Start The Year With A Social Detox

This article first appeared on QuietRev.com We don’t do all that much for the holidays. We don’t travel great distances while lugging presents or have Hollywood-level, tension-filled dinner chat with relatives who love to start loud conversations about sensitive, personal subjects. But even without the drama, I still end up exhausted from socializing by the time it’s the New Year.    My strategies for self-preservation at any celebration or family get-together are generally successful because I get some alone time by volunteering for things. I organize pickups, I run errands—anything that will give me some reprieve and silence. But all these quiet moments I take are acts of self-preservation. They are a defensive tactic to maintain the illusion of calm. This is very different from self-indulgence, where the whole purpose is to celebrate yourself. During the first week of January last year, my toddler son, while playing on my phone, bought me on Groupon a $19 day pass to a Russian bathhouse. Fortunately, he didn’t get to Living Social, or I’d be on a solo all-inclusive $13,000 trip to Papua New Guinea. Instead of returning the Groupon, I decided to trust my son’s instincts—even though his instincts at the time also included eating chalk and drawing on his face with permanent marker.    It was an odd feeling setting aside time to go to a bathhouse. When I arrived, someone pointed me in the direction of the lock...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news