You work so hard all year, knowing that your Christmas break is that one special holiday you can look forward to at the end. You plan to do so much, yet somehow every year you spend two-thirds of your break listless, exhausted, and crashed out, trying to ‘recover’. Before you know it, January welcomes you back to work, and the countdown jokingly begins again.
Why is it that the last sprint across the line for the month of December leaves you more exhausted than the previous 11 months of the year? I feel many of us can relate to this, but we rarely have the time to prepare to avoid this trap – despite the fact that it comes around year after year.
It’s easy to underestimate the mental and physical load of the month of December. The entire year has been building up to this finale, and just like the last song of any playlist is the loudest, and the last set of any exercise has you thinking, why did I even decide to get fit?, the whole thing crashes around your ears, and you are toast. The result? You end up wasting away your valuable annual leave trying to just return to baseline and get back on your feet.
I can say this because this has been me for as long as I can remember. After throwing all my energy into teaching LES MILLS classes and shaping new workouts, I would literally crash into Christmas, totally burnt out physically and mentally. I would hibernate away on my own for 10 days, not seeing anyone from Christmas Eve through the New Year. Shattered from all the ‘peopling’ (I don't think this is a word, but it's one of mine I like to use) throughout the year. I was broken, pasting a smile on my face to keep up appearances so others wouldn't worry about me. I wasn't worried about me, as all I needed was a break.
Turns out it was a ‘plan’ that I needed, not a break.
I only figured this out during the year of The Renovation of Rach. This is when I built out 12 months with as much balance across work, rest, and play.
Here are some learnings you may find useful:
Create a wind-down week
Wind-down week sits immediately before your annual leave begins. Starting this week, plan backwards from your deadlines to include a wind-down week so that all your commitments, meetings, workouts, and deadlines sit earlier, rather than later. Your projects need to be sitting in a place where they can be left alone mentally, where you feel at minimum satisfied and at best pleased with what you have achieved.
Focus on the wins
A health hack to happy hormones is to win or achieve something – working towards something meaningful to you that you can celebrate with your team at the end of the year. If there isn't anything big that works for you or your team, dream something up that sounds doable (the keyword here is 'doable') and get it completed just in time, so you all feel the sensation of completion and winning.
Walk away from worries
Letting yourself off the hook once and doing that extra bit of work because you love it and it's worth it in the long run is one thing. However, if you truly want to give yourself the full recharge you deserve, then you have to walk the talk and walk away from the worry. The mental residual that resides (ooooh, that's a tongue twister) in your head, slowly draining away in the back of your mind, will leave you in low-power mode over the break. When you tell yourself all that can be done has been done, and then you close that laptop or mental folder, you allow other tabs to open up where your PFC (prefrontal cortex) can increase its bandwidth and do more things with friends and family.
It's okay to feel useless ...
It's a given that during flu season/winter or shoulder seasons, you know you are going to need to take a break to get back on your feet. Life has seasons too, and sometimes you will find yourself in a season of struggle where ‘Life be life’ing' (as the kids say these days). The next minute, there’s some family drama, an economic or environmental disaster, or a dose of Monday’itus – when it’s all too much, and you just wake up with the patience of a perimenopausal person / two or twelve-year-old (yes three phases of life where the norm is replaced by chaos). You fall apart in the blink of an eye and you cannot ‘people’ positively. Take the sick day. There are so many ways we feel useless, and all of them are valid. When you power through all year, your body will pull the plug the moment you finally stop – and it will give you a reason to crash into Christmas!
The F.R.E.S.H value proposition of winding down – so you can start the New Year fresh
F - Fully charged
R - Ready to run with work, rest, and play
E - Excited about the year’s potential for yourself and your community
S - Set up for success – not stress
H - Healthy mentally and physically
Dream
The grandest destinations start with a dream, and then we wake up. Some of us tell our friends about that crazy dream, and even fewer of us do something to bring it to life.
Just by telling someone about your dream or plan, you are one step closer to making it real.
Do something today for yourself, not for any reason other than to take care of yourself today, so you can be the better version of yourself tomorrow.
Pssst…
Rach definitely deserves a break. Not only has she been creating LES MILLS workouts, she’s been traveling the world to LES MILLS LIVE events all over the globe. And, in the past few months, she’s been cooking up something fun for the LES MILLS+ community. Watch this space.
