Holiday Anxiety: Signs, Causes & How to Cope

Why Do the Holidays Cause Anxiety?

The holidays can amplify or trigger anxiety symptoms because of family pressures, societal expectations, and long to-do lists during the holidays.¹ Over 60% of people surveyed reported feeling an increase in stress during the holiday season.¹ If you are diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, you may be more vulnerable to holiday stress and experience flare-ups during the holidays.

Causes of holiday anxiety can include:

• Pressure to buy gifts for friends and family that may strain your finances
• Pressure to see extended family who make you uncomfortable
• Large social gatherings
• Pressure of hosting a party
• Cooking large meals for holiday dinners
• Pressure to make the holidays a good experience for your children
• Social pressures to spend money on get togethers and holiday events
• Pressure to purchase decorations such as lights and trees
• Feeling stressed trying to get everything done by the end of the year

Holiday Anxiety Symptoms

Holiday anxiety often manifests in ways that can catch you off guard. One common symptom of holiday anxiety is feeling irritable rather than excited by holiday events or family visits. Sometimes, people also have difficulty concentrating and completing personal and work tasks. These symptoms can lead to increased fatigue, decreased motivation, and a general sense of exhaustion, making it challenging to enjoy the season.

Common symptoms of holiday anxiety include:

• Increased irritability
• Trouble sleeping
• Feeling apprehensive
• Poor concentration
• Struggling to complete work deadlines
• Mood fluctuations
• Appetite changes
• Decreased motivation
• Feeling more exhausted despite sleeping
• Increased headaches or pains
• Decreased sex drive

How to Cope With Holiday Anxiety

As the holiday season is inevitable for many of us, it is important to create healthy ways to cope with anxiety during the holidays. Finding time for quiet solitude, making sure to eat healthy meals, and setting boundaries with others are all important elements of managing anxiety.

Here are ten tips for how to cope with holiday anxiety:

1. Take a Moment to Be Mindful

Strategies like mindfulness for anxiety can reduce holiday anxiety by helping you become aware of the present moment and stop ruminating. General mindfulness can be practiced during daily activities like driving or eating. Specific mindfulness strategies, like practicing gratitude or finding mindful movement, might be practiced with family or friends.

Situations to use mindfulness practices for holiday anxiety might be prior to holiday shopping, before having guests over, or when taking part in holiday activities with family.

Here are some mindfulness practices that can help with holiday anxiety:

• Mindful eating: Mindful eating is a mindfulness practice that involves focusing on enjoyable sensations during a meal, intentionally slowing down, and recognizing when you are hungry and full. When practiced repeatedly, mindful eating can help you feel grateful for meals rather than mindlessly indulging during the holidays.
• Mindful movement: Holiday anxiety can cause restlessness. Mindful movement can help with restlessness and also provide a break from the crowded house. It could involve walking with little ones in the park, doing some gentle stretching before bed, or training for a local holiday run.²
• Expressing gratitude: Gratitude is a mindfulness practice that is sometimes forgotten with the business of the holiday season. Expressing gratitude might look like creating a gratitude list, showing love to family or friends, or taking the time to fix a holiday meal for a lonely neighbor.
• Mindful driving: Since many people travel and shop during the holiday season, driving can be hectic for people who live in cities. Mindful driving can look like saying a positive mantra while driving or choosing to engage in deep breathing to ease anxiety during traffic jams.
• Mindful shopping: Holidays are often filled with lots of shopping to-dos. Instead of making excessive and mindless purchases, find the time to plan, budget, and pay attention to impulsive urges during shopping trips.

2. Plan Ahead

Holiday anxiety can develop when relationships are strained, or there is too much on your plate. Planning ahead can help you avoid obstacles to holiday to-dos, miscommunications in relationships, and additional stress that can add to holiday anxiety.

For example, writing out a list of grocery items prior to entering the store can help you avoid wasting time, impulse buying, and forgetting important items for holiday meals. Planning with your partner how you will handle extended family members overstepping boundaries can help avoid miscommunication in the relationship, which adds to tension during holiday events.

3. Focus on Values

Identifying core values can highlight what is most important to you during the holiday season. Core values can help ground you in your holiday decision-making when holiday anxiety creeps in. Anxiety can encourage impulsive, people-pleasing decisions that may not be in line with your core values. Taking the time to identify what your core values are prior to making decisions can help you feel more confident in your choices when holiday anxiety peaks.

Here are some examples of values to focus on that can help with holiday anxiety:

• Valuing family can help you prioritize time with loved ones over work projects
• Valuing respect can help you set and stick to your boundaries
• Valuing kindness may encourage you to be kinder to family members you have tension with
• Valuing gratitude may encourage you to focus on whatever is beautiful about the present moment
• Valuing faith may help you remember to connect to your spiritual side during the holiday season
• Valuing wisdom may give you a nudge to connect with the stories of older family members during holiday gatherings

4. Take Breaks

Taking breaks can be an important strategy for navigating holiday anxiety, especially around relationships with others and personal or professional expectations.³ Taking breaks might look like excusing yourself to go to the bathroom during a family gathering to complete a breathing exercise if your holiday anxiety spikes during family tension.

