1: Please explain why women suffer from Holiday Stress?
I still remember the first time I experienced crushing loneliness and disappointment at the holidays. In our first year of marriage, as a new fellow, my then husband, a physician, was on call at the hospital. He left early Christmas morning and did not return until later the following afternoon, the day after Christmas. We had recently relocated to Washington, DC. I had few friends and knew even fewer of our neighbors.
Truthfully, the listlessness, sadness, and loneliness crept up on me. I hadn’t expected the arrival of these emotions, which, since then, I have learned, is often the case. Many times, emotions surprise us. Especially when we have experiences for the first time. This was my first time living away from my hometown, and not returning to my parents’ home for the holidays. Leading up to Christmas day, I had brazenly believed that this holiday would just be another day, and we’d celebrate when he returned.
As I watched, what seemed to be, everyone else around me with biological and chosen family, in warm homes with home-cooked meals, a heavy sense of despair came over me. I spoke to my family, but their merry only made me feel worse that I was missing the time with them. I went for a walk in the cold. I watched the retail stores close, and place signs in the windows for after-Christmas sales. This made me feel worse. I felt like I hadn’t experienced Christmas, and yet, the world was going on without me. Christmas was happening all around me, without me.
While holiday “stress” can arrive in the form of exhaustion, anxiety, and overwhelm, it can also be experienced through a variety of emotional experiences, including sadness, loneliness, and feelings of loss.
Photo Credit: Kseniya Berson
Stress Less
Both men and women can and do experience stress related to the holidays. However, a study conducted by the American Psychological Association (APA) in 2013 found that women, compared to men, report disproportionately more dramatic increases in stress levels. For example:
- 44% of women, as compared to 31% of men, reported an increase in stress levels at the holidays
- 27% of women, as compared to 41% of men, reported that they were able to relax over the holidays
- Women are likely to cope with the associated stress, turning to food (41%) and alcohol (28%)
So, not only do women experience surges in stress, women are also not employing healthy habits for alleviating the increased stress. If you’ve ever wanted a drink or a sugary treat to cope with stress, it’s no wonder stressed is desserts spelled backward!
2: What causes this stress to occur for so many year after year?
The Merry-Go-Round of Being Merry
Experiences such as trauma, along with illness, caregiving, and loss create heightened emotional states that become further amplified during the holiday season, often leading to even more palpable feelings of frustration, disappointment, and grief.
To break this cycle, conduct a Joy vs. Stress Audit:
- Divide a piece of paper into two columns. Think about the last few holiday seasons. On one side of the paper, list the items that brought you joy. One the other side, write the items that created stress for you. Note: Some experiences may go on both sides of the piece of the paper.
- Once you have a complete list, circle the items in the joy and stress columns that are within your control.
Once complete, use this Joy vs. Stress Audit to focus on the aspects of your holiday that bring you joy AND you are in a position of control to impact these experiences for yourself. Determine:
- How you would like to do more of what works – create more experiences or experiences with greater duration that bring you joy?; and
- How you will do less of the items on your list, that are within your control, that create stress?
If baking cookies makes you feel overwhelmed and trapped in the kitchen, but you love to create and write holiday cards, determine how you can do more of what you love and delegate what you don’t enjoy.
In The Five Practices of Particularly Resilient People, The Resilient Practice of Possibility invites us to focus on the what is within our purview to change and encourages us to not get mired in perfection.
Based on your Joy vs. Stress Audit, consider the smallest meaningful changes you can make to your holiday season that will bring you more joy and support a reduction in stress REMEMBER to start small. You don’t need to change everything at one. Chose one of two areas you’d like to focus on enhancing this holiday season! Then, do more of what works.
3: Do Holiday movies, commercials, ads with the ‘perfect’ family holiday lead to unrealistic expectations?
Comparison is the Thief of Joy
Yes, holiday stress often accumulates, even intensifies by the perceived gap between our expectations versus our reality. When we think our lives, relationships, family members, experiences, etc., ‘should’ be a certain way, we set ourselves up for disillusionment. The late Albert Ellis, a psychologist told his patients, when they used the word ‘should’, that they were “shoulding all over themselves.”
Think about that for a moment.
This is powerful.
Literally any time we use the word ‘should’ in our mind or in our spoken language, we are setting up a dichotomy that leads to disappointment.
