The Toxic Emotional Cocktail That Is the Holiday Season

You can also read this article in Psychology Today here

Hello there, ​

I developed the three-part series below based on my firsthand witnessing of the toll the upcoming holidays is surprisingly taking on a lot of people. I wanted to better understand why.

I hope this series helps you also better understand how you are feeling at this unusual time of year, and why. ​

Wishing you a better understanding of your emotions so they cease to control you – and a happy holiday season. 🙂 ​

Anthony

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This is Part One of a three-part series.

When the holidays roll around, many of us find ourselves feeling out of sorts. We feel somewhere between blue, apprehensive and stressed, and we’re not sure why.

“Emotion, which is suffering,” the ​philosopher Spinoza once wrote​, “ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.” I’ve always been driven to help myself and others better understand our emotions so they cease to control us.

Action Research

I have observed many people around me feeling stressed or anxious over the past few weeks. Armed with the idea that “affect labeling” (see Part Two of this article series) would enable them to better enjoy the holiday season, I decided to ask them what they are feeling.

I sent out a free-write survey to hundreds of working professionals in my ecosystem (you can also join it ​here​ and receive two free books, The Myth of Happiness: How Your Definition of Happiness Creates Your Unhappiness and The Myth of Friendship: How Your Misunderstandings about Friendship Keep You Lonely) asking them to identify any challenging emotions they are experiencing as the holidays approach. From their responses, I’ve identified four common emotions many of us feel as the holidays approach.

Holiday Emotion #1: Stress

“On top of all my work responsibilities I am trying to finish before going on holiday break,” exclaimed Ron, another conference participant, “I have to endure crowded shopping malls and find the right gifts for each person in my family. It’s all just too much.”

You may feel stressed about unaccomplished goals and a relentless push to move the needle toward them before you take a break. I know I often do. Last year, I pushed myself so relentlessly to hit a research deadline in the last days leading up to Christmas that I did not pay attention to how cold I was, sitting in front of my screen typing out the final version. The result? I had a high fever for about a week, right through Christmas.

Don’t make my mistake: Recognize that your worth is not your work, and it certainly is not your last performance. When we over-focus on what we haven’t yet accomplished, we overlook what we have achieved that has taken us to where we are now.

We also succumb to ​the next-in-line effect in cognitive psychology​: we focus so much on what we have to do next that we lose sight of experiencing the present, which is what the holiday season is (meant to be) all about. “Going home means that I have so many people to visit in my hometown. I just want to relax!” shared Maria, one of my conference participants.

“Visiting both my parents and my wife’s parents is not only stressful just by the nature of being with each set of people for an extended period,” confided Max, another participant. “It also involves a ton of travel in over-congested airports with end-of-year flight delays, which just adds to the stress I’m already experiencing.”

Holiday Emotion #2: Loneliness

You might feel loneliness from thinking thoughts such as “Why isn’t my family or intimate relationship or friendships as close as those of other people I know?” The winter holidays is a period where people tend to spend more time inside (in many cultures, it’s the coldest time of the year) and take inventory of their social relationships. It’s our annual Social Judgment Week.

If you are feeling lonely as the holidays approach, as I propose in my video course ​Managing Loneliness: How to Develop Meaningful Relationships and Enduring Happiness​, take an inner detour before you dive into time with your family and friends to consider how you show up in your relationships.

Most of us don’t like how others prioritize or treat us, and then feel lonely. In this way, loneliness contains a narcissistic element. We are the victim; others, the perpetrators.

Instead, consider how you prioritize and treat others. In so doing, you will actualize the whole point of the holiday season: giving to others. When you reduce their loneliness, you will counterintuitively yet compellingly also decrease your own.

Disagree? Consider research that has found that people who focus on the gifts they receive during the holiday season experience more negative emotions and stress, and reduced well-being and life satisfaction. Further, when people do not like the gifts they receive, they tend to perceive themselves as less similar to the giver and become less enthusiastic about the relationship, both of which often accentuate their loneliness.

Which challenging emotions are you experiencing as the holidays approach? What is going on in your life that is producing this emotion(s)? Please send me your response through this survey (which only includes the two questions) so I can use it in next year’s article: ​bit.ly/holidayfeelings​

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A 2016 study and another study I published in 2018 highlight the importance of being able to healthily express the wide variety of positive and negative emotions we feel.

Fear is one of those emotions. Conflate the thoughts from which your fear arises with thoughts of the sources of beauty in your life (e.g., the people you love and care for) that generate positive emotions such as gratitude
and joy.

How can you better understand what stimulates fear inside of you?
How can you move forward with this understanding?

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