TECCanada

Holiday Travel: Recognize the Stressors

Larry Ohlhauser, Speaker Visit Website

This is the season to be jolly and that includes plans to spend time with family, relatives, friends or head somewhere warm and sunny. All this sounds exciting, however, there is the problem of getting there! This is not the season where ground or air travel is without pain. Weather seems to have its own rules that affects driving conditions and can play havoc with flight schedules. 

Waiting patiently for my delayed flight out of Chicago’s O’Hare airport during a nasty mid west winter storm gave me ample opportunity to confirm how travel can challenge our physical, relational and financial wellness.

Here are some survival tips for a healthy happy holiday.

Physical wellness
Eating and drinking alcohol can be mindless rather than mindful. Starving for nutrition or just responding to the nagging from our children seems to place us in this mindless mode. Observing other stranded travelers, it was easy to see how most people went for comfort food, rather than nutritious food, to deal with their stress. 

At your destination, enjoy the hospitality and learn from these ideas. One recent study found that when individuals had to walk more than six feet to get food or alcohol, they ate and drank less. So instead of hunkering around the big screen with food and drink within reach, have them on a table that requires individuals to get up and get it. 

Don’t refill your glass or remove the empty cans. Leave them on the table near you, the reminder of how much you’re consuming helps you indulge with more mindfulness, as you get up and pour a new glass or get a new can of your favourite drink. A good bench mark, even for the holidays, is no more than five drinks of alcohol on one occasion in a month. 

The average North American gains five to eight pounds between Thanksgiving and Christmas Holidays. Eating mindfully will help you maintain a healthy weight and appreciate great food and wine.

Relational wellness
Nothing appears to bring out the best or worst in an individual then traveling as a group. Holiday travel seems synonymous for “over booking,” airplanes, delays, and people always running to catch their flight. Disagreements are inevitable and conflict management skills are at a premium. 

I observed some very interesting approaches to conflict during my delay at O’Hare airport. With the denial or avoidance approach, people chose to let issues go unresolved than risk having to deal with a potentially messy situation. This led the other half of the couple to surrender and simply give in no matter what in order to “keep the peace.”

The most common approach I observed was escalation, people unleashing their emotions – anger or hurt in an overblown and unwarranted fashion in an attempt to intimidate, manipulate or even provoke the other person enough to dominate them or make them back down. We can’t control about 90 percent of what happens to us, but we have 100 percent control over our response.

“We see the world not as it is but as we are.”

This is a good time to clean up our preconceived notions and question some of our strongly held beliefs that may be impacting our relational wellness. Empathy is the ability to think or even feel from another’s vantage point. If we have a large capacity for empathy, we’ll be able to readily anticipate and gauge how our word and actions will impact those around us.

Relationships can alter or even dissolve when empathy is derailed; we stop caring or feeling cared for. While empathy elicits positive behaviour, it can also transform destructive impulses. How open are your eyes to those around you?

At O’Hare, the traveler who was empathetic with the stressed out gate-agent seemed to enjoy better travel results than those whose resolution skills were confrontational and escalated the stress. Happiness and unhappiness are a matter of choice.

Joy and pleasure add to making life meaningful and fulfilling. 

Financial wellness
A common source of stress, anxiety and depression are precipitated by financial matters. What is it about seasonal sales that cause us to “lose our minds,” buying things we would never consider purchasing at other times. I think it is the pervasive social pressure to consume. Deciding before hand what a budget for spending would look like will ease the pain of the credit card statement arriving in the snow storm you experienced two weeks after you got home from your holidays.

Avoid multiple visits to the ATM; make one trip and limit your spending to the cash in your pocket.

Capacity for leisure is a major factor in your wellness and perhaps the best antidote and preventative measure for stress. Holiday travel is just a break from making a living or did yours help you to get a life?