What is your plan for the holiday season? What I actually mean is, how do you plan to survive? If you listen to the way many people talk about the holiday season, it can sound more like they are going into battle. We think in terms of everything we have to, should do, or must do, and often we complain about it. The thought of everything that we have to do is burdensome, make us feel powerless, and highlights the possibility of failure. When our perception is filtered in these ways we will experience stress. Unfortunately, even though we intuitively know that we are stressed, and that our perspective is a piece of that stress, most of us will do nothing about it – except charge full steam ahead.
The fight or flight response is the body’s adaptive response to a threatening situation and functions to help promote the survival of the organism. Physiological changes such as the release of stress hormones, digestive changes, and cognitive processing occur. These responses are experienced so that we are able to fight for our life or flee away from the stressor. But what about when you can’t just punch the Holiday in the nose, or run away completely? Then you can end up with chronic activation of your hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, which you have probably already guessed is not a good thing. Chronic elevation of stress responses is associated with sleep disturbance, short-term memory loss, autoimmune and cardiovascular disease, obesity, and increased abdominal fat. ( It’s not just the cookies and eggnog! ) Chronic stress can even result in changes to the circadian rhythms of our bodies (the system that regulates things like our sleep-wake cycle). When a parent’s system is elevated, they are also less consistent in parenting styles, make poorer health choices, and experience more behavioral challenges with their kids. So, the kicker is that as we become more stressed, our kids are more difficult to manage, we take less care of ourselves, and we behave badly. These secondary effects of stress add up quickly. Like the philosophical question of when does a collection of individual grains of sand become a pile of sand? When do the ‘to-dos’ of it all become too much? It’s a personal question.
If there is such a thing as one size fits all advice it is this… slow down!You don’t have to do it all. Actually, you really don’t have to and not in a colloquial way. The more you agree to the bake sale, the cards for 100 people you don’t actually know, the perfect décor, the extra side dishes, a few extra presents, the perfectly cleaned house – the more you are actually agreeing to being run down. The less room we leave for laughter, fun, peace, and connection with others. Stop right now and take out something to write on. Draw a circle, and then divide it up into pieces of pie. In each piece write the name of things you value, things that you think truly matter to you. Somethings can take up more than one piece. Activity outside, connection with family, rituals (think volunteering, specific meals, religious participation, outings) and on and on. Be specific so that the things that you identify are more real. Instead of saying ‘family’ think about what you value about the family, such as time together. Now flip the page over, draw another circle, and pieces of pie, now write out how you actually spend your time most holiday season. The discrepancy will give you a starting place for how to trim it down and take things off your to-do list. If you absolutely value spending time with family, but spend hours on hours decorating your house and writing out cards, then you are misguiding your energy. When our values and efforts don’t line up it means that we won’t be as likely to find our activity meaningful, which leads us up burnout mountain. When value and activity line up, then we often describe something called “flow”, which is timelessness. Of course, it will not line up perfectly, nor should it. The goal is not to live a completely self-serving holiday. It is about finding a balance. And my experience is that most of us, especially but not exclusively women, get this balance wrong. We are too geared to doing what we think will serve others, and on top of that have heard the message from many psychologist about the importance of self-care, so we try to cram that on top of it all. But we can’t keep piling on more. This holiday, give yourself and your loved ones permission to be balanced, not to try and do it all, and instead to try and enjoy it all (or at least the majority of it).
Carmen Dodsworth, BSc., MA.
Registered Psychologist