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Holidays can be times of joy and relaxation, or times of frustration and stress. And a simple shift in thinking is what makes the difference.
Holidays can be emotionally stressful because they are filled with vivid associations of what it felt like growing up—the good and the bad. Holidays also interrupt our every day routines, and we can find ourselves brooding about unresolved emotional issues.
The good news, however, is that you have the power to stay in control of your holiday emotional experience. Wisdom sometimes comes from unexpected places…such as the cartoon film Arthur's Perfect Christmas. Baxter, a young boy being raised by a frazzled single mom, finally tells his mother "Sometimes I wish we didn't have to make such a big deal out of Christmas."
As they say, out of the mouths of babes sometimes comes profound wisdom.
The stress we feel around the holidays usually is rooted in inflated expectations of what they SHOULD be like: The perfect family gathered in their perfectly decorated house opening the perfectly chosen presents and dining on the perfect meal. The parents don't bicker, the kids don't squabble, and everyone gets along just fine.
How could reality possibly live up to that beautiful fantasy?
Instead, what usually happens is this: The hosts bicker over whether dinner really is ready to serve yet. The children squabble and burst into tears at random moments. Your cousins who bear a grudge against each other stare sullenly at the their plates because they have to sit next to each other. Aunt Mary gets "tipsy" again and tells those embarrassing stories. Again. And cranky old Uncle Herbert insists on talking crazy politics and upsetting you until you leave the table in a huff.
Welcome to reality.
Unrealistically high expectations coupled with a tendency to take intense personal responsibility for failure make a lethal combination, according to Dr. Barry Schwartz, author of the best seller The Paradox of Choice, and co-author Dr. Andrew Ward, professor of psychology at Swarthmore College.
Schwartz and Ward distinguish between two strategies for managing this kind of stress: maximizing and satisficing. Maximizing means making sure you choose or achieve the best possible outcome. Schwartz and colleagues have found that . maximizers tend to latch onto expectations that can’t be met, suffer the most disappointment when reality turns out not to live up to idealized desires, worry most about regret and missed opportunities, and erode their own self-esteem through excessive social comparisons.
Schwartz and Ward use the term satisficing to mean choosing the first option that surpasses some personal criterion of acceptability. Then forget about the rest—don't brood on what you woulda-coulda-shoulda done. (Gigerenzer & Todd also refer to this very powerful but simple decision-making strategy as "take the best, forget the rest.") Satisficers can rely on their own internal assessments to judge the acceptability of their choices. And because they don't compare what they have to some idealized version of reality, they tend to be happier and more content with their lives.
Does this mean that we should always set our sights as low as possible? The answer to this is decidedly no: As Schwartz and Ward point out, research indicates that setting expectations too low can lead to dissatisfaction and depression as well. There is a happy medium to be achieved. You'll know you've achieved it when you are content with where you are and what you have now, even if you have plans for betterment in the future.
Schwartz and Ward suggest several ways to find this happy medium. Three are perhaps the most relevant to enjoying holidays with family or without:
1. Satisfice more and maximize less. Maximizers suffer the most when there are too many choices available, and Christmas hype deluges consumers with more choices than we can handle. Learning to accept “good enough” will simplify decision making and increase satisfaction.
2. Control expectations. How we feel about our experiences is strongly influenced by how they compare to our expectations. So avoid setting excessively high expectations.
3. Cut down on social comparison. Social comparison can provide useful information, letting us know what is possible and guiding us in developing goals and plans for the future. But studies repeatedly show that engaging in social comparison too frequently reduces our satisfaction.
More about the paradox of choice can be found here.
Dr. Schwartz's entertaining TED talk can be found here.
Happy holidays!
Copyright Dr. Denise Cummins December 22, 2014
Dr. Cummins is a research psychologist, a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, and the author of Good Thinking: Seven Powerful Ideas That Influence the Way We Think.
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