'Tis the season for peace, joy and humanity, so why is it that so many people are angry, stressed, self-involved or just plain sad? Holiday performance anxiety might be one way to think of it.
Holiday performance anxiety describes that pervasive sense of "it's not enough" that seems to saturate the holiday season. Given the seasonal social and cultural messages that we confront, it's not unreasonable to consider that this sense of "it's not enough" can easily distort itself into "I'm not enough", a notion that provides us with a rather neat container for explaining the socially paradoxical behavior that we so often encounter at this time of year.
Think of holiday performance anxiety as a subset of a more primitive performance anxiety -- our fundamental drive for survival. One of the key elements informing this basic survival imperative is our need for a sense of acceptance. Without a basic level of acceptance, we are apt to be left behind in the wilderness to fend for ourselves, so we work very hard to establish our value within the social context of the "tribe". This ostensibly minimizes the possibility of being left behind, and we remain safe, warm and dry.
As society and culture have become more complex, this very simple ideal of personal survival has evolved to include not just physical survival, but social, emotional and spiritual survival, as well. So, giving the right gift, drafting the perfect eggnog, getting your cards out on time and seeing every single holiday play that every single child of every single one of your friends is in becomes, in this context, something of a post-modern substitute for field craft and skill with a spear.
While our immediate need for physical safety may have diminished -- there are no saber-toothed tigers at the dog park -- our core sensibility around personal survival has clearly been replaced by these more subtle considerations. The pressures of the holiday season would seem to magnify the (normally quite positive and productive) anxiety prompted by our hardwired survival response -- and its more subtle aspects -- to quite untenable proportions, transforming it into a fuel that feeds a fire of frustration, worry and discontent. When that discontent comes out sideways, people get trampled at Wal-Mart.
The thing is that the anxiety provoked by the seasonal irrationality suggesting that "it" and, by association, "we" are somehow "not enough" is just that -- irrational. The messages that we have received -- and continue to receive -- leave us with the misbegotten impression that this time of year is somehow different than any other time of year, transforming a season of joy and celebration into a season of crazy and crazy-making informed by the basic need for validation that we all share.
What can bring us back to center is the recognition that this much is, indeed, enough, that you are enough and that "it" is enough. From that center it possible to see this time of year as no different from any other, and that giving of ourselves in ways large and small can simply be a matter of course, not some sort of seasonal trial or test that provokes in us a level of negative emotion that is anathema to a core sensibility of satisfaction, ease and contentment.
© 2011 Michael J. Formica, All Rights Reserved
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