'Tis The Season For Losing Our Shit: 5 Ways to Stay Sane This Holiday Season
How does this photograph make you feel? Angry? Exasperated? Sad? Not a thing for me because this would never happen to my Christmas lights?
Once upon a time there was a little girl that loved everything about the holidays.
She loved the lights.
She loved the cookies.
She loved picking out a present for her teacher.
She loved having two whole weeks off of school.
Then that little girl grew up and discovered that it takes a crap-ton of work from the grownups to make the holidays feel so magical for the little humans.
The holidays are a time of magic, togetherness, gratitude, family, and friends. It is also a time of elevated expectations, traditions that we didn’t sign off on, disrupted schedules, and general chaos.
More Expectations = More Opportunities to Drop a Ball, Fall on Your Face, Feel Like a Failure. I am not trying to be a little brown cloud of doom and gloom - just acknowledging a commonly held truth. Let’s take a few breaths and chat about how to set ourselves up for success for the rest of December.
Prepare Yourself Emotionally.
Do a little bit of preemptive emotional housekeeping. Holidays can be stressful in normal times and this year we are dealing with year 2 of a global pandemic upset. Take a breath and take stock. How are you doing? No really, how are you doing? How are your people doing? Your immediate family, your extended family, your friends, your colleagues? Take a moment to assess the baseline. No judgement. Just honest assessment.
Inventory Expectations
Now that you have considered your own emotional baseline and that of those around you, take a moment to think about the running list of holiday expectations.
Start with the ones that you are placing on yourself. Consider both those that are task-y action items (example: your gift list, calendar of celebratory commitments, etc.), as well as those that are more emotional and behavioral (creating magical experiences for your children, making sure that everyone has a good time at your holiday gathering, etc.).
Next, move on to the external expectations of the important people around you. This can be immediate family, extended family, friend circles, work circles, etc.
Again, no judgement - just a list (it is helpful to actually write it down) of the “normal” holiday expectations that frame your schedule, tasks, and interactions around the holidays.
Be Ready to Adjust Your Expectations
#1 + #2 = #3. Emotional Baseline Analysis + Expectation Inventory = A Reasonable Plan
Listen closely. If, like most of us, your emotional gas tank is depleted and you attempt to run the same holiday race that you ran with a full tank of gas in a non-pandemic-world - YOU ARE SETTING YOURSELF UP FOR FAILURE (or at least feelings of failure). It is not reasonable to expect the same results with different circumstances and resources.
Adjusting your expectations to more realistically fit your baseline emotional capacity, specific personal circumstances, and available resources is NOT lazy or unreasonable - it is SMART. What can you reasonably do and do well? Which pieces of the holiday are the most important to you and those around you? Be creative. Be thoughtful. How can you work towards preserving magic and connection - even if there is less energy to do so? Start adjusting some expectations and making some plans.
Plan and Practice Boundaries
Think about how you are going to communicate your needs this holiday season. The holidays are a perfect microcosmic study of the intersection of internal and external expectations. For most adult humans living away from their parents, most of the time we can prioritize our internal expectations over our parents expectations. This can be MUCH harder during the holidays.
Remember all of those well made plans that you starting forming in bullet #3. Now it is time to get ready for implementation. Who else do you have to consider? To whom do you have responsibility? In the context of bullets #1-#3, how can you fulfill those responsibilities and still honor your adjusted plan?
If part of your adjusted plan means suggesting changes to past expectations, consider not just what you need to do, but also how you are going to do it. Who do you need to talk to? When do you need to talk to them? What context do they need to understand your adjusted plan? How can you care for their needs as well as your own?
Keep Your Eye on The Prize
Spend some time thinking deeply about what the holidays mean for you? What are the traditions and activities that you treasure the most? Why? For me, and I would assume for most people, it all comes down to Love and Gratitude and expressing love and gratitude to all of the people that surround and impact me.
If things get hairy or stressful, always come back to the “why." What is most important? And do all of your important people know how much they mean to you, especially in this difficult time? As always, deep slow breaths and lots of grace for yourself and for others.
Things can be beautiful even when they are hard or different. Our ability to adapt to change, reframe our relationship to expectations, and define both failure and success with grace and thoughtful consideration will bring us back to the most important parts of the holiday season.
With Much Love and Gratitude,
Happy Holidays,
Team Failure Lab
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