Happy New Year, dear readers! Thank you for your attention to Villa Kali Ma and what we have to share about how women can heal from addiction, mental illness, and trauma. We are wishing you a very bright, expansive, and beautiful 2025, full of inspiration, connection, and joy.
At the end of last year, we wrote a post about how to take care of yourself if you experience depression during the holidays.
Holidays survived without sinking into a pit of gloom? Congratulations, it’s truly no small feat! Take a moment to be happy about yourself, you are a treasure and you deserve it.
Now, for some of us, fortunately, or unfortunately, it’s on to the next challenge: post-holiday depression! Here are some thoughts on how to pass through this next phase, with kindness and care.
What is post-holiday depression?
As the name suggests, post-holiday depression kicks in as we come down from the holidays and all that they were or were not for us this year. Post-holiday depression has all the same symptoms as regular depression: lowered energy and mood, loss of enjoyment, bleak outlook, and feelings of sadness or mourning.
The key difference between post-holiday depression and regular depression is that post-holiday depression is seasonal, and will fade as the holidays recede further into the rearview mirror.
What causes post-holiday depression?
Depression is a call to go inwards. When we have been giving a lot of attention to the outside world, and perhaps neglecting our inner world, depression may appear as a psychological messenger who beckons us inward. Come home, she says, come back to me. I am your person.
Once we go back into our own psyches, pulling our attention and thoughts away from other people and what they think of us, we may find emotions that we have not yet had the time to process.
These were feelings we put on hold during the holidays because it wasn’t the right time or place to mourn, flash with anger, or tingle with creative inspiration. But now that we’re back in our routine again, we can make time and space to catch up with ourselves. Just as a child might need extra time with a parent who has been traveling, after that parent comes home, your inner child may need some extra time with you, after you have been “away” from her.
All of this takes time and space. We may need to rest, get out into nature, and do soothing manual tasks like cooking, baking, or cleaning while our mind free roams, in order to sort through what we took in during the holidays.
Why do women experience post-holiday depression?
Women experience depression for lots of reasons. One factor that affects us in particular is how we feel about loved ones, family, and togetherness.
Most of us have complicated feelings about our family of origin relationships, and the temporary reunion with family brings up a lot. The holidays can be a bittersweet combination of longing, nostalgia, anger, bitterness, sadness, joy, and who knows how many other emotions. Once they’re concluded, we may find the holidays have left us with a bag of surplus emotions to feel.
Also, it’s simple but it’s true: at the body chemistry level, a lot of us overeat during the holidays. Overeating anything, but sugar, in particular, is linked to depression.
Finally, if we have been away from routines we rely on for sanity-saving, such as exercise routines, morning journaling, and so on, we may also just be out of balance. The best way to get back into balance is to gently return to routines that we know to be helpful and stabilizing.
How long does post-holiday depression last?
By definition, post-holiday depression is a temporary state, and it will fade within a few weeks of returning to our normal life.
If we are depressed for months after the holidays, it is probably not really the holidays that got us, or at least not only the holidays. Rather, we may also be affected by seasonal affective disorder or topics that are surfacing in our psyche for witnessing. Whatever the reason, if depression is lingering on, then we may need to get some support for clearing it out.
What are post-holiday depression statistics?
There is little formal research available about post-holiday depression, perhaps because the symptoms tend to resolve on their own naturally by early spring, latest, and therefore do not necessarily represent a serious issue for humanity.
That said, it is anecdotally evident, at least to those of us who work in mental health, that the entire span of the year from November to the end of January is a difficult time for many people.
Whether that’s because of the shortened daylight hours, pressure about the year’s end, the holidays, or getting over the holidays, remains to be explored in clinical research. More information would need to be gathered.
But rest assured, if this happens to you, you are not alone. Many women do experience these months to be the hardest time of their personal yearly cycle.
How to overcome post-holiday depression?
The way to overcome post-holiday depression might be different for each woman.
In general, it always works to start with feeling better physically, and trusting that emotions and mind will follow.
Eat fresh green food (or whatever clean nourishment your body is asking for), sleep abundantly, turn off your devices, connect with nature, and get the body moving.
In addition to letting the body guide you back to feeling good, start taking some self-loving actions. Use your tools.
Wherever you’re at, you can start right now by making a list of all the tools you already possess, which you know work to make you feel better.
Just brain-dump all the things you know help, in no order:
I can go for a walk around the neighborhood every day. I can make some green juice. I can start intermittent fasting again. I can drink a big glass of water with lemon. I can cook myself a nourishing vegetable soup. I can turn the phone and the computer off. I can read my book. I can make and send thank you cards, including one to myself for staying sober. I can pay for the coffee for the stranger behind me in line. I can cuddle my cat. I can get into my pajamas early. I can go to the botanical garden. I can collect eucalyptus leaves at the park.
Depression is cured in part with kindness and caring for yourself, and remembering to do the self-loving, self-caring things that you have already discovered.
For further inspiration, we offer the following journal exercises:
1. Say Goodbye to Last Year
Sometimes depression is just mourning. If you haven’t yet done it, take some time to mourn, honor, and release what you have been through. Reflect on all that you experienced, discovered, and worked through in 2024. Say goodbye.
Dear 2024 me, I am writing to say goodbye to you. There were many experiences I had with you that were really great. A highlight was in the summer, I am still so amazed we managed to complete that project, we really pulled it off!… A difficult moment that I endured and learned from was…I am grateful for you because…
2. Welcome the New Year
If you haven’t yet done it, take some time to welcome in your new life. It is unknown to you now, a surprise. But imagine what highlights and interesting surprises may be in store. What will come to you this year, if this is a good year for you?
Dear 2025 me, I am so excited to meet you! I hope I will be ready for you. I know that you will be brighter and bigger than any past version of me. I am a little scared, I don’t want to let you down. I’m excited too, though. If it were up to me, I would wish for some really great traveling to happen, maybe we could go to Hawaii or someplace like that. Even better, I hope I make some new friends, I want to laugh a lot, and feel tender and connected, and feel like I am a good person….
Dear reader, whoever you are and however you’re feeling today, lots of love to you from us over here at Villa Kali Ma. May your 2025 be full of magic, meaning, and transformation!
