How to Beat Holiday Stress and Find the “Happy” in Happy Holidays

Let’s welcome Abby Seixas back for her second Holiday guest post! Be sure to read her previous post, “The Present of Practicing Presence.”

What do you think the primary cause of stress is for women during the holidays? Too many relatives to cook for? Trying to find enough time between the demands of work and family, to shop for gifts? Juggling the needs of kids and parents (in-laws too?) during school vacation?

Nope. The single greatest cause of stress during the holidays is our own overly high expectations. Think about it. A lot of our stress gets created in the gap between how we want things to be (or how we think they should be), and how they actually are. For example, you may have a standard of “the perfect holiday dinner.”  If you hold too tightly to this standard or expectation, then when the turkey is slightly overcooked or the whipped cream is a little runny, your stress increases, not because the food isn’t the best you’ve ever made, but because of the gap between how it is and how you think it should be.  With the same food cooked the same way, and a more lightly held expectation, you have less stress.

If you have a perfectionist streak, it can easily be magnified during the holidays–trying to create the perfect Christmas dinner, find the perfect gift for people you care about, or decorate your home perfectly beautifully. The good news is,that it is possible to tame the unrealistically high standards that cause stress. Look for ways to remove the sense of life-or-death urgency from things that really aren’t matters of life or death. Here are some simple ways to get started:

1.) Try HUMOR:  See if you can laugh at your own imperfection.  Imagine how you would look/what you would say in a cartoon, sitcom, comic strip. If Lucy in I Love Lucy had overcooked the turkey, wouldn’t we see her imperfection as endearingly funny?

2.) Try EXPANDING TIME: Ask yourself, “Will it matter 10 years from now that the turkey was overcooked?”

3.) Try EXPANDING SPACE: Look, even briefly, at a star-filled night sky, or the vastness of an ocean or prairie or clear blue sky. See if it helps you put the fact that the turkey was overcooked into perspective.

4.) Try coming up with A REMINDER PHRASE that can help you lighten up, such as Rick Carlson’s, “Don’t sweat the small stuff––and it’s all small stuff.”  Or, “Que sera sera; whatever will be will be.” Use anything that will remind you that the world won’t end if the turkey is overcooked.

5.) Try asking yourself “WHO SAYS?” With a little introspection, you might trace your self-expectation to someone else (mom? dad? a family tradition?) or simply to your own internal perfectionist. Even if you can’t identify the source of your expectation, asking the question provides a pause and the possibility of choice about whether that expectation is important to you.

The most valuable effect of taming your self-expectations during the holidays (not to mention any other time of year, for that matter) is that you might find you can actually enjoy some of the season, and rather than spending January recovering, you can enter the new year relaxed and open to what 2012 will bring.

Happy Holidays!

Abby Seixas is a psychotherapist in private practice and author of Finding the Deep River Within: A Woman’s Guide to Recovering Balance and Meaning in Everyday Life (Jossey-Bass/Wiley).  Visit Abby at her website, and on Facebook  or Twitter.

Want to dive deeper?  Join Abby for a Deep River retreat at Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health, Jan. 29-Feb.1, 2012.