Is it planning or dread?: What Holiday Preparation Looks Like When Anxiety Is Running the Show
Wild Hope Therapy | For anyone whose November already feels crowded
We work with a lot of parents and a lot of women, and these are the people who are in charge of most of what has been dubbed the holiday “magic.” The thing about magic is: it’s fun. It’s the old traditions and new additions that make the holidays feel joyful and memorable. And while that is fun, it’s a lot of pressure. And it also includes some not so fun logistical planning, and takes up a ton of mental space. It also is expected from women who are often also managing working full-time and being the default caretaker.
Starting to plan early can be a useful tool for managing end of year holiday stress; but how do you know if you are engaging in supportive planning for your future self, or entering into a space of over control and even anticipatory dread? It’s incredibly difficult when we don’t have the space, time and resources to do all the special things we want to do for our families. How can we balance the magic of the season with the acceptance of what is to find what is enough? And maybe even avoid unnecessary anxiety?
Planning and Anticipatory Anxiety Are Different Processes
Planning has an endpoint. It moves toward a decision, produces an action, and transitions into the next step of a project. You think about whether to host, you decide to host, you pick a date, you send the text. The thought is finished. When it comes back, it comes back with new information or a new task attached. But there is a conclusion to the original cycle.
Anticipatory anxiety does not have an endpoint, because its actual function is not to solve anything, but to give your brain the sense that it is “doing something” about a potential problem or threat. The threat is the stress that comes from being underprepared or the grief of not seeing your perfect vision through.
Worry can operate as a form of cognitive avoidance. Verbal, linguistic thinking about a feared outcome suppresses the vivid emotional imagery and physical discomfort that would come with fully feeling it. Worry is uncomfortable, but it is less uncomfortable than how our brain perceives the feeling underneath it, so the mind keeps choosing to spiral as it is relatively safe. This is also why worry feels productive while producing nothing. You are doing something. You are just not doing the thing you think you are doing.
The other engine is intolerance of uncertainty, which research has identified as a core feature of generalized anxiety (Dugas et al., 1998). Rehearsing a family gathering forty times in advance is an attempt to eliminate the possibility of being caught off guard. But the worry never goes away because the uncertainty is not resolvable. Even after a successful dinner, there is the next gathering to be worried about, or the retroactive attempt at control that comes in the form of critiquing everything you did and said. The common theme is control.
Here are some questions you can ask yourself to decide if you’re just planning, with a touch of normal, natural stress, or if you’re in a cycle of dread and rumination:
Does it end? Planning finishes a thought and moves onto the next stop. Anxiety continues to circle around on the same issues, feeling, or concern.
Does it produce an action? Planning generates a task, a date, a text, a decision. Anxiety generates more thinking.
Is it specific or is it a mood? Planning sounds like "I need to order the turkey by the 18th. I should put a reminder on the calendar." Anxiety sounds like "there is so much to do and I will never get it all done.”
Are you problem-solving or rehearsing? Do you problem-solve and decide on a way forward, or do you keep replaying nerve-wracking scenarios over and over? Deciding how many hours you will stay is planning. Running the conversation with your aunt in your head for the ninth time is rehearsal.
What time is it? Planning happens when you have capacity or decide to work on a project. Anxiety is difficult to redirect from and comes in and out whenever something reminds you of the worry, or often when you’re trying to relax, like at bedtime.
Does it respond to being written down? A plan gets quieter once it is on paper because your brain believes it has been handled. Writing can help to get anxious thoughts down, but if writing it out doesn’t help it is more likely to be anxiety or dread that you are feeling.
What happens in your body? Planning is usually neutral, mildly satisfying or sometimes even fun. Anxiety comes with a physical discomfort: chest tightness, jaw tension, nausea, or a mix of any number of physical manifestations dependent on the person.
What do the holidays actually mean to you?
