After the holidays, you may feel down or out of sorts for a short time. This is known as the post-holiday blues and may be caused by the contrast between holiday festivity and everyday life, or from not having enough time to recuperate from the whirlwind of holiday events before returning to your normal routine.
While not considered clinical depression, the same skills that help people improve their mood when depressed will help individuals experiencing post-holiday blues.
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What Are Post-Holiday Blues?
If you find yourself feeling a little down after the holidays, you may be experiencing the post-holiday blues. The post-holiday blues are a short-term, low mood that happens after festivities and holidays.1
The post-holiday blues are different from diagnostic mood disorders. Post-holiday depression typically doesn’t last as long and is not as severe as conditions like clinical depression and seasonal affective disorder (SAD).2, 3 However, symptoms of SAD often start in the early winter, so there may be some overlap, making it a good idea to check in with your care provider if you think you have something more severe than post-holiday blues.
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Signs of Post-Holiday Blues
There are signs that may help you recognize holiday stress and post-holiday blues. You may temporarily have less interest in your non-holiday-related activities, feel less engaged in work, or feel overwhelmed or underwhelmed with everyday life. These signs are normal while returning to your everyday life after the holidays – and after a short time, post-holiday blues usually fade.
Common signs of post-holiday blues include:
- Feeling unmotivated
- Having increased anxiety
- Experiencing concerns about money
- Having trouble sleeping
- Not wanting to do normal activities with family or friends
- Engaging less enthusiastically in your job or hobbies
- Feeling overwhelmed or underwhelmed
- Having more trouble concentrating than before the holidays
- Finding it harder to get back into the swing of everyday life
- Dwelling on missing holiday experiences and family
Symptoms of Post-Holiday Blues
There are some common emotional symptoms you may experience with post-holiday blues, including sadness, worry, emptiness or loss, and loneliness or feeling disconnected. While these symptoms are not as intense as clinical depression, you may still feel more stressed and irritable and you may have more financial stress than usual due to holiday spending.
Sadness
Sadness is a normal feeling that you may have after the holidays, and it may show up with other symptoms, like crying or feeling irritable. Sadness can make everyday tasks less enjoyable and cause you to feel alone even in social situations. After the holidays, you may experience sadness more often for a little bit because of the contrast between your everyday life and the holiday period.
Worry
When you worry, you may find yourself thinking excessively about bad things or potential problems. Worrying is a natural process that helps you prepare for potential issues. Worrying is different from more severe forms of anxiety and shouldn’t cause physical symptoms or impair daily life. But it’s common to find yourself worrying about returning to work, holiday expenses, or those New Year’s resolutions.
Emptiness
Emptiness may make you feel like you are missing something important in your life. You may feel numb, disconnected, or like something important is gone. This feeling can be especially strong after the holidays when you get to have fun with friends and family and get a break from your normal routine. After the holidays, it makes sense that returning to normal life could cause you to feel like something is missing.
Loneliness
Loneliness can occur even when you are around others and is often described as a feeling of being apart, disconnected, or detached from other people. It makes sense why you might be feeling more lonely after the connectedness of the holidays, especially if you live farther away from your family or if you have difficult family dynamics. It is also not uncommon if you experienced loneliness during the holidays for it to intensify when you return to your everyday life.
Stress
Stress can manifest as a general feeling of being tense or uneasy and often comes along with some of the other symptoms discussed here, like irritability and feeling worried. Stress may also come along with increased headaches, tense muscles, fatigue, and difficulty sleeping. After the holidays you may be experiencing more stress than normal as you are trying to recover from fast-paced social gatherings, traveling, and holiday spending.
Irritability
Irritability may feel like being on edge and you may get angry or annoyed more easily or find yourself being bothered by things that normally wouldn’t matter to you. It makes sense that you would feel irritable after the holidays, given how overwhelming and tiring of an experience you just went through and that you now must jump right back into your busy, everyday routine.
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10 Tips to Cope With the Post-Holiday Blues
Self-care and other strategies can help you better cope with your post-holiday blues. Taking care of yourself has been shown to reduce stress and can be especially important when you are feeling out of sorts after the holidays.9 Don’t forget you can also reach out to a therapist or other professional if you need more support.
Try to make sure you are getting enough rest, eating well, and getting healthy exercise. Make time for the hobbies and activities that make you happy, and don’t forget that mindfulness, meditation, or yoga have been shown to reduce the hormones related to stress.10
Here are 10 effective strategies to overcome post-holiday blues:
1. Exercise
Exercise can benefit your mental health, improve your general mood, and could help lessen the effects of stress, anxiety, depression, and the blues.
