SUMMARY: I had so many people asking questions about how to manage holiday anxiety and stress that I decided to do an entire podcast on this.  This is part 1 of a 2-part podcast Q&A. In This Episode: Q&A from this episode include How do I enjoy the holidays? How do I let go of the last Christmas? How do I survive the Holiday blues? How do I survive the holidays? How do I manage social anxiety over the holidays? How do I manage holiday travel anxiety? How to manage the financial stress of the holidays? Mental Health Holiday gift guide? How do I let go of my holiday expectations? Links To Things I Talk About: ERP School: https://www.cbtschool.com/erp-school-lp Episode Sponsor: This episode of Your Anxiety Toolkit is brought to you by CBTschool.com.  CBTschool.com is a psychoeducation platform that provides courses and other online resources for people with anxiety, OCD, and Body-Focused Repetitive Behaviors.  Go to cbtschool.com to learn more. Spread the love! Everyone needs tools for anxiety... If you like Your Anxiety Toolkit Podcast, visit YOUR ANXIETY TOOLKIT PODCAST to subscribe free and you'll never miss an episode. And if you really like Your Anxiety Toolkit, I'd appreciate you telling a friend (maybe even two). EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION This is Your Anxiety Toolkit - Episode 214. Welcome back, everybody. We are approaching the holiday season. In fact, some of you may already be in the holiday season. And if that is so, I wish you nothing but joy and peace and fulfillment. I really do. I hope you have moments of elated joy. Now, while that is my wish and my intention for you, I also know that the holidays can be pretty dang hard. It is anxiety-provoking for the best of people, let alone if you’re already struggling with a mental illness or an anxiety disorder, or you’re struggling with anything really. It can be so incredibly difficult. So, what I wanted to do is answer some of your questions. So, what I did is I went on to Instagram and I asked my community: What are your questions? What do you need help with over the holidays? And they’ve given me a bunch of things to talk about, and I’m going to go through each and every one of them. Now, this is actually a two-part podcast. This week I’m answering general questions about managing anxiety throughout the holiday season, or just general stresses. And next week, we’re talking about setting boundaries during the holidays with family and loved ones. Setting boundaries. However, the truth is we don’t even need to make this specific to the holidays. This is for everybody at any time. So, if you’re listening to this and it’s not the holidays, it’d be probably helpful to listen to it at any point in time. Before we do that, I wanted to share with you the “I did a hard thing.” The “I did a hard thing” segment is where people write in and they share what hard things that they have been doing. This is a really important part of the podcast. If you’re new, or if you’re being with us for a while, I really want to stress the purpose of this podcast is to inspire you, is to help you feel like you’re on the right track, that you’re not alarmed, that people are doing the hard thing and I want you to know how they’re doing the hard thing. So, I’m going to share, this one is from Marilee and she says: “I’m facing the fear right now. We moved two weeks ago. Today when I was getting dressed and picked up my socks that were laying on the floor in the living room, a silverfish crawled out from where it was laying. I hate them. It’s probably a phobia. I compulsively checked and cleaned in the previous place to get rid of them. I feel them all over my body.” As you’re listening folks, you’re probably feeling a little itchy and scratchy, I’m sure. “I imagine them everywhere and anywhere. My hard thing is to feel these feelings. I’m going to give myself permission to feel anxious and freak out about it, to do the reasonable thing and buy lavender scented sachets and place around the house, to not