Most holiday overwhelm comes from running a set of traditions that nobody has evaluated in years, or trying to make everything you think “should” happen, happen, despite your individual values, capacity, or resources. Identifying what actually matters to you and the people you share the holidays with can help to focus in on what really matters, and minimize the strain that comes with trying to do everything just because.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) makes a useful distinction between goals and values. A goal is achievable and finite: host Thanksgiving, get the cards mailed. A value is a guiding light: connection, rest, generosity, tradition, faith, delight in your kids. Goals in service of a value will always have a bigger pay off, and are often (not always) less draining because of the joy that goes into them. And even if it doesn’t work out or go exactly as planned, you can always know that you planned based on what matters most, and that is something you can be proud of. Goals that have detached from any value are just tasks or to dos. They’re draining because the outcome isn’t connected to something deeper or meaningful to you. Even chores are based in values: wanting to have a clean home for your family, showing care and respect for yourself through your surroundings, keeping an investment well maintained. Doing anything just because you’re supposed to or because someone else expects something from you is based in obligation and often fear, and makes it heavier to carry.
So the first question is what you and your loved ones actually want this season to be about. For some people it is genuinely about religious observance. For some it is about their children having specific memories. For some it is about seeing four particular people. For some it is about ten days of not working. For most of us, it’s about being with the people we love most with flourishes that signify the gratitude we hae for one another.
Once you have a solid understanding of what really matters to you. It is easier to prioritize what you want to actually do. For each tradition, event, or obligation, consider the following:
Who is this actually for? Do you and your family members actually like this tradition or is it just how it’s always been done? Does the activity serve your values whether that is quality time, faith, or rest? Is the event something that matters to your closest family members, or is it being done not to upset someone who you might be able to set a boundary with?
What does it cost in hours, dollars, and energy? Estimate honestly. If one project takes time and resources away from something else that matters more (including rest!) then it might not actually be worth it to you, and you might not miss it that much if you cut it out.
What happens if you do not do it? Play out the real consequences. Are you prioritizing one person’s feelings over the whole? Are you afraid to set boundaries in one area of your life that detracts to the areas that matter more? Is it scary to sit with the feelings that come with setting boundaries or prioritizing yourself over the wishes of others? It’s not wrong to be worried about these things, but under-estimating your ability to cope with them might be holding you back.
Would anyone notice a smaller version? Four kinds of cookies instead of eleven. Two hours instead of six. Store-bought. Most things are flexible when you really think about it and changes are whoever is involved will understand because they also got invited to 7 cookie parties.
Are you motivated by obligation or meaning? Both are legitimate reasons to do something. Knowing which one you are operating from changes how much of your energy it deserves. It’s not bad to want to fulfill commitments to do things to make others happy sometimes even if it’s not your favorite. We do that sometimes for the people we love. But if you find you are being pulled in too many directions, and never saying no to “obligations” it might useful to interrogate this a little more and see where there is wiggle room for you.
Does this conflict with something you actually value? If you value rest and you have committed to eleven December events, the calendar is telling you something. Don’t let FOMO actually ruin your ability to be present during the holiday seasons. You are meant to have fun, too. And no one can be everyone at once.
Boundaries With Yourself
The boundaries conversation almost always focuses on other people, and for many of the women we work with the fastest ways to setting external boundaries is looking within.
Boundaries with yourself in this season look like: deciding in advance how many hours you will spend on a given thing and stopping when you hit it. Setting a gift budget and holding it. Choosing a standard of good enough for the meal and refusing to renegotiate it upward at ten at night. Deciding you will check the group chat twice a day rather than continuously. Declining to make the holiday magical in a way that requires you to be depleted from November 1 through January 2. Yes. You might have to cut things that other people really love, or that is even sad for you to skip this year. But it is important to acknowledge that you have this power.
The expectation that women produce holiday magic is a cultural phenomena we’ve only begun to address. Magic, operationally, means a great deal of invisible labor performed so that the experience appears effortless to everyone else. You are permitted to produce less of it. Your children will remember whether the house felt calm considerably longer than they will remember the elf. The truth is, the magic is you. And when you give yourself space to prune, you will likely be able to identify the things that are most worth doing and will have the biggest impact on your loved ones in the long run.
