I have my ugly holiday sweater on and I'm here to speak with you about navigating depression during the holiday season.

My name is Kimberly Quinlan. I'm an anxiety specialist and I have seen a huge increase in my clients reporting an uptick in depression over the holiday season.

If you're someone who's experiencing more depression or more debilitating depression over the holidays,

you're absolutely not alone.

Today, I'm here to talk with you about how to identify triggers for depression,

how we can use some effective skills to help you manage that depression as it shows up,

how you might set some boundaries with family members and friends during the holiday season,

and we're also going to talk about some creative ways that you can really take care of yourself.

So if this would be helpful for you, let's go.

Okay, so with all the holiday cheer and tradition and events and parties,

sometimes alongside that comes depression. There is a lot of pressure put on us during the

holidays to be cheery and happy and in the mood for all the

celebrations but for many reasons you may not be in the mood to celebrate the holidays and so

what I want to first really bring home here is you're allowed to reconfigure what the holidays mean to you. It might look like

social media wants you to make it look like. You're going to in this season have to readjust that

to what works for you and what works for your mental health. So the first thing I want to say is let's just take all of the

expectations on how you are going to show up, how you are going to cope. Let's take the expectations

on how you're supposed to do this holiday season and check in with what feels right to you.

And I'm going to give you a ton of ideas on how you might do that.

Now, before we get into it, let's just take a look at the most common triggers people experience

around the holidays.

The one that I see the most is grief.

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