How To Have Happy Holidays, Without All The Stress

What causes the most stress during the holidays? It’s usually one of two things… family (relationships), or presents.

Maybe you don’t get along with someone in your family… maybe you don’t get along with anyone in your family. Or it could be that you have “things that need to get done”, and spending time with extended family keeps you from doing those things.

Or perhaps you are one of those ones who worries about gifts… “Did Suzy get the same number of presents as Joey?” or “Did I spend the same amount on each of the nephews and nieces?”. Everything has to be “fair” (there is no such thing as “fair”, but that’s an article to itself) so that nobody feels left out or insulted.

Though these two sources of holiday stress seem very different, the true source turns out to be the same… it come from focusing on you.

Sounds wrong, doesn’t it? How does focusing on yourself cause you to stress about other people, or about making sure that the distribution of presents is “fair”?

When you stress about who gets how many presents, and how much they’re worth, what you’re really worrying about is how that reflects on you. If you didn’t care about the “kind of person” it makes you, you would just give people gifts based on who you are and/or who they are, things you enjoy giving and that they enjoy receiving. The number and cost wouldn’t matter, because the whole goal and focus would be giving them something that would bring a bit of happiness.

Stressing about relationships works in a similar way… even the relationship with your significant other. If you remove “how it affects me” from the way you think about the relationship, it takes away all the stress. It doesn’t magically fix relationships, as there may be solid reasons why you don’t get along, or you may simply be different enough people that there isn’t much common ground upon which to build. You are very likely to find, however, that your relationships (all of them) improve when you stop looking at everything through the “how it affects me” lens.

It’s not easy to learn how to stop looking through that lens (actually, it might be more useful to refer to it as unlearning it, as it is a behavior that is learned), so what can you do to relieve the stress right now, while we’re still in the holiday season?

The answer is simple: Go do something to serve others. It doesn’t need to be your family… it might even be better if it isn’t. Go volunteer at a homeless shelter, visit someone in a nursing home who has no family, or buy a bunch of toys and bring them to children who are in the hospital this holiday season.

It doesn’t really matter what you do, as long as you don’t do it for yourself… giving to others when no personal gain is involved has great emotional and spiritual rewards, one of the least of which is the relief of stress.

So go, help someone else without looking for any kind of reward, not even a thank you… and watch how much your own outlook improves.

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