Ep #130: Let Go of Holiday Perfection: More Joy, Less Stress

This is the Strong Is a Mindset podcast, Episode #130. If you’re feeling stressed out from the pressure to do it all during the holidays, I’ve got an alternative for you.

This is the Strong Is a Mindset podcast, where you’ll learn how to build both a strong body and a strong mind by eating, moving, and thinking. I’m your host Physician, Personal Trainer, Certified Health Coach and Certified Life Coach, Carrie Holland.

Hey, how are you? What’s new? What’s good? So, what’s good here, we are going to talk about dealing with the stress of the holidays and blow up the myth that there is such a thing as a perfect holiday today.

So I am taking just a bit of a spin on this. And my goal is to present a different approach to the holidays that might just leave you feeling more fulfilled and less depleted once all is said and done.

I have had loads of conversations with clients in the last few weeks about how this is a super busy time for them, and they are doing their best trying to keep it all going. They are doing their best to manage work and family and kids and winter sports and holiday parties and Secret Santa gift exchanges and potlucks, and all the things.

And I’ve noticed a theme among many of these women. Their situations are all unique, but the pattern that I found that united them was this, a need to nail it. A need to make it perfect. To make the holidays nice and seamless and smooth, complete with cookies made from scratch, perfectly curated family holiday cards, a stellar menu for the family dinner and amazing gifts for the school teachers to boot.

And even just listening to some of my clients describe all of the things that they take on during the holidays is exhausting. And I’m not even the one doing any of these things. But these women take on a lot.

Many of them go to their jobs and are at work all day long only to come home and start their second shift of taking care of the house and the family.

And for this time of year, that second shift includes all of the usual stuff, plus the added extras of cleaning the house to get it ready for guests and parties, making cookies and gingerbread houses, buying and wrapping gifts, packing luggage for travel, and who knows what else, just to be ready for the holidays.

But then you add on another layer of needing to get it just so, or the need to get it exactly right, or the need for it to be picture perfect, and that takes an already stressful season and sends it through the roof and it becomes too much. And so here’s what I want to offer you.

Perfect holidays are a myth, okay? Really. The idea of a perfect holiday, while I don’t mean to burst anyone’s bubble, that is a fantasy, okay? That’s a 90-minute Hallmark Channel Christmas movie special, but it’s not real life. Unfortunately, we are sold into the idea that if your dining table or your Christmas tree decor or your family holiday card is not Instagram worthy, well then why bother?

As soon as Halloween ends, and in some cases even before Halloween ends, we are bombarded with images and advertisements that spin the holidays as this magical, picture-perfect time of year. There’s the sparkling decor that matches impeccably, fancy meals that could be gracing the cover of a cooking magazine, and beautifully wrapped presents and coordinated wrapping paper. Those are the images that we get bombarded with the second the holiday season starts.

And I don’t know about you, but those images do not match up to my reality. So here, it looks like Christmas vomited all over my house. There is nothing coordinated. There are red and green stockings. There are red and white towels. There are ornaments in every color of the rainbow on our tree, and absolutely none of them match.

Our Christmas cookies look like they came from an episode of Nailed It. Our outdoor lights have either been so much and so overdone that they shorted out our garage door, or they have gone in the complete opposite direction with a few colored floodlights and a door hanging. Suffice it to say, we would not be featured in Real Simple Magazine, okay?

But if you go on social media or turn on the TV, it will take you all of five seconds to find someone’s picture-perfect holiday captured on film and primed for you to see. Or you may open your friends’ and family’s holiday cards and wonder how in the world they got everyone to smile like that. And how did they find such coordinated, but not overly coordinated, outfits?

Or you go to a cookie exchange with your partially burned peanut butter blossoms, which you have to set next to your neighbor’s perfectly iced sugar cookies that look more like pieces of art than a cookie. So between news and TV, your friends, your family, social media, you may be feeling pressure to perform.

The unrealistic expectations put upon you at the holidays may be amplified at this time of year because the holidays get so much hype in general. There’s just a lot of buildup and anticipation at this time of year, and you may be feeling it. You may be feeling the pressure to perform, and not just to perform well, but perform beyond expectations.

And what’s worse is that, no surprise here, these holiday expectations tend to fall largely in the hands of women. Women tend to be the orchestrators of the holidays for their families, whether that is by choice or by default. They often carry much of the mental load that goes into the holiday season.

