The surge in anxiety comes from the surplus of contemplation

Why do we get the holiday blues?

Is there a clinical explanation for the increase in stress at the end of the year?

The national alliance on mental health published a study showing that sixty four percent of people with mental illness report holidays make their conditions worse.

Now, any number of triggers could contribute to that boost in anxiety and depression.

Travel, loneliness, high expectations, family conflict, financial strain, dark and cold weather, the memory of happier times, grandma shitting her pants at church, and so on.

But here’s one trigger you might not have considered.

Holidays afford people additional days to acknowledge all of the unpleasant aspects of their life.

Simple math. People have a disproportionate amount of time on their hands, and the cream rises to the top. All the feelings they pushed down and denied and avoided all year, they hitch a ride on a one heart open sleigh. And when they clear off that frosty magnifying glass, all those difficult emotions lingering just below the surface be jingling all the way.

No wonder everyone gains five pounds.

This is the central problem with the holidays. The unprecedented increase of existential reflection isn’t something most people can contend with. The surge in anxiety comes from the surplus of contemplation.

Chestnuts might be roasting on an open fire, but the emotions roasting within us are actually what’s nipping at our heels.

Now that we have been given the gift of time, we unwrap a few less than festive thoughts.

Bah! Most wonderful time of the year my ass.

I was talking to a friend of mine who ceremonially creates her vision board for the following year during the holidays. It’s a beautiful ritual. I used to do that kind of thing myself well into my thirties. Until I eventually realized:

Wait a minute, why do I have to wait until the end of the year to visualize how I want my life to look? July isn’t a good time to dream? Screw that, I’m starting right now. I’m singing that song in the summer baby. Growth is mine for the taking.

Look, there’s nothing wrong with an inspiring menorah or a glowing holiday tree to make me feel festive. But I don’t need some calendar invented by the pope in the fifteen hundreds to decide when I am going reflect on my own existence.

I’ve studied history. Gregory was one hundred percent acting in collusion with a secretive global cabal to engineer calendar reform, so he could manipulate modern society into a more centralized and authoritarian control structure.

Point being, if you want to beat those holiday blues, you don’t need to chug egg nogg and stuff yourself with latkes. Santa has a pretty busy schedule anyway, so here’s what you should consider.

Make a habit of introspection during the year, and the holidays won’t destroy you.

Get yourself accustomed to addressing both the positive and negative aspects of your existence, and a few extra days or weeks at the end of the year won’t send you into a tailspin of depression. Create reflective rituals that are uniquely appealing to your preferences and need, so you can assess your experiences, learn from them, and continuously grow as an individual.

Doing so will foster a mindset of ongoing improvement and adaptation.

See, that’s the thing about all holidays. They only come once a year. And that messes with our heads. Because it creates this illusion that there’s only one day or week per annum in which we should act loving, joyful, thankful, generous, reflective, whatever.

But if we want to keep jack frost from nipping at our heels, we need to get out ahead of it. We have to be more adaptive than that. Consistent emotional wellbeing comes from avoiding bottlenecked reflection. Spreading the reflective process throughout the year.

December is not going to be the hap happiest season of all, if we spend it confronting our backlog of thoughts and feelings and experiences that need processing. The overwhelming accumulation of emotion will swallow us whole.

Think of it this way. Would you rather your boss give you immediate feedback on your work so you can improve in real time? Or keep feedback bottled up for months at a time, and then vomit it all into your lap during your regularly scheduled performance review?

I’ve had both. At one of my startup jobs, I had a boss who waited six months to tell me that a blog post I wrote five months prior was inaccurate and offensive. Well thanks for the heads up. Not helpful for my growth.

Compare that to another job, where my boss would always give me feedback, both positive and negative, within twenty minutes of every single piece of writing I published. Even if it was one sentence like, great job on that newsletter, or, hey, can you go delete the final paragraph of that article, it doesn’t reflect well on our brand, at least I knew where I stood. At least I could get ahead of the iteration curve.

This same principle applies to giving ourselves feedback. We are our own best managers. The more often we engage in regular introspection, the more likely we are to develop healthy coping mechanisms for managing challenging times. An ounce of reflection is worth a pound of sanity.

The opposite is letting our shit fester. Maybe you’ve heard of the expression, a problem shared is a problem halved? Well, the math works the other way too. A conflict avoided is a conflict multiplied. Especially within the walls of our head.

We need to get out ahead of it.

Look, reflection is going to be hard either way. Whether we do it regularly, or once at the end of the year,. the process will bring up a range of uncomfortable and difficult emotions.

Jack frost will come nipping at our heels no matter what. We may as well kill the monster while it’s still a baby.

If you want to have a holly jolly time, then beware of the ice that appears on the surface of your mind.

You might find yourself with a disproportionate amount of time on your hands, and the egg nogg will rise to the top.

How could you get yourself accustomed to addressing both the positive and negative aspects of your existence?