2. Meditation
Meditation can help with depression and the blues by improving mindfulness and reducing stress. If you are new to meditation, the Headspace app might be a helpful tool with beginner-friendly mindfulness methods.
3. Sleep
Sleep affects your general mental health and can impact your mood and ability to manage stress. Getting a healthy amount of sleep can help with post-holiday blues by improving emotional regulation and overall well-being after the holidays.
4. Mental Health Apps
Some newer mental health apps, like Youper, have begun to use AI as a tool to implement cognitive behavioral therapy techniques. For some, these apps may be helpful for managing post-holiday blues using daily check-ins and personalized strategies.
5. Social Connections
Sometimes just talking with loved ones can uplift your mood and provide a sense of belonging and support. There are things you can do if you feel like you do not have friends to foster social connection, like joining a local group or club, volunteering, using social apps like Bumble BFF, or joining a class or workshop.
6. Journaling
Writing down your thoughts and feelings can help process emotions and reduce stress. You can use these 12 prompts for journaling for your mental health to get started.
7. Limit Social Media Use
Reducing time spent on social media platforms or taking a break from social media can help decrease feelings of inadequacy or loneliness that can arise from comparing yourself to others.
8. Light or Color Therapy
For some, the reduced sunlight in winter months contributes to mood changes. Light boxes that simulate sunlight or color therapy techniques may be helpful for you in combating your post-holiday blues.
9. Setting New Goals
The post-holiday period is a great time to set new goals or resolutions. This can bring a sense of purpose and direction, countering feelings of aimlessness or sadness.
10. Professional Help
If the blues persist or you’re thinking you’re experiencing something more severe than temporary blues after the holidays, it might be beneficial to find a therapist. Therapy can provide more tools and strategies to help you cope more effectively with the post-holiday blues or determine if you are experiencing depression or another mental health condition.
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Starting at $200 per session (insurance not yet available). Next-day appointments available.
Causes of Post-Holiday Blues
Holidays offer a break from routine that may leave you feeling temporarily out of sorts from the post-holiday blues when they end. Your attendance and anticipation of holiday activities may have helped to break up the monotony of normal life. After the holidays, returning to normalcy with all its duties and expectations can feel harsh and unfulfilling, in a sort of contrast effect.6
Additionally, research has shown that how recuperative a vacation is impacts how well you handle the transition back to your everyday life.7 This might be part of what contributes to the post-holiday blues. Since, while enjoyable, the holidays with their whirlwind of buying gifts, planning family gatherings, cooking meals, and other holiday-related activities are seldom recuperative experiences.
Common causes of post-holiday blues include:
- High expectations during the holiday season
- Overspending and subsequent financial stress
- The contrast between holiday excitement and everyday routine
- Reduced daylight hours and colder weather affecting mood
- Being especially busy or overbooked during the holiday season
Ways to Avoid Post-Holiday Blues
When you return to normal life after the holidays, you may feel off-kilter and overwhelmed. Knowing this is common can help to make it a little easier to get through; however, the easiest way to handle the post-holiday blues may be to avoid getting them in the first place. Getting enough sleep, engaging in healthy activities, and slowing down during your holidays may help.
Some specific things that may help you avoid the post-holiday blues include getting a healthy amount of rest, eating a balanced diet, and staying hydrated. Limiting your alcohol intake and drug use may also help.8 After the holidays end, consider taking time to engage in healthy activities like exercise, meditation, or yoga, and finding time for hobbies. Don’t isolate yourself. Instead, intentionally make time to talk with friends or family during and after the holidays.
When to Seek Professional Help for Post-Holiday Blues
It is important you know there is a difference between the post-holiday blues and more serious mental health conditions. The holiday-post blues are mild and usually brief. If the feelings persist or worsen and interfere with daily life and relationships, therapy may be necessary.11 If you have persistent mood swings, withdrawal, or suicidal thoughts please look into finding a therapist or use an online therapy platform.
Online directories for therapists are helpful because they give you access to many professionals who could meet your needs and allow you to sort your results using various factors. When looking for a therapist for feeling down, mood swings, feeling withdrawn, and other mood-related concerns, you will want to sort by related specialties, such as depression or mood disorders, along with your location and insurance, if applicable.
In My Experience
“As a therapist, I plan for the reality that many of my clients will feel out of sorts or more down than normal the week after any major holiday. This is a phenomenon I recognized even before I knew its name. If you are experiencing the post-holiday blues, know you are not alone. You will feel better and be back to your everyday self soon.