So women most often are the ones organizing potlucks, setting dinner party menus, creating the shopping list, baking the cookies, buying and wrapping the gifts, making sure everyone, including your third cousin twice removed has a gift, sending the cards, and it’s just a lot.

And this is not to say that men or partners don’t help out, but what often happens is that women end up bearing a disproportionate share of the mental load. And what that means is that women often have to find and dedicate brain space to getting this stuff done.

There’s a really great book that describes this in detail. It’s called Fair Play by Eve Rodsky. If you haven’t read the book, I highly recommend it. In this book, she describes how many home and family tasks have three components, and those components are conception, planning, and execution, or CPE.

So the Conception portion of a task is determining what exactly needs to be done. Very simply, conceptualizing addresses “the what”. It identifies the task that needs to be done.

Planning is exactly as it sounds. It means having a plan and an approach to getting the task done. And it answers the questions of how, where, when, etc.

And then Execution is carrying out the plan. It’s doing the work. So it’s conception, planning, and execution. A good example of this would be your upcoming holiday dinner. There’s the conception; coming up with the menu and deciding what’s on it. Then there’s the planning; making the grocery list, checking your kitchen and pantry to know what you have and what you need. And then there’s the execution of going to the store and buying all the stuff.

You can imagine that the first two components, the conceptualizing and planning piece, take some serious, legit work. That takes brain space. And honestly, that’s where the mental load is spent. You have to think about the menu, who has what food allergies, who’s no longer eating meat, and who can’t have dairy.

And then there’s the planning piece. That’s when you check what you’ve got in your kitchen, create a list of what you need, and make sure to have enough so that everyone has enough food to eat. So the conception and planning both take work, but they also take up time and they take up brain space. There is a bit of thinking involved.

The execution is less mentally demanding because that’s the action piece. There’s less mental energy needed for that. And that’s because execution is, in part, the end product of conception and planning. Most of the heavy lifting has already been done in anticipation of the execution piece. And often the conception and planning, especially at the holidays, falls to the woman.

What that amounts to, is one more set of tasks that lands on your already full plate. And whether this is made explicit in your home and not, this is often the way that it settles out. It’s often the woman who spends time conceptualizing and planning while the other partner carries out the plan.

And I know full well, there are exceptions to this. I’m not saying that men don’t have to think or that they don’t help, but I’m giving you a glimpse of the typical pattern that I’ve seen in so many of my own clients’ lives. This pattern was so well described in Eve Rodsky’s book, Fair Play. She does a really great job dissecting this and offering loads of ways to address the balance of work at home. It’s fascinating.

If you want to know more about it, definitely go and check it out. It was a really great read. And so what happens too often is that the combination of culture, social media, television, plus our engendered roles as caretaker and orchestra, leads many women to internalize this myth that you have to essentially play Martha Stewart over the holidays.

It’s got to be perfect, and you are responsible for making it perfect. And when you strive for perfection or when you put so much pressure on yourself to get a 100% A+ over the holidays, that can set off a spiral that leads you to feeling totally overstretched and burnout.

You may feel compelled to bake cookies from scratch and pull out your grandma Sue’s 100-year-old gingerbread cookie recipe. You may feel that you’ve got to find the exact, right, perfect gift for everyone on your list. You may feel obligated to attend every holiday party, even if it means driving all over and spending your weekends in your car instead of at home.

And if you do feel compelled to do it all, there is a cost to you. I said it before in an earlier episode, and I’ll reiterate it here. Trying to do it all, especially over the holidays, very easily costs you your self-care. Many of the women I work with have said it. They’ve said that this is often the time of year when self-care, in the form of eating healthy and exercising, goes out the window because there are just too many things to do.

Their to-do list is overflowing, they’re staying out later at parties, and staying up late wrapping and baking and stuffing envelopes. And the end result is that there is no time left for self-care. So the opportunity cost here is your self-care. That is the most common cost of over committing and trying to do all things perfectly over the holidays.

Beyond that, there is another cost of aiming for “perfect” over the holidays. And that cost is dread and resentment towards the holidays. You might end the season feeling irritated, depleted, and underappreciated. And I cannot tell you how many of my clients have shared that they feel completely gassed by the time the holidays have come and gone because they are just empty. That is not a fun way to end the year.

So the cost of trying to do it all, and do it all perfectly over the holidays, that cost is real. If any of this sounds familiar to you, or if you’re already feeling the dread of the holiday setting in, here is the reality check I want to offer you today. You may know this intellectually, but I want to really let this sink in for you.

