Advice for Managing Holiday Stress

Ah, the holidays… the most wonderfully stressful time of the year.

I’ve been getting a lot of newsletter readers writing in asking for tips on managing holiday stress, so I’ve added a few more tips to my previous advice about how to manage holiday stress.

1. Don’t Pre-Stress

The holidays are always going to be stressful. But they often end up more stressful than they need to be because of something I call pre-stressing.

Pre-stressing is when you worry about how stressed you’re going to be in the future.

The problem with pre-stressing is that it quickly morphs into a vicious cycle of ever-increasing stress, anxiety, and exhaustion:

STAGE 1: Feel stressed and start to worry
STAGE 2: Worrying generates anxiety
STAGE 3: Anxiety increases stress levels and the cycle repeats

For example:

You feel stressed about traveling and start worrying about your flight getting delayed and how miserable and stressful it will be sitting in an airport for hours with two little kids.
Worrying about airport stress makes you feel increasingly anxious about your upcoming travel plans.
The longer you’re anxious about future stress, the more stressed you feel in the present, which leads to more worrying and the cycle continues, generating more and more stress each time.

The key to breaking out of this holiday doom loop is to look more closely at the transition from Stage 1 to Stage 2; specifically, it’s about realizing that worry is actually a coping mechanism for stress.

Even though worry makes you more stressed in the long-run by increasing your anxiety, in the very short term, worry gives you the illusion of control. Because worry is so similar to problem solving, it feels productive, and because it feels productive, it gives a false sense that doing it will alleviate the stress in the moment.

So, the key to breaking the cycle is to get better at quickly realizing when you’re stressed, and instead of using an unhelpful coping mechanism like worry, substitute a healthier activity—ideally one that reduces your stress in the long-run rather than raising it.

Of course, don’t worry so much is a famously difficult bit of advice to follow through on. So, I have two suggestions for how to get better at worrying less:

Schedule time to worry on purpose. It’s counterintuitive, but if you set aside 10 minutes a day during the holidays to worry on purpose and on paper, you’ll have a much easier time letting them go throughout the day. You can learn more about scheduled worry here →
Walk it off. Worry gives you short term relief at the expense of long-term stress. But there are ways of responding to stress that not only help you relax in the moment but also decrease stress long-term. And one of the best is walking. I know, it sounds simplistic and boring. But here’s the thing: a lot of people know that getting a little more exercise during the holidays would help their stress, but because they feel so busy, they don’t make time for it. The trick is to realize that even very brief walks—5 minutes to walk around the block—can be remarkably helpful because they serve as a healthy alternative to worrying when we’re stressed. So, lower your walking expectations and try incorporating brief, micro-walks into your holiday routine.

2. Ask for Silly Help

I used to give the advice that during the holidays simply asking for help was one of the best ways to reduce stress. But people inevitably resisted it because they didn’t want to be “a burden” to others—especially during the holidays.

Now, I haven’t given up on that project entirely: I do still believe asking for help, especially in really big ways, is one of the best things we can do to reduce our holiday stress. But, like most difficult things, we need to work up to it.

So I’ve developed a new strategy designed specifically for people who have a hard time asking for help that I call asking for Silly Help.

Silly help means asking for help with something so small it seems silly.

For example:

Honey, would you mind taking the cookies out of the oven in a few minutes? I want to head to the gym a little early.
Jenn, I forgot to pick up salad dressing for the salad I’m bringing to the party tonight—do you mind bringing some?

The key idea here is that these silly help requests themselves aren’t going to move the needle much with your overall stress, but they will boost your confidence being assertive so that when the time comes to ask for help on something bigger, you’ll be more likely to do it and reap the stress relieving rewards.

So, keep an eye out for silly help opportunities and use them to practice getting better at asking for help.

3. Pick a Holiday Mantra

Mantra is one of those woo-woo sounding terms that I used to resist but actually think is quite helpful, at least as I define it:

A mantra is a single word or short phrase that reminds you of something important.

For example:

People who meditate often have a word like om that they repeat or a short phrase like This too shall pass.
Athletes often use mantras to help them stay focused during especially challenging practice sessions or before competitions. I worked with a client one time who was a former professional athlete who told me that the mantra he tried to keep in mind before every game was the phrase calm like water because it helped remind him to stay present and focused instead of getting lost in his head.
In recent years, it’s become popular to choose a word of the year as an alternative to a traditional New Year’s resolution. So, instead of resolving to work out five times a week this year, someone might choose the word energy as their word of the year to remind them of the value behind their desire to exercise more: wanting to have more and better energy.

All that’s to say, a great way to reduce holiday stress is to pick a holiday mantra that reminds you of what’s most important during the holidays. This is especially helpful if your holiday stress comes from doing too much and saying yes to too many things, which leads to exhaustion and eventually resentment in addition to stress.

Saying no feels hard because it seems so negative. But really nobody’s saying no because they want to be negative or difficult; we say no (or aspire to say no) because of a bigger yes behind the no…

You say no to that last minute Christmas party invite because you want to say yes to quality time with your kids.
You say no to hosting a family gathering this year because you’re trying to say yes to self-care.
You say no to excessive gift-giving because you want to say yes to focusing on the spiritual aspect of the holidays.

A holiday mantra helps you say no to stress-inducing activities by reminding you of the yes behind the no—the values that matter most during the holidays.

Here are some holiday mantras I’ve heard people use in the past:

Presence
Grace
Service over stuff
Connection
Less but better
Be the light

In addition to choosing a mantra that reflects an important value for you during the holidays, it’s helpful to take it a step further and make the mantra a physical part of your environment so that you are reminded of it regularly:

It could be as simple as a sticky note with your mantra written on it that goes on your desk or the dashboard of your car.
It could be that you add it as a prompt to your morning journaling practice
Or maybe you just set a reminder on your phone to go off a couple times a day that simply shows you your mantra.

Remember, the whole point of a holiday mantra is to stay focused on your values and what really matters to you during the holidays.