Beating the Holiday Blues

For some, coming back to Shanghai after their summer holidays is an exciting time. They’re ready to get into another season, to prepare to welcome fall, to get back into their routines and reconnect with friends here. But for others it can be a time of sadness that the vacation is over. Perhaps they just had a few wonderful weeks back home enjoying time with friends and family  and now are struggling with the fact that they’ve just said good-bye to (again). Or maybe they took a trip to some exotic beautiful place and now feel tired just thinking about getting back into the grind. If you find yourself in the group that’s having a hard time getting back into the Shanghai swing of things, here’s a few tips to try out.

 

1) Give yourself time to recover. Jet lag can have more of an impact than we realize both physically and mentally, especially if it had only been a couple of weeks since we adjusted to jet-lag on the other side. In addition, a lot of intense time with family and friends back home, while enjoyable, may have left us more exhausted than we realized. This can have such an impact on our mood! So if you need to take it easy the first few days, or even first week or two, give yourself time to do that.

 

2) Make a list of what you’re grateful for about your life here. Gratitude lists are a great way to boost our mood at any time. As humans we can have a tendency to focus a lot on what we don’t have or comparing to others whose lives are very different from ours or who have more than us. This is natural, however if we spend too much time on these thoughts, for example, comparing our lives to friends back home and only paying attention to what we like or miss about their lifestyle, then it will really bring us down. Spending some time writing about what we’re grateful for in our lives here brings our attention back to all of the positives we may have been ignoring. And I bet there are more than you think!

 

3) Reconnect with Shanghai friends. Spending some time with the people you care about here is another way to solidly get your head back into the Shanghai game. Of course there’s no replacing old friends back home but being with newer friends can be a lot of fun as well! And weather or not you feel the energy for it at first, as I acknowledge it can be patently hard to call people up when we’re feeling down, connection with others is one of the best way to bring up our mood.

 

4) Try something new – The start of fall can be a great time to experiment with putting new things into your schedule. Whether it’s a new type of exercise, an activity group or going to see different parts of Shanghai, this can invigorate a sense of adventure about being here and help to reconnect with the excitement you may have felt when you first moved here. Plus, if it’s something that involves getting outside or moving your body, there’s loads of added benefits with that!

 

5) And above all, be gentle with yourself. We all have ups and downs: it isn’t just Shanghai: it’s life! Sometimes we can judge or be impatient with ourselves when this is happening, but sometimes, paradoxical though it may sound, if we can have compassion for our own experience, rather than judging ourselves for how we’re feeling, it can help our blues begin to fade.

Christine Forte
SIMHA President