The holidays are not about keeping your home spotless in case Real Simple comes to the door wanting to do a holiday feature on you. The holidays are not about having the prettiest cookies at your cookie exchange. The holidays are not about impressing your in-laws with your ability to roast meat either. Okay? That’s really not what this is about.

Instead, I’m going to pose this question to you from the get-go. And that question is, what is important to you during the holidays? Keyword here, you. What is important to you during the holidays? And here’s why I’m being explicit about this and asking what’s important to you.

Often, what happens, especially around the holidays, is that you do all the things like I mentioned, the cards and the cookies and the gifts and the decorations. But I would simply ask, are you doing all the things because they contribute to your joy over the holidays? Or are you doing these things because you feel like you have to?

Are you overstretching yourself because you feel like that’s what you should do? And I’ve asked this question of many of my clients and some of them have outright laughed when I mentioned joy over the holidays. And that just confirms to me that there is work to do.

So if the idea of having joy at the holidays seems laughable to you because you are so overcommitted and you have too much to do, and you’re set on doing it to the highest level and making it perfect, then it would make total sense that you don’t have much joy over the holidays.

Some of you have said that you would prefer to just skip the holidays altogether and jump into the new year. But it doesn’t have to go that way. Instead, the holidays can be joyful and you don’t have to end the year feeling resentful and exhausted. And to do that, I would encourage you to take a second and ask, what is important to you during this time of year?

Is it spending time with your family and people you don’t get to see often? Is it reflecting on the past year as you put together your family holiday card? Is it remembering your grandma and honoring her when you pull out her 100-year-old sugar cookie recipe? Is it thinking about your best friend and how amazing she is while you brainstorm gifts for her? What is it that’s important to you?

And part of the reason I asked this question is because everything cannot have the same level of importance. Everything cannot be a priority over the holidays, all right? There just isn’t enough time. And remember what Stephen R. Covey says. He says, “When you have too many top priorities, you effectively have no top priorities.”

So I would encourage you to get clear, for yourself, what matters most to you at this time of year. And here’s what often comes up when I ask this question. Often, the response I get is, “I do all the things because I have to. I do all the things because people expect me to. I do it because it makes everyone else happy. I do it to make my family happy. I do it to make my in-laws happy. I do it to make the teachers happy.”

If these are some of your answers, let’s talk about this, because we need to pull this apart. Because when your approach is to run yourself ragged at the holidays, in the name of making everyone else happy, we need to switch that up, okay?

So let me give you some examples here, and then we’re going to tie this all together. Let’s say you have a family member and you set out to buy her a gift. You spend all kinds of time thinking about it and brainstorming, and you finally decide on the most perfect gift for her. You go and buy it, you wrap it, and you are so excited to give your gift to her, and she is just not excited about it.

She thinks that the journal you got her, even though it has the coolest binding and handmade paper, and you thought it was totally perfect, she is just not excited about it. You walk away feeling totally unappreciated.

Or imagine you’re hosting a big holiday party, and you spend days or even weeks planning and cooking and cleaning and organizing, and everything goes off without a hitch. No detail is overlooked. The decor, immaculate. The food is delicious.

The music, the candles, the vibe, all of it came together to make a fabulous holiday party, but no one said anything about how much work you put into it. Your guests have a fun time, but you don’t get the reception or the reaction that you were expecting. And again, you feel underappreciated.

Or you go to every single holiday party; your work party, the neighborhood party, your book club party, the extended family party, the immediate family party on both sides. And at the end of it all you feel underappreciated because you’ve taken all this time to attend all of these parties, you’ve spent multiple nights out going to these parties, and no one has acknowledged it.

These are just some of the examples that have come up for my clients. And maybe you can relate. Or maybe you have your own that you can add here. Here’s what I want to point out. This overextension is a spiral.

It’s often fueled by a desire to make the holidays exceptional. Or it is fueled by a need to perform to a certain impossible standard that you’ve set for yourself.

That leads you to go above and beyond, but most often it leaves you feeling underappreciated. And this is a cycle that you don’t need to fall into. At its core, this spiral is most often fueled by the need for external validation, which could come out in full force over the holidays.

