3 Mistakes People Make During The Holidays — And How To Avoid Them
To start, we all need to lower our expectations.
Navigating the holiday season while preserving daily routines poses a challenge, as festivities often disrupt established habits.
By setting realistic expectations and incorporating small adjustments, one can not only maintain a sense of normalcy during the holidays but also ease the transition back to regular routines afterward.
What We Get Wrong About The Holiday Season
The holiday season is many people's favorite time of the year because it usually brings us together with our loved ones — our friends and families, which is also why it's some people's most dreaded time of year.
From here flow three mistakes:
- Those who look forward to the holidays risk coming into the holiday with idealized expectations and getting disappointed.
- Those who dread the holidays risk falling into passivity instead of being proactive and figuring out how to make things go better than years past.
- Everyone's routines get disrupted and habits we've worked hard to set up during the year often get abandoned. Many of us don't plan how to avoid that. Given the holiday season is long, we then risk setting ourselves way back.
If You Tend To Idealize The Holidays
In one of my monthly polls, 25% of readers said their expectations for the holidays exceeded their experience.
The best way to avoid that — without putting a damper on the buildup and excitement that can be very positive and useful — is to get more specific in your expectations.
Rather than look forward to the holidays as a whole, take a moment to define for yourself what specific moments you look forward to — the special gift you got for someone that you're eager to give them, the special dish you can't wait to have, the rituals you always enjoy.
Being specific in terms of what you're excited about (as long as those expectations are realistic) is a great way to avoid disappointment because those moments are often easier to predict and are most stable from year to year.
If You Tend to Dread the Holidays
If your experience of the holidays is usually lonely or stressed or you anticipate being sad (e.g., because you just lost someone or a favorite person won't be there or you have to be in a situation you find tense and uncomfortable, etc.) the best thing you can do is to try to curate your experience ahead of time by minimizing the stressful moments and adding in ones that would bring you more comfort and joy.
For example, if a trip home is stressful, shave off a day or two. If you're worried about feeling lonely, set up short video calls with close friends or loved ones so you can spend some time with them in ways that won't disrupt their own plans (15 minutes can do the trick).
If you'll miss your cat or dog when you're away, take some videos of them ahead of time that you can watch when you're apart (or create a playlist from the many you probably have).
In short, it's tempting to slip into passivity when you're dreading something but even small tweaks can change your experience from painful to tolerable and that can make a meaningful difference.
How to Keep Habits and Routines During The Holidays
It is tough to keep up our regular habits and routines over the holidays, but that doesn't mean we should let them go entirely. The idea is to minimize the damage and disruption so that getting back into our routines after the holidays is easier and less overwhelming.
1. List the habits and routines that will be hard to maintain.
Include healthy eating, exercise, sleep hygiene (getting to bed and getting up at regular times), alcohol consumption, meditation, and any other self-care and self-enrichment routines.
2. Indicate when and where they will be at risk.
Identify both the location and the situations that will make them challenging to maintain.
3. Problem-solve how to minimize the disruption.
For each one, figure out how to do even a little bit to keep your momentum going.
For example, a five-minute workout, eating a healthy breakfast and lunch if dinner is going to be a feast, meditation every other day, or following days of 'slippage' with a disciplined day, can all keep your momentum loss to a minimum and make it easier to get back on track after the holidays.
4. Set realistic expectations.
Part of what demoralizes us when we break our habits is the negative self-talk that follows. By setting reasonable expectations that you can achieve, you can and should feel proud for making the effort during a time when it's difficult to do so — and making it easier to get back to your routines in 2024.
What We Get Wrong About Giving Presents
Gift Giving Mistake #1
We fail to use perspective-taking to update what they would want/enjoy at this current time.
Grandpa might have liked socks five years ago but does he need new ones this year? Tastes and needs change — make sure to account for that.
Gift Getting Mistake #2
It's common to hope that our loved ones can read our minds and know what would make us happy.
At best they can guess but rather than 'test' their ability to read your mind, giving them a hint or two or even being specific in some cases can make it easier on all concerned. Yes, surprises are great but if there's a person in your life that typically 'misses' when it comes to gift giving, help them out.
Guy Winch is a distinguished psychologist and acclaimed author. His work has been featured in The New York Times and Psychology Today.