What is holiday depression?
Holiday depression is another name for the blues, a special kind that comes around starting with Thanksgiving and peaking around Christmastime or New Year. The melancholy among us can have a rough go over these weeks, and even the cheeriest among us might feel it too.
There are many reasons why the holidays surface emotional pain. The stress of travel, end-of-year work deadlines, finances, and pressures of hosting and attending family gatherings are all valid reasons that some women find this to be a demanding time of the year.
Whatever your feelings are, trust us, if you’re not feeling merry, it’s ok. We get it.
What are the causes of holiday depression?
Holiday depression can be caused by any number of things. The most common sources are pre-existing mental health conditions, substance abuse history, seasonal affective disorder, stress, grief, and financial trouble.
Here are three additional ways to think about the holiday blues.
1. Compare and Despair
The holidays can highlight ways in which we feel we aren’t up to snuff. Someone else’s job, children, house, appearance, whatever, can steal away our own sorely-needed self-approval.
A little cure for this holiday blues-maker:
Write up a list of everything you are proud of yourself for, large and small. Acknowledge yourself, for your courage, your best intentions, and all that could be looked upon kindly and lovingly. Put the list in your purse and take it with you to your gathering. In a moment when you need it, go to the bathroom and read your list to yourself.
2. Boundaries and Depression
Due to stress, limited time and space, and large groups of people, something will probably happen during this season that crosses our boundaries. We will feel, whether we recognize it or not, angry.
Depending on our anger skills, we may lash out (saying something we regret, for example), or feel guilty about our anger and turn it inward. The latter will instantly create depression.
How can we stay in witness observer mode as much as we can, taking note that we are angry or that we feel our boundaries are being crossed, and yet not turn against ourselves?
A little cure for this holiday blues-maker:
Choose a subtle, self-soothing action that you will do every time you notice crossed boundaries. For example, you could wrap the fingers of your right hand around the thumb of your left hand and hold it for as long as twelve full breaths.
This is a little body-energy hack that will activate the parasympathetic nervous system and help you stay calm, but also soothe yourself. If you know something positive that will work better than this, good! Do that instead.
3. Stress
Finally, it seems pat, but stress is really bad for humans! Like anger, stress needs to be released almost immediately from the body or it turns into depression or physical illness.
Everyone knows the holidays are stressful, whether it’s because of financials, getting gifts in time, managing family schedules, finishing work projects before the end of the year, being responsible for cooking and hosting, or just the horrors of winter travel. So what could you do to prevent stress from turning toxic for you?
A little cure for this holiday blues-maker:
Pre-plan what you will do every time you notice a stress spike, whether in the weeks during the run-up to the holidays or during the actual days. For example, you could pause to do four rounds of box breathing. Box breathing is like this: four-count breath in, four-count hold, four-count breath out, four-count hold; and all of that four times total.
Again, maybe you have a better hack. Would you rather stop what you’re doing for a 5-minute stretch break? Dance break? Step-outside break? The important point is to plan to use a specific tool and use it.
What is the difference between holiday and seasonal depression?
Seasonal affective disorder is connected to all times of the year in which there is a lack of sunlight and would be diagnosed no matter when it shows up. Holiday depression is linked specifically to the winter holidays themselves. Both of them have similar symptoms, of what would ordinarily be diagnosed as depression, including lowered mood, lowered energy, and bleak thoughts.
The connection between preexisting mental illness and holiday depression
Whether it’s because so much of our mental illness is tied up with family topics, because the winter offers less of the healing relief of sun and outside time or another reason, the connection between the winter holidays and an uptick in mental health symptoms is strong.
This is especially true of the period of time after the holidays themselves, such as the latter days of December or the first days of the new year.
What are signs of depression in women?
Women and men show their depression slightly differently. Men may show their depression more in behavioral terms, for example by isolating, and to experience it more consciously as negative outlook and bleak thoughts about the world. Women may be more likely to feel their depression emotionally, as sadness, and to cry and to feel bad about themselves.
For both, depression is about feeling low, in terms of mood and energy, and is often paired with stopping certain activities that made us feel good. There are many vicious cycles paired with depression, such as eating food that makes us feel worse, poor sleep patterns that give us even less energy, skipping exercise routines so our endorphin levels drop even lower, and overindulging in entertainment, which makes us feel even less connected with what matters in life.
Common signs of depression are:
- Appetite changes, including weight gain or weight loss
- Loss of enjoyment in hobbies or creative activities
- Feeling very exhausted, needing to oversleep, or be physically lazy (beyond normal levels of winter laziness)
- Moodiness, crying, feeling sad, and thinking about the past too much
- Crying without really understanding why you’re crying or what you’re sad about
- Negative thoughts about yourself and your future
How to cope with holiday depression
Why not make a plan for coping with holiday depression? If you don’t end up needing it, great, but if you do, you’ll be happy you had enough self-love and foresight to prepare.
We suggest the following ideas be part of your holiday self-care plan:
1. Exercise, exercise, exercise
Exercise is nature’s most potent antidepressant, right here in our own bodies. It’s so simple it’s silly: if we just move (enough to get sweaty and energized), we’ll feel better.