Often, we convince ourselves that if we do just a little more, if you make the decorations a little prettier, if you make the cookies from scratch instead of buying pre-made sugar cookie dough, if you buy the highest quality cardstock for your annual card, if you make it more perfect, then you’ll feel more appreciated or more valued.

But the reality is that this approach creates a dependence on other people to validate that what you’ve done over the holidays is good enough. It’s putting your self-worth in the hands of other people, who may or may not respond to the effort that you put in over the holidays.

So to put this very simply and really boil it down, often you run yourself ragged over the holidays because you feel you have to in order to please everyone else; family, friends, co-workers, and everyone else. It feels more like an obligation than something you do to celebrate the holiday season.

So what if you’re thinking to yourself, “Well, I want to make my sister happy. I want to find her a great gift because it will make her happy and that will make me happy.” Or if you’re thinking to yourself, “I love to entertain people and have them over, and I want them to be happy.” Or if you think, “Well, it will make all of these people happy if I show up to all these parties. So that’s why I’m going.”

What I want to point out is that no, this isn’t the approach I suggest you take over the holidays, or really ever, for that matter. If you’re doing all the things and hosting all the parties and buying all the gifts and baking all the cookies, and you’re doing it because that’s what you feel you need to do in order to make people happy, but then you don’t get the response you’re looking for, that is a setup for total resentment.

It’s putting your happiness in the hands of other people. It’s making your validation dependent on whether someone loves the journal or the sweater you bought them. You’re putting your holiday success at the hands of someone recognizing the trouble you went to in order to coordinate your decorations and your tableware.

It’s making your happiness dependent upon their response to whatever it is that you do. But remember what we know, you can’t control people, right? You can’t control other people’s minds, and you can’t control how people think, feel, or act.

You cannot control how people do or do not receive your perfectly frosted snowflake Christmas cookies that were made with royal icing you whipped up yourself. You cannot control how people respond to the placemats and napkin rings that match the ornaments hanging on the wreath in your dining room. You cannot control whether or not your aunt loves the sweater you bought her, the one that you spent hours searching for online before deciding on the exact one because you thought it would be perfect for her.

But, too often, we make the holidays about doing all the things and it turns into more of a performance than a time to enjoy. So often, and especially at the holidays, you put so much pressure on yourself to perform at the highest level and get an A+. But then, to make it worse, the metric you use to know if you got that A+ is by how people respond to your efforts.

But you can’t control that. And if you put the success of your holidays in the hands of everyone else except you, you’re probably not going to enjoy the holidays nearly as much as you could. It adds up to feeling exhausted, undervalued, and resentful. It ends up with you looking at a ticket-for-one to Hawaii next Christmas.

So if you feel that you are pushing yourself to your limit, bending over backwards to make sure that everyone around you has a picture-perfect holiday at the expense of your own well-being and at the expense of your own enjoyment, and you’re using other people’s enjoyment and other people’s praise or response as your barometer, we’ve got to rip that apart right now.

While there is absolutely nothing wrong with wanting other people to enjoy the things that you do for them around the holidays, where it becomes a problem is when you let their response dictate your own joy. Because then, what happens is that all the things you do over the holidays — the cookies you make, the decorations you hang, the roast you cook — they become less about the people you’re doing them for and more about you seeking validation for yourself.

So before I ruffle any feathers, let me explain what I mean. If you go above and beyond to plan a family party, and you finish that party all in a huff because not enough people — your mother-in-law, or your cousin, or whomever it is — did not tell you what you wanted to hear or did not recognize all the work that you’ve done, then I would question, what is this actually about? Is the party really about your family’s joy?

Or is it about you getting joy when people tell you that you’ve done a good job? There’s a big, big difference. And the thing is, it may be subtle at the heart of it. You may truly want to throw a really great party. You may really want to find the very best gift you can give your aunt. You may want to spend the hours that it takes to frost a perfect cookie.

But if your intent gets lost in the need for someone else to tell you that it was good enough, then the party and the gifts and the cookies are not going to feel joyful for you anymore. Instead, those things are going to create resentment and dread.

I would simply encourage you to think about why you are doing the tasks that you’re taking on over the holidays. Are you doing it because you love to bake and it makes you happy to spend time decorating a super intricate artsy cookie? Or are you doing it to elicit a response from your mother-in-law because you think she’s decided you’re useless in the kitchen and you want to prove her wrong?

Or what does giving that journal to your sister matter? Does it matter because you enjoyed taking the time thinking about her and shopping for her, even if she doesn’t love what you got her? Or does it matter because you’re hoping that she’ll love it so you can be happy that you did a good job?