Allow the use of the word ‘should’ to show you were you may have the opportunity to examine your expectations versus your reality. If there is a gap, ask yourself if making a change is within your span of control. If it is, think about what you might like to do differently. Recruit family members and friends to help you make a change and encourage you if it becomes difficult.
Remember The Resilient Practice of Possibility – and to try to avoid the tendency to subscribe to an ideal of perfection.
First, try focusing on greater gratitude. Gratitude is a potent practice. In The Five Practices of Particularly Resilient People, The Resilient Practice of Grati-osity, the concept of finding gratitude amidst challenge, and also sharing our moments of challenge with others, so they might learn and be up-lifted by our experience, enhances resilience in the face of challenge, change, and complexity.
Second, learn to practice Mudita, the Sanskrit word that means to experience vicarious joy through the happiness of others. So, when you see the smiling faces of friends, family, neighbors, and even strangers at the holidays, allow their joy to fill you, instead of being frustrated by taking a stance of comparison.
Photo Credit: Kseniya Berson
4: What can you do to not become overwhelmed before and during the holidays?
Holiday Hurdles
Why you should resist the urge to eliminate overwhelm
When we talk about holiday stress, we often use unhelpful words like ‘overcome’, ‘escape’, ‘beat’ holiday stress. The thing is, I don’t know anyone who feels like they overcome holiday stress. If anything, it often feels like holiday stress overcomes us!
When we change our language, we change our expectations, and we change our lives!
Look, challenges in life, and especially at the holidays are inevitable. It’s not if the challenges show up, it’s when. So, when we set ourselves up to believe that our holiday can, or even ‘should’ be challenge-free, we set ourselves up for disenchantment.
Set a goal to have more control, more moments of joy, and fewer moments of stress rather than completing eliminating stress and overwhelm.
Recognize that some feelings of stress and overwhelm are inevitable. Rather than asking yourself, “Why is this happening to me?”, see if you can ask yourself a different question, ask yourself, “Why is this happening for me?” When you ask what this moment is mean to teach us, we often feel differently about the experience and are primed to learn an important lesson from the moment.
Polar-ity
Often, we subscribe in an unhelpful binary, a belief that experiences are either ‘good’ or ‘bad’. When we release ourselves from this narrow polarity of “bad” and “good” – challenge, and our overall experience is richer than simply being coded as negative or positive.
In order to prove that stress is not all inherently bad, when psychologists Robert M. Yerkes and John Dillingham Dodson were researching performance and mental arousal, i.e., stress, they found that human performance increases with physiological or mental arousal. What does this mean for you at the holidays? And beyond? It means that some stress incites us to perform at a higher level than we would when stress is not present. Of course, this is only up to a point. When levels of stress arousal become too high, performance decreases.
5: Why do so many families expect women “The Mom’s” to handle most of the holiday prep, shopping, decor, food preparation.
Women and the Holiday “Work”
According to the APA study cited earlier, men don’t have attitudinal differences toward their families, meaning, men care as much about their families during the holidays, but men do exhibit behavioral differences when it comes to the work associated with the holiday season.
Women are more likely to shoulder the brunt of the work associated with the holiday season, regardless of religion. Women both invest more the emotional ties of kin-keeping, organizing family members, as well as the physical and organizational investment of bringing the holiday logistics to fruition, (read) getting that holiday feast cooked and on the table.
For example, during Thanksgiving, women are nearly twice as likely to report they will:
- cook for the family (66% of women vs 35% of men);
- shop for food (52% of women vs 32% of men); and
- wash dishes (70% of women vs 41% of men)
Men, on the other hand, are nearly twice as likely to report that they will watch football (26% of women vs 46% of men).
As I woman, I recognize that, often, the loftiest and most stringent expectations, are those that I place on myself.
Yet, when well-meaning friends and relatives suggest I simply do less, it feels like I am being blamed for my overwork without clear line of sight to who will pick up the work I desire to put down.
6: How can she delegate those responsibilities, especially if she also works a full-time job?
The Delegation of Decking the Halls
Whether you work full-time inside or outside the home, precious few women want to be saddled with all the holiday preparations, end-to-end. Yet, we also, often, have a vision for the aesthetic of our holiday season. Reconciling our sense of duty to be responsible for the holiday preparations with delegation can be down-right difficult.