What can you do to make sure vigorous exercise is part of your holiday season?
Our suggestion is to commit to some kind of daily challenge, such as 30 yoga sessions in 30 days, or to make December your month of dancing til you’re sweaty, once every day. Exercise doesn’t have to take all that much time – just 20 minutes of HIIT or another activity that gets you sweaty and out of breath will give you a cascade of good feelings.
2. Go outside every day for 20 minutes
Nature is also nature’s most potent antidepressant! (It’s a tie with exercise). Find a way to be around plants, gardens, trees, beaches, mountains – whatever you have.
20 minutes outside in the natural light, air, and sounds of nature will deal a powerful blow to the holiday blues. If you have to put on rain boots, lots of sweaters, or a giant jacket and it seems exhausting to do even just that – good. Fighting some opposition for the sake of your happiness actually helps create happiness.
3. Go to Meetings
If you are new to 12-Step, why not make this the year you find out what all the good fuss is about? If you’re not new, then you know why this tip works.
There are 12-step meetings for nearly every kind of trouble, and all of them have Christmas Day meeting marathons.
For those of us with addictions, there are the classics: AA, NA, PA, and so on.
For those of us with food issues, codependency, or love addiction, we have options too.
Finally, 12-step programs exist even just for helping us deal with our emotions. Isn’t that amazing?
You don’t have to identify fully with the description to get the benefit of attending, just go with a spirit of curiosity and open-heartedness. Sit close to the warm fire of honesty-based heart connection offered in these groups.
Managing and coping with stress
Managing stress has two aspects. One is ordering your life so that it unfolds in a less stressful way, and the second is to provide yourself with mechanisms for releasing stress (detoxifying and relaxing the body).
We suggest you do both. Here is our guide to managing tasks so that your life feels less stressful, in the first place!
Project Manage Your Holiday Season
This process, called Personal Kanban, can save your sanity. If this is hard to get from reading, there are short videos online. It’s worth a look up – it’s actually really simple. Here’s our explanation:
Step 1: Collect Your To-Dos
On Post-its or small slips of paper, brain dump all the things that need to be done (one to-do item per Post-it or slip of paper).
Step 2: Order and Prioritize Tasks in A Visible Way
Somewhere you can see it easily, such as on a whiteboard, corkboard, or just a big piece of paper taped to the wall, make three columns into which you can divide your tasks. These three columns are: To Do, Doing, and Done.
Start with putting all your post-its/tasks into the To Do column. Place the tasks in that column, in order of priority and actionability. The tasks which are most ready to be tackled right now are most towards the top of the list, and anything which is bigger or needs more time will be more towards the bottom.
For example, “Christmas present for Brian” might be above, “Last grocery store run before Christmas” for chronological reasons, and “Christmas present for Brian” might be below “Respond to Molly’s email” because email is easy and can be done right away.
The most time-sensitive and important tasks, but which are actionable, are the tasks that should be towards the top. If a task is time-sensitive but doesn’t feel actionable, try breaking it down into smaller chunks of task and see if that helps.
For example, maybe “Get presents for everyone” is too big to be completed as one task, whereas “Order coffee maker for Jake” is a tiny task that surely could be done right now.
Step 3: Move Tasks through the Pipeline
Now begin tackling your tasks. The way to do this is to take a limited number of tasks from the big, first To-Do column, and move them into the Doing column.
Only put the number of tasks that you think you can get done now or in this particular window of task-doing. The Doing column should never have too much in it at once, literally only the tasks you are essentially doing right now, which will be completed shortly.
Every time you have time to work on your tasks, clear the items in your Doing column, moving them into the third column, Done. When your Doing column is empty, take a few more from the To Do column, reordering and shifting remaining tasks, as well as adding new ones to that column, as needed.
This little life hack goes a long way!
More about this process can be found on this website.
When is it time to seek professional help?
If you know the holidays are hard for you, then do yourself and everyone else a solid and talk to a professional healer or therapist about it. Short-term help for getting through a season is something that can be done any time.
If addiction is on the table, and you’re worried you’ll slip, then take action and get help right away, because relapse is a serious world of hurt for you and your loved ones, both.
Much heartache can be avoided by having enough self-love to prioritize how you feel over all the other expectations that may be loaded onto the holidays.
You do matter, dear reader, enough to protect and support. We can tell you that without even knowing who you are.
Villa Kali Ma can help women overcome holiday depression and enjoy this holiday season
Villa Kali Ma helps women recover from the many miseries of addiction, mental health disorders, and trauma.
We use clinically effective, evidence-based treatment models and alternative holistic practices such as yoga, mindfulness, and nutrition, integrated together as one treatment course. We treat each woman as the individual she is and approach healing with sensitivity, compassion, and a wakeful heart.
The holidays are hard for many of our clients, and we’re prepared to help. If you’re staring down some darkness that you don’t have the heart to face alone this season, then come to us and we’ll do it together. A problem shared is a problem halved.
Either way, we send you our biggest wishes for sane, healthy holidays, dear readers!