December, The End Of The World? Halley’s Comet Syndrome

December is coming and with it the annual review of our goals and dreams. How are we doing? What do our results imply? Psychologist Marcelo Ceberio invites us to think about it.

December is a key month. It sums up all the activities of the year and concentrates all the accumulated fatigue resulting from the hyperkinetic rhythm to which we are subjected.

However, in order to endure this difficult context and face our responsibilities, we regularly activate our endocrine axis and expel an extra dose of cortisol into our bloodstream.

Then, when we arrive in December, at the end of the year, as a prelude to the holidays, we feel everything in our body. Old untreated contractures, postural defects and certain symptoms of stress. These include, among others, certain intolerances, susceptibilities, anger or bad humor.

Along with these behavioral signs, there is also an urgent need to want to achieve certain things. It may be an unfinished project, abandoned to make way for another. It is quite possible that we also dropped it because of procrastination …

This whole panorama is marked by anxiety, to which is added the guilt and the consequent anguish for what we should have done and did not do. The month of December is full of anxiety.

And so, ejected by the guilt / anxiety / anguish triad, we generate a series of negative thoughts. These then reproduce like bacteria in a broth of reproach.

• “ I should have done it ”
• “ I could have started it… ”
• ” What will they think of me if I haven’t done this “
• ” I’m not good at this “
• “ I don’t have the capacity… ”

What happens is that these thoughts strongly affect our self-esteem. We are gradually disqualifying ourselves. If we don’t stop quickly, we are able to end up with an extremely distorted image of ourselves. An image in which we are vile, ugly, incapable or even zero at all.

The catastrophic cases in progress

No wonder we look at ourselves in the mirror and overindulge in carbohydrates and fats all year round. Winter chocolates, fine dinners, wines, creamy ice cream come to mind every time we look at ourselves in the mirror after a shower.

Sometimes we pray that the mirror is fogged up enough not to look at us. Other times, the towel does its job of hiding cellulite on our hips or melted abs. Likewise, we forget about medical care because we didn’t have time.

What about psychotherapy? Denial during the year has worked well for us. We covered our problems with activities, we looked for small distractions, we found momentary gratifications, rational answers or justifications that we strained over and over again to resolve conflicts.

Among the list of outstanding questions is the conversation with this friend to whom we did not dare to say what bothered us for fear of destroying the emotional bond or the conversation with this sister to whom we tried to express a lot of things that we felt that we failed to clarify for fear of his reaction. A large number of communications which we repeated and which did not succeed.

December is like a month of personal debt. Unfulfilled projects, unfinished tasks halfway through, unresolved conflicts, postponement of clinical analyzes, relegation from walking, running, gym classes… And so, we turn into victims. Our critics hit the record for the year, because the results are always negative.

December: the paradox of a hidden force

Rising from the smoldering ashes, here we are: trying to make up for lost time. We will try to solve in one month what we have not done in the previous eleven. We try, we try and… we try.

That’s why we piled up our poor program of unfinished activities, thinking we could do it all, one day, in the most total haste. This is how we entered this last month of the year, believing that on December 31 everything will stop. Like the belief that Halley’s comet was going to collide with the earth and blow it up into millions of particles.

The proof of this tacit hypothesis is expressed by language in our prototype sentence from that time: “ See you before the end of the year ”. Its subtitle could be “ We see each other before, because afterwards we will cease to exist. There will be no 2020 ”.

Thus, we sail from the gastroenterologist to colonoscopies, from gynecological analyzes, including the speculum, to clinical laboratories. We wake up on an empty stomach with the bottle containing the first morning urine. We meet with the psychologist. During the first session we regurgitate a burst of unworked pain. And the psychologist to tell us that it will take time, that he is a psychologist, not the magician David Cooperfield.

Gyms are filling up with new members. The proposal to run without control, the exercises with apparatus or the stationary bike, everything becomes good to increase the musculature and be in good shape in the 30 days of December.

However, this formula does not reduce anxiety, on the contrary, it increases it. It is based on the triad of anxiety, dread and guilt. The proposed activities generate and further stimulate this triad.

In addition, to this panorama, we must add the festivals and the difficult question: “ Who do we spend them with? “. A question that highlights family dysfunctions, the postponement of explanatory interviews to resolve intra or inter-family problems.

“ I want to spend them with Uncle André but he is fighting with my father-in-law over a money problem”. “ Aunt Martine comes alone, but she is old. Who is going to look for it? ”. “ My sisters don’t even talk to each other anymore, who are we going to spend with on the 24th? “…

It is a strategic logistics that demonstrates the set of musical chairs necessary to get out of the holidays alive. This should invite us to the following reflection:

All is not lost

In the end, this is all an illusion. The world continues to turn and dates are socio-cultural frames of reference that organize our life through certain events.

Relax. In 1910, Halley’s Comet spread terror as it was believed to collide with Earth. None of this has happened and its passage has been spotted since AD ​​374 every 70 years. This is comparable to Popeye’s spinach. Due to an error in an advertisement – in which an additional zero was added in the proportion of iron – the belief that spinach contains a lot of iron, which is false, could never be reversed.

The end of the year is a ritual of the end of one stage and the start of another. And the rituals are too important to be ruined by anxiety, guilt, and dread.

We must always take stock, but we must be kind to ourselves in appreciating the results. We did what we could to survive in an environment as entropic and messy as our context.

There are always contingencies, challenges and activities that we like more and others less. The point is, we need to value ourselves and life, validate what we have done right, and rectify carryovers and mistakes by making changes for the next cycle.

What we experience is the result of our actions, emotions and thoughts. This is how we construct reality, the pain is that later we externalize it and say: “this is the life I want to live ”.

I propose to change the sentence and take responsibility: “ This is the life that I am building ”. Being happy will always be our goal.

Finally, we take this opportunity to wish you a happy new year 2020, in search of strength, passion and respect for life in your personal resources.