Right now, many of us are feeling pressure to get a lot of priorities handled before the year ends. Between the stress of finalizing next year’s budgets, year-end performance reviews, and holiday preparations, December can be a pretty intense month.

To help you navigate this time, we’d like to share a few articles we are finding helpful:

• “Stress is natural,” says Alia Crum, an assistant professor of psychology at Stanford. “Stress is inevitable when you’re living a life that’s connected with things you care about. And learning how to embrace it, learning how to work with it is really what helps us thrive and grow and perform at our highest level.”
• Marcus Buckingham studies joy at work at the ADP Research Institute. He found that the two biggest predictors of thriving at work, despite the stress, are 1) feeling like someone cares about you at work and 2) having the chance to do something you love every day at work. Buckingham makes the point that most of us have the ability to adjust our work activities to align more with work we love.
• According to research from the Yale School of Management and the University of Washington, leaders who prioritize building personal connections with their teammates improve both employee happiness at work and also business outcomes.
• A similar focus on positive relationships surfaced in a recent study around happiness, in which investing in relationships with family and friends was the first of ten actions found to increase happiness.
• And finally, one of the most effective ways to navigate stress and lead a healthy and positive life is to practice gratitude.

We hope you navigate these next few weeks as well as you can, enjoy some time off, and have a happy holiday season.

The Boda team