Dr. Carole Myers
Welcome to Health Connections. The show about people, health and policy. I'm Dr. Carole Myers, today. I'm joined by Andrea Yates to discuss how we actually find peace and joy during the holiday season. Dr. Yates is an engineer and a psychologist who describes her roles at the University of Tennessee as advisor, consultant and educator. Welcome to Health Connections.
Dr. Andria Yates
Thank you for having me Dr. Myers.
So Dr Yates, what are the origins of holiday stress?
Well, holiday stress, fundamentally, is not that different from any other stress. It's just that this time of the year we have condensed time periods and expectations that we don't have in many other times of the year that can add to the stress that we perceive.
Could you say a little bit more about those expectations that make this a little bit different?
Expectations can come from a variety of sources within ourselves. It's from our past, our memories, and then also what we're projecting of what we want to experience during the holidays. The expectations can also come from other people. It's a time we tend to be in contact with people. Maybe we haven't seen much of the rest of the year, and their expectations may not be in alignment with our own.
So we can have a conflict between our expectations, maybe what we had as a child or didn't have, and then we can have expectations that differ from the folks that we interact with. And this is the source of the stress.
It's certainly one of the sources. Another is that we're expecting a lot of ourselves, physiologically, emotionally and mentally, and that adds to stress levels as well.
Say more about that, about expecting more of ourselves.
So I would imagine most of your listeners are like you and me. We have pretty busy lives during the rest of the year, and then comes the holiday season, and there are extra activities. Sometimes there's a different party, if not every night, several nights of the week, there are extra financial expenses, burdens, opportunities to do things that we don't do the rest of the year. There may be travel, and we may also be wanting to create memories for people other than ourselves. So we may feel the burden and that expectation and stress of our children, our parents. If you're in the sandwich generation, you may be having parents who maybe some of their last holiday seasons, and you may have children that you're hoping to create those beautiful memories for them.
What is your advice for finding peace and joy and not having stress take away from that peace and joy during the holiday season?
So I sort of have two directions of advice. One would be, the more you can be proactive to create the holiday season that you want, which may not be based on what others expectations are to do that. If you can't do that and you're involved in holiday experiences that bring you stress that you don't wish to have, then find a way to take care of yourself. It could be as simple as taking a step outside saying you need a breath of fresh air when there's a lot of family tension that you're around that you can't remove. It could be taking some time just for yourself in advance of the event, and really process whether you journal or just think about it or talk about it with a beloved other. How are you going to handle a particular experience that you perceive will probably coming at you with so thinking proactively, how can I not be bothered by that in the way that you are typically in the moment?
