The Abridged version:
- Research shows Americans are finding the holiday season increasingly stressful.
- Establishing new traditions is one strategy to head off grief triggered during the holidays.
- Taking a science-backed approach could help us better stick to our New Year’s resolutions.
Andru Defeye served as Sacramento’s poet laureate from 2020-2024 and is the driving force behind Sacramento Poetry Week. In this regular feature, “The Great Joy Hunt,” he explores the science behind joy and shares strategies for adding more to our lives.
My father loved Christmas. The music, the lights, the movies, the shopping, the gifts — all of it. He loved Christmas so much that my mother actually had to put a mandate on him: no Christmas music until Thanksgiving was over.
This is my third Christmas since he passed away, and it never fails that at some point during the holiday season I hear the Beach Boys’ “Little Saint Nick” or see Queen Anne chocolate-covered cherries and start bawling in a grocery store or mall.
This year it hit hard on Thanksgiving. All I wanted was to hear him annoying my entire family with his Christmas music catalog and to see my mother rolling her eyes.
For many of us, this season is far more layered than the holly jolly Hallmark-encrusted version portrayed in the movies. It comes with anxiety, depression and grief that hit especially hard this time of year and seem to show up as soon as the trees get unpacked and Mariah Carey hits the first note of that inescapable yuletide anthem.
A 2023 study published by the American Psychiatric Association found that nine out of 10 Americans say there is some part of the holiday season that stresses them out. Leading stressors include money (58%), gift pressure (40%) and missing loved ones (38%). The holiday season brings stress even to those who don’t celebrate it. One in five people said they don’t feel their culture or beliefs are represented during the holiday season and nearly half said they don’t feel included in the festivities. Some even reported feeling increased discrimination during the holidays.
Where did the sun go?
Part of this can be attributed to SAD. Not just the feeling, but the acronym. Seasonal affective disorder is a reality for millions of people worldwide. Many people experience some degree of SAD when the sun disappears. This generally looks like less motivation or an uptick in anxiety or depression.
A 2010 study from the National Library of Medicine explains part of the reason for this is that seasonal affective disorder slows morning cortisol production. We’ve been culturally trained to hear “cortisol” and think “toxic stress hormone.” That’s half-true in the same way fire is dangerous if all you know is house fires. This study points out cortisol has two very different jobs. One of them is our ignition, and that’s what gets affected for millions of people during the winter months.
The study found that for people with seasonal affective disorder, morning cortisol levels were drastically lower than their unaffected counterparts. This meant they moved slower and with less motivation during the winter months. Their cortisol didn’t stay low all day, but the morning lack contributed to slower movement as well as more susceptibility to anxiety, depression and general malaise.
Sacramento just went through a record-breaking 32 days with low to no sun, so if you’re feeling a little SAD right now, you’re not alone.
Holiday stress and spending
A 2024 study from the American Psychiatric Association found that 28% of Americans felt that holiday pressures and stress had increased from 2023, with the leading factors being money, grief/loss and family dynamics. There’s little indication that these pressures are easing.
What can we do?
I sat down with Steve Kempster, founder of Sacramento’s Bright Spot Counseling, to ask exactly that.
To confront the financial stress of the holidays, Kempster recommends prioritizing connection over dollar amounts in our gift-giving.
“I wrote heartfelt cards to people this year telling them what they mean to me and my family’s lives,” he explained. “Some of those people have gotten back to me with deep appreciation. It’s an opportunity to not participate in the capitalism of it all while also being mindful of the season of gratitude.”
“It’s the thought that counts” isn’t just an idiom, it’s behavioral science. According to three separate studies, gift givers feel like more money spent on the gift is a symbol of higher care while gift recipients do not experience it this way and often feel the same gratitude and care from midrange gifts as higher priced ones.
When family dynamics aren’t merry and bright
But what if it’s not just the Kriss Kringle capitalism of it all, but the very people and environments we are expected to celebrate with? Many of us are thrown into large family gatherings with people we fundamentally disagree with or who have traumatized us.