Taking breaks could also show up in your professional life during the holiday season. Sometimes, work projects ramp up at the end of the year, so holiday anxiety can creep in when viewing a calendar full of meetings and to-dos. Make sure to weave in five minutes of breathing or progressive muscle relaxation, find time to eat a healthy lunch, or simply take a few moments away from screen stimulation.

5. Increase Self-Care

Increasing the amount and types of self-care you do can help improve holiday anxiety symptoms by decreasing stress. You can start increasing self-care by noting what physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual activities you already participate in. Then, explore what self-care activities you do not use but might like to explore. Finally, you can mix these two strategies together to personalize a holiday self-care plan.

During the holiday season, physical self-care may look like making sure you are getting in daily movement in a form you enjoy. Depending on where you are, you may use a sunlamp to avoid vulnerability to Christmas anxiety or other holidays in the winter. Spiritual self-care may include attending any holiday faith-based gatherings with family or spiritual communities.

6. Set Healthy Boundaries

Healthy boundaries are essential for navigating the holiday season with work and family. Setting healthy boundaries with work might look like discussing time off plans with your manager to prioritize family during the holiday season. You can be assertive with your manager about your time off needs while still being respectful and proactive about completing work projects.

Setting boundaries can also help you deal with difficult family members during the holidays and avoid spikes in holiday anxiety. This may look like attending certain extended family gatherings for limited amounts of time. Planning ahead around your “why” for not attending may help you avoid holiday anxiety when family members question your absence or departure.

Here are some examples of healthy boundaries that can help with holiday anxiety:

• Prioritizing time off from work
• Saying “no” to extra work shifts or last-minute projects
• Saying “no” to holiday gatherings that would add stress
• Limiting time spent with chaotic family members
• Saying “no” to hosting at your home but “yes” to helping host at another family member’s house
• Not participating in a gift exchange if it causes money anxiety

7. Re-think Gift Expectations

Holiday anxiety can spike when people feel pressured to show gratitude to loved ones through material items. If gifting is a priority for you and your family, consider either budgeting or re-thinking gifts to include non-material items. For example, gifting a night of babysitting to a family member with children, or offering to clean an elderly family member’s home.

8. Minimize Work Stressors

Holiday anxiety can peak when work expectations heighten at the end of the calendar year. Consider finding ways to minimize work stressors to reduce your chances of triggers for holiday anxiety. This may include talking to your partner about limiting talks about work at home, speaking to your manager about time off, or saying “no” to extra work shifts.

9. Attend to Religious or Spiritual Beliefs

Some people find that shifting focus to religious or spiritual beliefs during the holiday season may help diminish feelings of anxiety. Take note of any opportunities for holiday gatherings related to your religious or spiritual beliefs and prioritize the time to attend these events. If you find you are unable to attend gatherings, find ways to incorporate your beliefs at home, such as practicing religious or spiritual rituals.

10. Prioritize Holiday Rituals

Most families have rituals around the holidays that remind them of their reasons for celebration. It may be helpful to sit down with your family and determine which rituals are most important so that you can prioritize completing these before getting lost in feelings of holiday anxiety. These holiday rituals are also important opportunities for grounding in the present moment and re-focusing on feelings of gratitude rather than sitting in anxiety.

When to Seek Professional Help

While holiday anxiety can often be dealt with by increasing self-care and slowing down to avoid stress, sometimes the stress and anxiety can feel unavoidable and impossible to deal with. If you are dealing with holiday anxiety that will not go away, it may be time to seek professional support.

An online therapist directory or online therapy platform for anxiety is a good choice for finding a therapist who specializes in anxiety. Also, online psychiatrist options are available and are a good choice for finding anxiety medication management if this is something you may need.

Treatment for Holiday Anxiety

For most people, holiday anxiety is temporary and doesn’t require professional treatment. However, for some people, already present and untreated anxiety can make holiday anxiety worse. Similarly, those who find the holidays very stressful and feel unable to recover may benefit from treatment for anxiety to prevent it from getting worse.

Treatment options for holiday anxiety include:

• Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT): CBT for anxiety is helpful for those who want to learn how to challenge unhelpful or even destructive thoughts that contribute to feelings and behaviors.
• Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT): ACT for anxiety teaches us that distressing and stressful moments are inevitable, so it is better to learn ways to work through them rather than try to avoid them. ACT helps you find ways to deal with stressful times when they arise, and how to more easily make it through them.
• Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT): DBT for anxiety works by teaching distress tolerance to those who struggle with emotional regulation. It is a great tool for those with a trauma history who find that the holidays bring about an increased stress response and associated symptoms of mental health.
• Family therapy: If your family struggles during the holiday season, such as having increased arguments or conflicts, family therapy could be a great tool. If all members of the family are supportive and willing to work together, family therapy can help you learn tools to improve communication and decrease stress.
• Group therapy: The holidays can feel very isolating if you have family trauma or if you do not have family to go home to. Group therapy can help by bringing people together with shared experiences and helping those learn tips and techniques to work through their stress while being validated and supported.