Dealing with Holiday Stress Workshop

Design your game plan to deal with stress this holiday season, that works for your neurowonderful brain and individual needs.

Dealing with Holiday Stress Workshop

Available on-demand

Learn healthier ways to deal with stress this holiday season, that work for your neurowonderful brain and individual needs.

Designed for and from an Autistic/AuDHD perspective.

This is the recorded version of the live workshop in December of 2024. So it’s available to you now. This on-demand version includes the video recording, audio-only recording, full transcript with slides included, slides, and all workshop materials and bonuses.

What does the workshop cover?

The holidays are a stressful time for a lot of people, and when you’re neurodivergent, (and have complicated or difficult relationships with family), things can get even more stressful.

How do you usually deal with stress? Do you cave in to people’s expectations? Shut down? Meltdown? Explode? Fume or rant about all the problems in the systems and how the world doesn’t understand us? Would you like healthier options?

Would you like those options to specifically come from, and be for, an Autistic/AuDHD perspective?

In this 1 hour 45 minute workshop, you’ll learn:

  • Common Autistic and AuDHD stressors.
  • How to identify your personal stressors.
  • 3 Principles for healthy stress management.
  • The framework: 3 types of unhealthy coping strategies. (Identify which one you tend towards.)
  • The course correction for each strategy.
  • How to adjust your plan as needed. 
  • 40 minutes of Q&A with real Autistics/AuDHDers applying this to their real holidays.

Bonus content

  • Autistic Holiday Stressors Action Plan PDF
  • Extensive, categorized list of common Autistic holiday stressors, so you can identify the specific things at a granular level (the first step to coming up with a plan to deal with them).
  • Is it rude for Autistics to spend holidays in their room?

What stresses is this addressing?

Social

  • Complicated family relationships and tensions
  • Expectations to enjoy family time, lack of personal space during visits
  • Long periods of socializing, and masking
  • Gift-giving stress, financial pressures, mass consumerism
  • Anxiety
  • Grief

Sensory

  • The interpersonal components of sensory stuff: asking people to adjust to your sensory needs.
  • Noise
  • Lights
  • Music
  • Crowded spaces
  • Fireworks
  • Disrupted routines
  • Navigating food-related social expectations, esp. with an ED

Expectations

  • Emotional exhaustion
  • End-of-year work stress
  • Dealing with religious aspects, esp. when not religious, or preferring non-traditional celebrations
  • New year’s plans
  • Making resolutions

How can this cover so many kinds of stress?

As much as I wish we could address every holiday stress individually, that would take days.

Instead, this is presenting a framework for making decisions around almost any stress, so you can make your own game plan for your situation and needs.

This also gives you the power to adapt your plan as the situation changes!

This is the recorded version of the live workshop in December of 2024. So it’s available to you now. This on-demand version includes the video recording, audio-only recording, full transcript with slides included, slides, and all workshop materials and bonuses.

Will this get rid of all my stress this holiday season?

I want to be realistic, so the honest answer is no. And I wouldn’t trust any short workshop that makes that promise.

There’s probably a number of interrelated, competing, and conflicting issues, people, and values that are causing your stress.

A few explanations and strategies aren’t going to solve all of that. But it can make a start. Or add on to what you’re already doing.

I’d like to offer a way to think about stress, the relationships involved, and the competing values, that clarifies what’s really going on, so that you can make decisions that are more in alignment with what you actually want, and that gives you permission to pursue that.

Ready to dive in?

Is this the right time for you to get a handle on internalized ableism?   

Dealing with Holiday Stress Workshop

Learn healthier ways to deal with stress this holiday season, that work for your neurowonderful brain and individual needs.

When is it?

This is the recorded version of the live workshop in December of 2024. So it’s available to you now.

This gives you the freedom to:
    • Follow along at your own pace.
    • Rewind and re-watch as much as needed.
    • Pause to take notes.
    • Engage on your own schedule, as your energy allows.
    • Not feel pressured to participate in a live meeting.
    • Not need to take it all in at once, avoiding overwhelm.
    • Reduce demand avoidance of learning on someone else’s schedule.
    • Come back months later for a refresher.

So when is it?
It's ready when you are.

FAQs

This is the recorded version of the live workshop in December of 2024. So it’s available to you now.

This gives you the freedom to:
    • Follow along at your own pace.
    • Rewind and re-watch as much as needed.
    • Pause to take notes.
    • Engage on your own schedule, as your energy allows.
    • Not feel pressured to participate in a live meeting.
    • Not need to take it all in at once, avoiding overwhelm.
    • Reduce demand avoidance of learning on someone else’s schedule.
    • Come back months later for a refresher.

There are a variety of accommodations built into the course for various learning styles:

  • Human edited transcripts (no funky AI typos) of every video.
  • Transcripts include the slides so you don’t have to jump back-and-forth between files.
  • Audio only files if you prefer to just listen.
  • Table of contents built into each video to easily jump to topics of interest.
  • The video player remembers where you leave off so you don’t have to find your spot.
  • Bonus pages with clear explanations of important concepts for easy reference.
  • The course website is WCAG compliant. 

This is an inclusive, trauma-sensitive, and BS-free zone.*

ALL are welcome, including cis, trans, nonbinary, a-gender, gender expansive, and other LGBTQIA+ humans.

The language used throughout the course is intentionally gender inclusive.

*The presenter is trauma-informed and trauma-sensitive, but you are the best judge of what you can handle at the moment. Please take care of yourself.

You will have access for at least a full year (and longer if I renew my subscription to the course platform, which is likely).

I don’t want to promise “lifetime access”—(Whose lifetime, yours or mine? Or the lifetime of the website? All of which could be misleading.)—which is why I’m intentionally cautious about promising too much, but it is my intention to keep this available for the foreseeable future.

I want to be realistic, so the honest answer is no. And I wouldn’t trust any short workshop that makes that promise.

There’s probably a number of interrelated, competing, and conflicting issues, people, and values that are causing your stress.

A few explanations and strategies aren’t going to solve all of that. But it can make a start. Or add on to what you’re already doing.

I’d like to offer a way to think about stress, the relationships involved, and the competing values, that clarifies what’s really going on, so that you can make decisions that are more in alignment with what you actually want, and that gives you permission to pursue that.

Yes!

The framework and techniques I present aren’t exclusive to Autistic and neurodivergent brains, so if my approach resonates with you, and you’re fine spending time with Autistic adults, feel free to sign up, even if you’re not Autistic (or aren’t sure).

For example, this may also be a good fit for HSPs. 

Is this what you've been looking for?

What could you do if internalized ableism  didn’t get in the way?

Dealing with Holiday Stress Workshop

Learn healthier ways to deal with stress this holiday season, that work for your neurowonderful brain and individual needs.
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