However, if what you are experiencing is not brief, then you may not be experiencing the post-holiday blues. For example, if you were already feeling depressed or related symptoms before the holidays or if your blues seem to be lasting longer than a couple of weeks, please reach out to a mental health care provider or someone else for support.”
Frequently Asked Questions
What Is The Christmas Effect on Mental Health?
Research has found that there are fewer psychiatric emergencies, inpatient admissions, and self-harm or suicide attempts during the holidays.4 This phenomenon is called the “Christmas effect.” Research into the Christmas effect also found that moods are generally worse around the holidays, that alcohol-related deaths increase, and, unfortunately, that psychiatric emergencies and in-patient care related to mental health do rise again after the holidays.4
While psychiatric emergencies and needs for immediate mental health care drop over the holidays, you and your loved ones may still have worrisome mental health experiences. According to a survey by the National Alliance on Mental Health, almost two-thirds of people report holidays as making their mental health worse, with 24% of respondents reporting the holidays make their mental illness symptoms “a lot” worse and 40% reporting “somewhat” worse.5
Post Holiday Blues Infographics
Choosing Therapy strives to provide our readers with mental health content that is accurate and actionable. We have high standards for what can be cited within our articles. Acceptable sources include government agencies, universities and colleges, scholarly journals, industry and professional associations, and other high-integrity sources of mental health journalism. Learn more by reviewing our full editorial policy.
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Sandua, D. (2023). Back to routine: Depression, relationships and readjustment after the holidays. Kindle Direct Publishing.
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American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed.). https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.books.9780890425596
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National Institute of Mental Health (n.d.). Seasonal affective disorder (SAD): More than the winter blues. NIH. https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/seasonal-affective-disorder-sad-more-than-the-winter-blues
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Sansone, R. A., & Sansone, L. A. (2011). The Christmas effect on psychopathology. Innovations in Clinical Neuroscience, 8(12), 10–13. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3257984
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National Alliance on Mental Illness. (2014). Mental Health and the Holiday Blues. NAMI. https://www.nami.org/Press-Media/Press-Releases/2014/Mental-health-and-the-holiday-blues
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Strauss-Blasche, G., Muhry, F., Lehofer, M., Moser, M., & Marktl, W. (2004). Time Course of Well-Being after a Three-Week Resort-Based Respite from Occupational and Domestic Demands: Carry-Over, Contrast and Situation Effects. Journal of Leisure Research, 36(3), 293–309. https://doi.org/10.1080/00222216.2004.11950025
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Strauss-Blasche, G., Ekmekcioglu, C., & Marktl, W. (2002). Moderating Effects of Vacation on Reactions to Work and Domestic Stress. Leisure Sciences, 24(2), 237–249. https://doi.org/10.1080/01490400252900176
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Turner, S., Mota, N., Bolton, J., & Sareen, J. (2018). Self‐medication with alcohol or drugs for mood and anxiety disorders: A narrative review of the epidemiological literature. Depression and Anxiety, 35(9), 851–860. https://doi.org/10.1002/da.22771
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Ayala, E. E., Winseman, J. S., Johnsen, R. D., & Mason, H. R. C. (2018). U.S. medical students who engage in self-care report less stress and higher quality of life. BMC Medical Education, 18(1), 189–189. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-018-1296-x
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Cahn, B. R., Goodman, M. S., Peterson, C. T., Maturi, R., & Mills, P. J. (2017). Yoga, Meditation and Mind-Body Health: Increased BDNF, Cortisol Awakening Response, and Altered Inflammatory Marker Expression after a 3-Month Yoga and Meditation Retreat. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 11, 315–315. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2017.00315
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Siqueland, L. (2021). How to know when to seek therapy. Anxiety and Depression Association of America. https://adaa.org/learn-from-us/from-the-experts/blog-posts/consumer/how-know-when-seek-therapy
We regularly update the articles on ChoosingTherapy.com to ensure we continue to reflect scientific consensus on the topics we cover, to incorporate new research into our articles, and to better answer our audience’s questions. When our content undergoes a significant revision, we summarize the changes that were made and the date on which they occurred. We also record the authors and medical reviewers who contributed to previous versions of the article. Read more about our editorial policies here.
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Primary Changes: New depression worksheets added. Fact checked and edited for improved readability and clarity.
Author: Kalen D. Zeiger, LMFT, CCTP, CFTP
Reviewer:Kristen Fuller, MD
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