A few years ago, I attended a holiday at a family member’s home. In addition to dividing up the menu and asking guests to provide a portion of the food, we also drew straws for our contribution to the feast – from setting the table, carving the turkey, to washing dishes, she had the tasks that didn’t bring her joy covered. We were all clear on our contribution and it felt like all guests got to give back in an equitable way.
Buy, Borrow, and Build Your Way to a Happy Holiday
In my years of leadership development, we often talked about the talent we needed to make our company run using the words “Buy, Borrow, and Build.” In this case we could ‘buy’ talent by recruiting from outside the company, ‘borrow’ talent needed from one area of the company for another area of the organization, and ‘build’, or develop internal talent to be ready for assignments in the future.
When it comes to delegation, I believe the same concepts apply to a healthier, happier holiday season:
- Buy: Determine what aspects you can and want to outsource. Perhaps you buy your cookies or purchase your pies from a school bake sale. Maybe you can spring for a house cleaner or have a landscaping crew hang up your outdoor lights.
- The holidays are expensive. Decide what investments will help take some of the load off, and still fit within the limits of your bank account.
- Borrow: What elements can you borrow – consider requesting you use a neighbor who will be traveling to house out-of-town guests to stay less expensively than a hotel, or rent the furnishings you desire, without making a long-term investment.
- Leveraging the goods and services of others can reduce the burn of holiday stress (and finances) and ensure you have more energy to devote elsewhere.
- Build: Consider what investments you’d like to make in the long-term experience of your holidays. Are there traditions you want to create or china you want to purchase each year to create a full serving set?
- With each holiday season, you can make the smallest meaningful changes toward creating the experiences that will make happy memories for years to come.
7: Please share any tips to women so they can make this Holiday Season a good one for their family, but also themselves.
The Five Practices of Particularly Resilient People are evidence-based behaviors that enhance resilience. When, not if, you find yourself in a moment of overwhelm this holiday season, here is a little “cup” of resilience “tea”, a new behavior you can try out to enhance your holiday resilience:
- Vulnerabili- Tea: The ability to holistically integrate our internal and external selves. To allow what we think, feel, and believe on the inside to be congruent with the person we show the world on the outside. Vulnerability is the cornerstone of authenticity and requires overcoming the Shame Bias – the belief that others’ vulnerability enhances our view of them, but our own vulnerability will diminish us. This bias is a fallacy, but still, we remain afraid to share the vulnerable parts of ourselves for fear for rejection, or that we won’t be liked of loved if people really knew us.
Cup of Holiday Stress Vulnerabili-Tea: Resilience is often equated with being tough or unbreakable, but, in fact the opposite true. The people who allow stress and challenge to make them softer, by demonstrating vulnerability, rather than harder, are the people that are the most resilient. When we embrace vulnerability, the ability to connect with our emotional process and to share our emotions with others, this is a radical resilience up leveling, and helps us course correct the inaccurate belief that emotionality is equated with weakness.
To access Vulnerabiliti-Tea during times of holiday stress try an exercise developed in partnership with Happify:
- Take time to breathe and reconnect with your body, even if just for 10 seconds
- Tune into your internal process without judgement and write down what you notice inclusive of physical sensations, thoughts, and feelings
- Find a friend, or family member with whom to share what you wrote down. Let this person know they don’t have to solve your problem, but rather, they can think of themselves as an audience member to bear witness to your process. Notice how speaking out loud what you wrote down changes or shifts your perspective
- Leverage this exercise to enhance your vulnerability with others during moments of holiday stress
- Productivi-Tea: The intelligent pursuit of a goal; knowing when to maintain the mission, despite challenge, and when, in the face of diminishing returns, to pivot in a new direction. How to engage in single-minded pursuit of a goal and knowing when to have a plan B.
Cup of Holiday Stress Productivi-Tea: Productive Perseverance is a science as much as it is an art form. Famously, Sly Stallone made the initial Rocky film because of his own dogged insistence, as a struggling actor, on playing the main character in his screenplay until the film studio related. On the other hand, Vera Wang didn’t qualify for the Olympic skating team, and needed to pivot to a new vocation, giving us her iconic fashion of today.
To access your own cup of Productive Perseverance “Tea” during times of holiday stress:
- Write yourself a letter from Productive Perseverance. Write Dear xxx (your name) and sign the letter Love, PP (Productive Perseverance). In the body of the letter, write to yourself, from the perspective of Productive Perseverance about the times you’ve stayed the course, and the times you’ve changed directions to capture even more opportunity. Reflect on what you write from this potent practice to determine how you’ll further harness this resilient behavior during the holiday season.
