Let's say you're having an acute panic moment in the kitchen, preparing a holiday dinner. What do you do?
The first thing to remember is that panic-level anxiety never killed anyone. If you have heart disease it might trigger a heart attack, but that's a different issue. In and of itself, panic-level anxiety never killed anyone. So the first thing to do is remind yourself, "This is going to be over. No matter how bad I'm feeling right now, this is going to be over in five minutes or twenty minutes or half an hour."
Once you've calmed down, the next thing to do is figure out what precipitated the panic, and see if you can prevent it from happening again. The main thing is to remind yourself that it will pass. If you need to, go find a room where you can be alone to calm down. And get a hold of yourself well enough so that you don't do something you will regret in the meantime.
Like wield the ham knife.
Exactly. Something that would really give you a reason to have the blues down the line.
Also, it's important to remember that you can "just say no" to holiday events. If you have three parties to go to in a night, but it's going to completely stress you out to go to all three, then maybe you should say no to one or even two of them. The little bit of anxiety you feel in the five- to ten-minutes it takes to make that decision could save you from a four-hour anxiety-filled evening. Being kind of brutal about exercising control over your own time is worthwhile during the holidays.
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