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While you’re shopping for others this season, add these ‘just-for-you’ items to your list, too. Your RA will thank you for the tips in this HealthCentral column:

“AH, THE HOLIDAYS! It’s a season of overdoing simply everything—eating, socializing, shopping, decorating, cooking, baking, wrapping, and all the rest. Oh, and flaring, too. Due to the relentless holiday pace, we will also be overdoing our rheumatoid arthritis (RA) flares, which means more pain and more fatigue. During this time of year, we are often focused on making the holidays magical for the people we love, but it’s important to remember that you can’t give to others when you’re on the couch, walloped by your annual holiday flare. That’s a recipe for wrecking your own joy in the season, as well as your health. So, let’s talk about how you can take care of yourself during the holidays, body and soul.

Before I start throwing around advice like festive tinsel, I should be transparent. The suggestions I’m sharing in this column are based on hard-won experience of overdoing everything related to Christmas. It’s my favorite holiday and in the past, I usually got very caught up in the exuberance of the season, much to my detriment. Inevitably, I’d be miserable once the holidays actually arrived and I am not alone. Stress is a common trigger for increased symptoms of inflammation and pain, that is, flares. In fact, 86% of people with living with RA say that stress tops their list of flare triggers. It took years before I realized that good stress—say the excitement of gathering the whole family for a meal or going on a trip— counts as much as negative stress in terms of the effect it has on my body and mental health. Once this fact clicked into my mind, I started seeing the holidays in a different light. I used that knowledge to write my book Chronic Christmas: Surviving the Holidays with Chronic Illness to share the lessons with others who have RA and the people who love them.

These days I approach the holidays with a different perspective, one grounded in a very basic question that I’ve shamelessly stolen from Marie Kondo: “Does it bring you joy?” This approach is a gift to myself, guiding my decisions on what I do during the holidays. By putting holiday joy first, I am better able to narrow my focus to the few things that mean the most, as well as slow down enough to really connect to the spirit and purpose of the season. This is the best gift possible, one that protects both my physical and mental health.

The following is a list of gifts I try to give myself every year when the holidays roll around and threaten to pile on stress. I think if you give some of these to yourself, you might find more joy this season, too.”

Read my RA holiday self-care tips on HealthCentral.