- Connectivi-Tea: The ability to find, rely on, and gain encouragement from existing or created communities; to draw strength from the support of others. Connection is about creating and deepening connection with ourselves, as well as connections with other people, including developing our intuitive abilities to listen to and know ourselves.
Cup of Holiday Stress Connectivi-Tea: The practice of Connection allows us to dive more deeply into relationships with other people. Living and working in community, fostering collaborative partnerships, sharing information, and working in teams are key leadership behaviors, and even more important during times of change, challenge, and complexity.
To access Connectivi-Tea, here is another exercise Happify and I created to address resilience in times of holiday stress and change:
- With friends or family members, decide on a holiday experience you’d like to savor together like a winetasting, apple picking, tree trimming, or a musical performance. Ask those you choose to attend with you to take note of their experience using all five of their senses. After the experience discuss:
- What aspects were most impactful?
- Share what aspects of the experience stood out using the five senses as a guide.
- Grati-osi-Tea: A combination of the words for gratitude and generosity: this practice is the ability to, looking back, have gratitude for challenge, change, and complexity you experienced, and to appreciate how you changed for the better. Then, to share of these experiences, generously, for the benefit of others.
Cup of Holiday Stress Grati-osi-Tea: The practice of Grati-osity is influential because, through generously sharing our stories of resilience with others, we solidify our own experience of resilience and encourage others by sharing our challenges.
To access Grati-osity, during times of holiday stress and change, here is a tool to attune your mindset to what really matters most from business author Suzy Welch:
- The 10, 10, 10 rule is about projecting yourself into the future and determining what matters most. When you begin to experience stress during the holidays, consider:
- Will this be important in 10 minutes?
- What will I think about this situation in 10 months?
- Will this be important in 10 years?
Based on your reflection of what truly matters, determine your behavior, and how you would like to behave in a way that will support the person you want to be in that moment, and what will actually be meaningful to you 10 minutes, 10 months, and 10 years in the future.
- Possibili-Tea: The ability to see possibilities and potential for progress, instead of being mired in perfection, even in the face of obstacles. An enhanced “Adversity Quotient” AQ that allows all of us to better tolerate environments riddled with the potential for fear and failure. This practice is both resilient and cultivated by resilience in the sense that more resilient people are better able to resist perfection and focus on progress and possibility.
Cup of Holiday Stress Possibi-Tea:: The practice of Possibility is key during times of stress because, by nature, stress makes us more myopic in how we think about the potential for possibility. However, by considering unique and novel ways to achieve a goal, we expand the aperture of how we create results, and leverage creativity to make our goals a reality.
To access Possibiliti-Tea, during times of stress, let’s look at another exercise Happify and I developed in partnership:
- Take time to celebrate your own and others’ good news. In times of holiday stress, an emphasis on recognition and highlighting the aspects of our lives that are going well often falls by the wayside. By celebrating good news and acknowledging that is going well, we remind ourselves of the successes that exist alongside our stress.
- In order to do this:
- Spend the week on the lookout for successes, victories both small and large, and the positive accomplishments of others.
- Support the appreciation for these “possibilities realized” by congratulating the people personally
Enhancing our resilience through The Five Practices of Particularly Resilient People is even more important during times of heightened holiday stress. Through the Practices, we both become more resilient amid holiday stress, and prepare for the inevitable challenges, change, and complexity we will face, both now, and in the future.
Author Biography:
Dr. Taryn Marie has been uniquely focused on cultivating her audience members’ resilience in order to heal and pursue their full potential. She is the author of the copyrighted “Flourish or Fold: The Five Practices of Particularly Resilient People”, which is expected to release as a book in 2020. She has spent her career focused on developing people so they can bring the best of themselves to the work they do every day.
In addition to serving as the Founder and CEO of her company, Resilience Leadership, she is the former head of Executive Leadership Development and Talent Planning & Strategy for Nike. She has advised leaders ranging from non- profit foundations to Fortune 100 corporations, bringing forth her purpose to help people appreciate their strengths and harness their resilience in order to reach their full potential in leadership* and life.
*Resilience leadership believes that if you have a heart and a mind, you have the potential to be a leader.
She is an internationally sought-after keynote speaker, business consultant, and coach. To live a flourishing, more resilient life, follow Dr. Taryn Marie on Instagram @tarynmariestejskal