Holiday Stress Management Tips

August 7, 2009 | By Belinda Bison In stress management tips |

The holiday season can be a stressful time. Between getting all your relatives together, cooking all the food and the long, dark winter nights, many people feel stressed and depressed and in need of a holiday to recover from their holiday. But with these simple holiday stress management tips, the holidays can be the enjoyable experience that they’re supposed to be.

Holiday Stress Management Tip #1: Keep it Simple

A lot of holiday stress is caused by overcomplicating your holiday arrangements. The good news is that you can cut corners and still have a wonderful holiday. Prioritize your activities and cut out the ones you wouldn’t really miss if they were gone. Chances are, there are some holiday traditions that are only there out of habit. And you can simplify the holiday meal even further by making it a potluck, where everyone brings a dish. Oprah Winfrey also came up with the idea of making your bar a specialty bar, serving different varieties of one drink, such as margaritas or martinis, which is a lot simpler than trying to stock a full bar.

Holiday Stress Management Tip #2: Plan in Advance

It is never a good idea to leave everything until the last minute. A personal organizer, or a PDA for the more technologically advanced among you, can be a vital tool in helping you keep track of your card and gift lists, shopping lists and budgets. A regular organizer has the edge over a PDA, however, in that you can use it to store such things as receipts and recipe cards.

Holiday Stress Management Tip #3: Manage Your Expectations

One common cause of holiday stress is an idealized expectation of family togetherness that doesn’t exist outside of a sitcom holiday special. Real life families are difficult, argumentative and vain. The only way to cope with the stresses that this fact causes is to learn to deal with people as they are and learn to laugh off their foibles and try to defuse tensions.

It is often useful to try and arrange family events so that people are situated with the family members they feel most comfortable with. Teenagers in particular can often feel miserable at family gatherings, in the company of older (or younger) relatives, and a good holiday stress management tip for teens is to make sure that they are kept in the company of other teens as much as possible, as they will be able to relate to each other better.

Back to main page…