It’s Christmas Day, 2021, and I hope you’ve all had a Merry Christmas.
By the time many of you get around to reading this, the holiday will be over. You’ll be taking down the tree and preparing for the New Year.
Headed in to the holidays, its easy to find a lot of really good advice about how to survive the festivities with your sanity intact. I find that it is often after the holidays; the “post-holiday crash”, where we struggle the hardest, and wanted to take a few minutes to briefly address this issue with you.
What is the “Post-Holiday Crash”?
To put it simply, the post-holiday crash refers to that let down that comes after a sustained and stressful holiday season. Its the stress of making sure that enough gifts are purchased for all of your friends and family, and the fear that you’ve missed someone and they’ll notice. Its the stress of not having the resources to purchase any gifts at all, and scrambling to do what you can about it. Its the stress of making sure that you see everyone you wanted to see, or the stress of having to endure seeing people you would really rather not.
Once Christmas dinner is over and everyone is gone, or once Christmas Day has passed and you’re forced to again face the daily grind of life, there is often a low that sets in that rivals the high of the holiday.
Some will worry about how much they overspent, or if they made bad purchases.
Some will start to feel the pains of loneliness after everyone has gone home, or from not having anyone to share the holidays with in the first place.
Some will feel the need to take to Twitter and start a fight because they had to listen to their Uncle Larry’s conspiracy theories all week.
Some will become extremely body conscious and stress about their overeating during the holiday season.
I suspect that this is what motivates so many of us to make New Year’s resolutions (and also why so many of them fail) A New Year’s resolution is a natural response to the post-holiday crash and seems like a really good idea at the time. It restores to us in that low moment some sense of control over how we are feeling. These resolutions fail so often because they were made in a temporary moment so much of the time, and that’s what I would like you to understand about the post-holiday crash:
It is normal, and it is temporary.
It feels so much worse because there is a natural depletion of several reward chemicals. Dopamine, Serotonin and Oxytocin are all elevated around festivities with friends and loved ones, and will all naturally recede in the absence of that stimulus.
Don’t worry, they’ll be back online soon!