These are subtle contrasts that I’m bringing up here, but I’m highlighting them because they have come up for my clients and they underlie a search for external validation. This pattern of thinking has the potential to get in the way of you truly enjoying your holiday. When you seek external validation about the lengths that you have gone to make the holiday just so and you don’t get it, it doesn’t feel good. It can make you feel angry and bitter. It can make you question, why bother?

And here’s the other thing about this approach, and this applies to way more than your picture-perfect holiday card. When you base your own holiday joy on the response that you get from others, it will never be enough. No amount of ‘thank yous’ or praise or ‘oohs and ahs’ over your decorations will ever be enough if you have not validated yourself first.

No amount of wows will ever be enough if you have not decided for yourself that what you have done is good enough. So yes, it’s really great when people recognize and tell you that they think you’ve done a good job. It’s certainly nice to get that affirmation from people, but no amount of validation from other people will ever be enough if you haven’t given it to yourself first.

This is so, so important to understand. You cannot look outside for something that you need to be giving to yourself. To be clear, I’m not telling you to blow off other people. I’m not telling you to forget about what other people think. We are human, and as humans, we are wired to care about what other people think.

We are wired to crave acceptance, belonging, and fitting in. So I’m not telling you to ignore other people, especially at the holidays. But what I am suggesting is that if you’re going to go to great lengths over the holidays, do it because it brings you joy, independent of how other people respond to it.

If your sister hates the journal you got her, don’t make it about you. She just doesn’t like it. That does not take away from the joy you got by thinking about her as you looked at hundreds of journals before picking out the one that you wanted her to have.

Or if you throw an amazing party, and you spend the week leading up to it busting your tail to make every little detail perfect, do it because it’s fun and you like getting into details and you love matching your napkin rings to your ornaments. Not because you’re hoping your cousin will notice and point out how great your attention to detail is. Do it because it makes you smile every time you look in your dining room and see that everything coordinates and that makes you happy.

So do you see the difference here? It goes back to this key central concept, “like your reasons.” I really, really love this concept and it’s so very simple. It simply means that you’re doing a gut check and getting really clear with yourself about why you are doing what you’re doing.

It means you ask yourself, why am I taking hours to pick out the perfect font for my holiday card? Is it because you love those types of details or is it because you feel you have something to prove to your friend who had the most fancy, beautiful card you’ve ever seen?

Why are you making sugar cookies from scratch for your kid’s holiday party? Is it because it’s a family recipe and you love the tradition of making these cookies every year like you did with your parents? Or is it because you know all the other parents are sending in homemade cookies and you have to measure up?

And the answer here is, like your reasons. Okay? Get really clear on what is motivating you to take on all the things and decide for yourself if you like what’s behind it. Okay? Do the things at the holidays because they bring you joy. Okay?

You can’t control if your friends or your family or your coworkers find joy in your cookies or your holiday cards or your decorations or choice of music at your party. You don’t have the power to decide their response, but you do have the power to decide your response.

Remember that you are in control of yourself. You are in control of how you think, feel, and act all the time, and especially at the holidays. And because of that, you can decide what you do and don’t do during the busiest season of the year.

You can choose to create your own joy. You can choose to validate yourself. You can choose to practice sufficiency. And know that whatever you choose to do over the holidays, it is in fact enough. And when you validate yourself first, everything else is a bonus, not a necessity. All right?

And if you want help with this, let’s talk. When you coach with me, we talk about the impact other people have on your success. And we shift that balance so your opinion and your own self-validation matters most.

Check out my website. Send me a message at www.CarrieHollandMD.com/contact, and let’s talk about how coaching will change how you see yourself.

All right, thank you for hanging out with me, and I’ll catch you again next week.

Hey, if you’re looking for your next great read, I’ve got you covered. Head over to CarrieHollandMD.com/books and download my list of most favorite reads. I’ve got two collections waiting for you. One is all about work-life balance. The other is a collection of books that have changed my life.

I’ve referenced many of these books in the podcast, and now you can access those titles all in one place. Again, that’s CarrieHollandMD.com/books. Check it out and find your next great read.

Thank you for listening to the Strong Is a Mindset podcast. If you want to learn more about how to build both a strong mind and a strong body by eating, moving, and most importantly, thinking, check out CarrieHollandMD.com.