Boundaries With Other People
In the interest of finding ways to disperse some of the holiday management responsibility, if you currently are in charge of planning the holidays for a family or group, decide with your partner or co-parent before any conversation with extended family, and present one answer rather than two negotiable ones. This is an important step in not just setting boundaries that create space instead of tension, but that distributes the responsibility more evenly.
This is another time when specificity can really help. Plan out how long you will stay at each gathering (or if you will go at all) and then create a script for how you will set the boundary. Something like "We're staying home Christmas morning this year" is completely reasonable. The harder part is often delivering a message and letting the recipient hold their own emotions about it. Remember, your obligation is to the people in your closest circle, and while it doesn’t feel great to let someone down, you deserve to have your boundaries respected.
When the Dread Is Accurate Information
While dread and perseveration can be signs of over-control and anxiety, distress like this can also be indicative of a bigger problem. All emotions are information, so developing awareness about how your anxiety shows up will help you discern how to utilize the data your body is giving you. And sometimes the dread is absolutely justified and you should not ignore it.
If your family of origin includes someone who was unsafe, if gatherings reliably involve you feeling diminished or disrespected, or your boundaries are consistently crossed, then your brain and body are accurately detecting a safety hazard and you do not have to white-knuckle through that feeling.
In these situations, it helps to perform an honest risk assessment for yourself, consider limits on duration and exposure, having a plan for managing certain comments or even leaving early, and considering if you should attend at all. Nothing is more important that taking care of yourself and if you have them, your children. We find that deep down, we often know when this is the cause of our holiday anxiety and not the onslaught of parties and potlucks.
This is also part of why the holiday season amplifies grief. First holidays after a death, holidays after estrangement, holidays during infertility or after a loss, holidays with an empty chair. Anticipating that in advance and deciding what you want to do with it, including changing the traditions that hurt most, is self-care and not avoidance. You do not need to suffer to prove you are not bending to anxiety. Truthfully, the way to identify true messages of danger and fear from your body from regular anxiety is similar to the skills above. What matters most to you, and how do you best care for yourself right now?
For the holiday memory maker extraordinaire
If you recognized yourself in the eleven-at-night list-making, 10 dozen cookie baking, homemade wrapping paper crafting holiday coordinator examples above, you probably don’t need to improve your planning skills. It seems like you’re great at coming up with ideas and makin the magic happen, even if it’s messy. Try focusing on what you and your family value most about the holidays, and then run that by your list of “to-dos” and see how it feels to chuck anything that doesn’t align. You can take some of them back, but just see what happens when you don’t stop yourself from cutting anything loose that doesn’t serve your actual goals. Especially because at the holidays, the goal is joy.
If this is a season that reliably takes something out of you, or if the anticipatory anxiety has stopped being seasonal, that is exactly what therapy is for Wild Hope Therapy works with anxiety, family-of-origin dynamics, and the particular exhaustion of carrying more than your share of the invisible labor. We see clients in person in Cleveland Heights, OH and in Upper Arlington near Columbus, OH, and offer virtual counseling for clients across Ohio, including sessions that fit into a December that is already full.
You have more say over the shape of the next two months than the momentum of the season suggests. Some of it is genuinely fixed. A good deal of it is a set of decisions somebody made once, and you are allowed to be the person who makes them differently this year.
References
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Daminger, A. (2019). The cognitive dimension of household labor. American Sociological Review, 84(4), 609–633. https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122419859007
di Leonardo, M. (1987). The female world of cards and holidays: Women, families, and the work of kinship. Signs, 12(3), 440–453.
Dugas, M. J., Gagnon, F., Ladouceur, R., & Freeston, M. H. (1998). Generalized anxiety disorder: A preliminary test of a conceptual model. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 36(2), 215–226. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0005-7967(97)00070-3
Hayes, S. C., Strosahl, K. D., & Wilson, K. G. (2012). Acceptance and commitment therapy: The process and practice of mindful change (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.
Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. University of California Press.