The Truth About December No One Wants to Admit
Everyone’s Just Trying to Feel Something Again
The truth about December? Everyone’s just trying to feel something again.
We’ve been numb for months, scrolling, striving, surviving. Keeping the world running while quietly losing the thread of our own aliveness. And then December arrives, with its cinnamon and sparkle, promising that if we do enough, buy enough, host enough, sparkle enough, maybe we’ll feel something again.
We hang lights hoping they’ll switch something on inside of us. We wrap gifts trying to rewrap wonder. We fill every corner with music so we don’t have to face the quiet.
But the ache we feel isn’t because we’re doing the wrong things. It’s because we’ve been running on empty for too long to feel anything at all.
The Emotional Hangover
Most of us entered this season already maxed out.
Our nervous systems have been operating at a hum of stress for so long
that joy now registers as pressure.
The same part of the brain that processes delight also tracks danger.
When we live in chronic overdrive, those wires cross.
So even beauty feels like too much.
Even rest feels unsafe.
That’s why joy feels slippery,
why we keep chasing it instead of receiving it.
It’s not that we’ve lost our capacity for feeling.
It’s that our attention has been hijacked by survival.
We can’t feel depth when our energy is diffused across a thousand tabs of urgency.
If this resonates, I created a companion resource ‘The Honest Gratitude Guide: Finding What’s Real When Life Feels Heavy’.
The Culture of Over-Stimulation
We mistake stimulation for emotion. The scroll, the sale, the sparkle, each one gives us a micro-hit of dopamine. But it fades before we can absorb it.
That’s why we go back for more, not out of greed necessarily, but out of hunger.
We’ve built a world that rewards intensity over intimacy. We don’t need more things to feel. We need more space to feel them.
Real presence requires regulation.
The body has to believe it’s safe before the mind can settle enough to notice beauty.
That’s what focus actually is, not the ability to push harder, but the capacity to soften enough to stay.
When your breathing slows, when your eyes rest on one thing without darting away,
when you let silence stretch past the first wave of discomfort, your nervous system re-enters safety. And in that safety, feeling returns.
December isn’t about rekindling joy. It’s about relearning how to stand still long enough to notice the way light hits a window. To taste your coffee instead of scrolling through it. To let a song move through you instead of playing it in the background of multitasking.
Focus isn’t about doing one thing efficiently. It’s about being in one thing fully. It’s the bridge back to feeling. So if you find yourself disconnected this December,
don’t add more to your list. Subtract. Turn down the volume. Light one candle. Take one breath long enough to notice the sound of it.
You don’t have to force joy to return. You just have to stop running long enough to let it find you.
With you in this.
Love,
Zelana
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