I like to imagine that the jumble of chaos in my brain notices my body relaxing and begins to slow its movements. It settles down and slowly starts to unravel itself while I’m resting. After 15 minutes, I’m ready to tackle things in a better way. Give it a try—I think you’ll find that a few minutes of hibernation can feel like a fire extinguisher for stress.