“So I do this thing with people where I have them imagine the play of their life,” Kempster said. “What are the lines that you’ve read in different stages of your life and at what point have people imposed their lines or their narrative on you? What scripts or lines do you want to let go of?”
You don’t need to read lines that other people have been putting in your script. You can always write new lines for yourself.
In the case of grief being triggered by the holidays, Kempster explains this is called ambiguous loss. This is the idea that we are not only mourning the person that is no longer with us but all of the possibilities of what could have been. He suggests rituals of remembrance as a way to honor those passed and keep them present in our holidays.
Kempster recounted the grief he felt after the loss of his mother, “My mom’s not going to show up with her cinnamon buns on Christmas morning. That was her tradition. And that ambiguity can create some inner turmoil, and I think it’s really important to ritualize those things,” he explained. “What are the things we can build into our rituals that invite those people or those memories back in? So I make cinnamon buns on Christmas morning now.”
The neuroscience of New Year’s resolutions
Now, once we make it through Christmas there’s that weird portal where no one knows exactly what day it is or what we should be doing. The days the kids love because they get to run around out of school, ride their new bikes and spend all day playing video games. The ones where a large portion of adults float aimlessly through while we eat way too many Christmas leftovers and scroll Instagram until we have to go back to work. This is a breeding ground for depression and mental health drops. Kempster suggests what he calls the three M’s: mindfulness, mastery and movement.
“On the daily, pick up at least one of those things,” he explained, “Go for a walk outside. Learn something new. Smile at somebody nontransactionally. Be present and engage with the world authentically.”
Once we make it through the portal, New Year’s Eve awaits on the other side. Do you have your resolution ready? Science backs the concept of “new year, new you” but may have some insight to help you shift your approach to be more successful with your resolutions.
There is a lot of data on the idea of creating a new habit or breaking an old one at the start of a year, a month or a week. Researchers call this the fresh start effect and refer to these dates as temporal landmarks which can also include things like birthdays, anniversaries or the beginning of a new job or semester in school. The reason these landmark days work so well to launch new habits is because they provide psychological distance between past you and future you.
While Jan. 1 is a great time to resolve to change our lives, how can we better stick to our resolutions this year? One way is by changing toward something rather than away from it.
Quick! Don’t think about pink elephants.
I’ll bet you’re thinking about a pink elephant.
This was exactly the test done by Daniel Wegner in the late 1980s that produced what we call ironic process theory. This means that telling the brain what not to think about guarantees that we will think about it. Psychologists recommend approach-oriented goals over avoidance-oriented goals for long-term success. This means centering a goal on what you want to achieve rather than something you want to quit. This can look like “I want to eat five servings of fruits and vegetables a day” rather than “I want to cut out sugar from my diet” or “I want to build my lung capacity back up” rather than “I’m going to quit smoking.”
People with an approach-oriented goal were 58.9% successful as opposed to only 47.1% that focused on an avoidance-oriented goal.
In his book “Atomic Habits” author James Clear explains that “we don’t rise to the level of our goals, we fall to the level of our habits” and encourages people to focus on getting 1% better every day. Perhaps rather than promising ourselves a new hourlong workout routine every day we start with 10 pushups daily until we can do 15 or 20 and give ourselves space to grow.
For some of us, the holidays can feel like more of a gantlet to get through than a walk through a winter wonderland. If that’s the case for you, you’re not alone. Joy doesn’t mean that we don’t cry in the grocery store when we walk past the chocolate-covered cherries. Sometimes it means that we buy a box to celebrate the love that we’re missing this holiday season.
Be gentle with yourself and give yourself the grace, space and pace to find joy in your holiday. You deserve it.
Until next time, The Great Joy Hunt continues.
Andru Defeye is the former poet laureate of Sacramento and a regular contributor, writing The Great Joy Hunt for Abridged.