Coping with Holiday Stress, 2: Concrete Steps to A Better Holiday

December 17th, 2018 · coping with holiday stress

Our last post explored coping with holiday stress, and expectations.  This post explores practical steps for alleviating holiday stress.

Let’s look at things pragmatically, but also from the perspective of viewing the holiday period and coping with holiday stress as an important part of our journey towards wholeness.  From this vantage point, what can we do that would assist in coping with holiday stress?

Acknowledging That the Holidays Do Create Stress

As we discussed in the previous post, it’s important for us to simply acknowledge that, for many of us, the holidays are an extremely stressful period!  Many of us face stresses during the holidays around time, money, meeting the expectations of others, family stresses and wounds — and a host of other possible factors.

We need to be up front with ourselves and acknowledge that our holiday experience is often far from perfection.  We may find much of value in the holidays, but we need to accept the places where they can make excessive or unacceptable demands upon us.

Denial: Not a Great Way of Coping with Holiday Stress

With the holidays, we can be tempted to tell ourselves that there’s nothing wrong, and that everything is just going wonderfully. Part of us may really want to channel our inner Will Ferrell or White Christmas Bing Crosby and just believe we can have a blissful stress- and fault-free Holiday Season.

This approach can end up amplifying holiday stress.  We need a more down-to-earth method of coping with holiday stress.

Accept the Demanding Parts of the Holiday Season

Acknowledging the good parts of the holidays is important, but equally important is acknowledging the difficult parts– and the parts of ourselves that have trouble with the holidays.

Here are a few key practical suggestions on how to cope with and accept all the parts of the holidays, including those that may provoke stress in us.

a)  Keep your expectations realistic.  Not everything about the holidays is going to be perfect. It’s essential to be compassionate to ourselves, recognizing that we can’t use magic to get a perfect Burl Ives “Holly Jolly Christmas”.  No one gets to have “perfect”.  Be kind to you, and enjoy the good things that really are there in the holidays,

b)    Don’t over-commit.  Getting over-tired and taking on too much leads to the opposite of a warm holiday — it can feed depression and anxiety.  Limit yourself to reasonable and enjoyable commitments.  Get others to help with tasks, if you need them

c)   Don’t overspend.  This can be a major contributor to post-holiday blues.  It’s wise to set a realistic budget, and stick to it.

d)  Don’t try to do everything at the last minute.  Thinking about your holiday plans, and getting them in place in advance can certainly save a great deal of holiday stress.

e)  Learn to Say NO!  This word may seem to have nothing to do with the “Christmas spirit”!  Yet, it has everything to do with self-acceptance, self-compassion and maintaining healthy boundaries that reduce stress.  Other people may have lots of ideas of how you should spend your time on the holidays.  Some might be very appealing.  But, ultimately, as with many things in life, it’s important to ask yourself, what do I really want?

f)   Accept people and situations for what they are.  Christmas can be difficult for many people, because they have to encounter people, often family members, with whom there is conflict, a possible history of trauma, or who are dealing with addictions, mental illness or other major problems.  It can help to try to set aside differences, where that’s possible.  In some cases, as when there has been abuse, that simply is not possible.  Then it’s essential to avoid contact by whatever means possible.

g)  Above all, acknowledge your feelings.  If you have experienced loss, separation or grief, it’s essential to recognize those feelings.  If the Holiday season is associated with bad memories, as it can be for a significant number of people, it’s important to acknowledge that, and work on good ways to take care of yourself in this season.  Whatever, you feel, it’s important to acknowledge it, not fight it.

Talking to a skilled depth psychotherapist to explore the individual value and meaning of the holiday season, and how it forms part of our journey to wholeness, can be of genuine benefit.

Brian  Collinson, Registered Psychotherapist & Jungian Psychoanalyst

PHOTOS: Jim, the Photographer (Creative Commons Licence)

© 2018 Brian Collinson, 2238 Constance Drive Oakville, Ontario (near Mississauga)

Coping with Holiday Stress: A Depth Psychotherapy Point of View

December 10th, 2018 · coping with holiday stress

We’re now right on the edge of the time when most people start coping with holiday stress.  For a great many people, this is easily the most stressful time of the year.

I’ve written a number of posts on this topic, but I think that it is still as relevant as ever!  Most depth psychotherapists are aware that this time of year is one in which they receive many contacts from potential clients, quite simply because it is such a stressful time of year for people.

There are many aspects of coping with holiday stress, so much so that it would be relatively easy to write up two dozen different blog posts on the subject — relatives, finances, time pressure — the list goes on and on.

For this post, though, I’ve decided to focus on one aspect of the holidays alone, one that is central to the impact of holiday stress.  That is the tremendous expectations that we so easily place on the Christmas / Holiday season.

The Heavy Weight of the Holidays

One of the most difficult aspects of the holidays can be the way that we carry such an idealized weight of expectation about them, which can easily lead to intense anxiety.  If you consider lists of the most popular Christmas music you’ll find titles such as the following:

• “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas”;
• “Have a Holly Jolly Christmas”;
• “It’s The Most Wonderful Time of the Year”; and,
• “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree”

If you listen to these songs, they’re no doubt charming and even beautiful.  But if you listen closely to the lyrics, you become aware of something else.  They portray an incredibly idealized picture of Christmas, with mistletoe, endless joy and a universal friendly feeling with a warm glow, with every particular detail just right.  Yeah: no pressure people — just get every detail perfect, or else “the most wonderful time of the year” won’t be what it’s supposed to be.

Needless to say, in these songs, there’s no mention of relationship difficulties.  Or financial difficulties.  Or unemployment.  Or the recent loss of a loved one.

Coping with Holiday Stress is Harder if We’re in Denial

Many of us grew up in households where Christmas was idealized to quite an extent.  Yet, perhaps without even being fully aware of it, we can easily perpetuate this attempt to reach an idealized summit of “maximum Christmas” without really ever becoming fully aware of what we’re doing.

We can keep doing that, year after year, trying to live up to some ideal perfect Christmas that never arrives for us.  This can be particularly difficult if people feel an intense amount of pressure to give their children the wonderful Christmas that they perhaps never had for themselves.  Many people are striving so hard to make Christmas right for their kids or grandkids, or other family members.  Often, that can be a source of genuine credit card bill anguish in January.

Changing Our Expectations

It may be that the best means of coping with holiday stress is to change our expectations to something more human and self-compassionate.  What would an approach to the holidays that was kinder to ourselves look like?

It might well be that the holidays would be less stressful if we could meet them with a lot more acceptance of ourselves and of our own life situations.  If we could approach them less as a perfectionistic test that we have to pass, where we and everyone we love has to somehow “make the grade” in terms of our holiday experience, and more as an opportunity to get outside of the busy stress-filled round and re-connect with our selves and our journey to wholeness.

There might be real value in approaching the holidays as a gift to us, rather than as something that we have to achieve.  Perhaps taking the time to value what we do have, and to give ourselves the holidays that we need and want, rather than the ones that meet the marketers’ expectations.  Perhaps acceptance of our lives as they have been over the last year, and seeking to be open to seeing the meaning in our own real lives might give us the holidays we genuinely want and need.

This process of self-acceptance and of uncovering the meaning in depth of our lives as they unfold is a key part of the process of  depth psychotherapy .

Brian  Collinson, Registered Psychotherapist & Jungian Psychoanalyst

PHOTOS: MollySVH (Creative Commons Licence)

© 2018 Brian Collinson, 2238 Constance Drive Oakville, Ontario (near Mississauga)