The letter read: “Dear Dr. D: Tis the season to be jolly but I’ve got the fa la la la la la la-la blahs. As the holidays draw near, my mood turns to indigo. Amber lights festoon the town’s trees and my eyes glaze over. Strains of ‘Joy to the World’ catch on the breeze and I swallow hard.
Consumers with long lists are scurrying from store to store, laden with packages, and my stomach knots. I feel awful and don’t know why. Why am I the only one who feels this way?” Signed, “I’m Dreaming of a Blue Christmas.”
Everywhere you can hear the tinkle of tinseled, tinny prescriptions of “glad tidings,” “peace on earth,” and “good will to all humankind” as the media and advertisers celebrate the season’s “perfect warmth, harmony, and happiness.” People wear holiday expectations on their sleeves while depression and loneliness run rampant.
Why, when we’re supposed to feel our happiest and most hopeful, do we often feel so low, dispirited, and hopeless?
Partly these blues are due to the day’s shorter duration. With less daylight the pineal gland in our brain produces increased amounts of melatonin, a hormone related to the neurotransmitter serotonin. Too little serotonin can depress our mood. The secretion of melatonin is at its highest levels in the winter – around the holidays.
Mostly, however, the holiday blues are due to our great expectations of how holidays “should” be planned and spent and with whom. Expectations that we generate the “right feelings” and that this season “should” bring us “joy.” We also fall prey to other people’s expectations that we’ll demonstrate all the “appropriate” holiday behaviors.
Expectations raised this high are rarely met. The problem boils down to “shoulds” – what we should do and what we should feel at this time of year. We unconsciously (some of us consciously) live in fear of transgressing them.
It is almost as it we believe that these expectations are inscribed on stone tablets and failure to adhere strictly to them is punishable by copious helpings of guilt with our eggnog.
What we often don’t realize is that most of these tradition-bound expectations don’t represent reality. Instead they represent some idealized and generally unattainable state of mind. As a result, when we don’t experience the expected emotional high, we feel bad. We feel like a failure: The only one not partaking in the holiday spirit and benefits. Everyone else is not attaining this seasonal “nirvana.”
Making matters worse, our remembrance of holidays past adds a note of wistfulness. While we yearn to recapture the good feelings, we once again agonize over the guilts, the losses, the emptiness, and we start the grieving process anew. This year is nearly gone and with it the opportunity to right past wrongs. Add to that the everyday reality of stress and conflicts which don’t stop for the holidays.
While we may have some success altering our body’s response to this time of the year by eating fewer carbohydrates and getting more exercise, what we really need to do is concentrate on ichanging our attitudes and expectations and learning ways to cope better.
First, we need to stop thinking so rigidly about the holidays. There is no “right” way to celebrate the season. Second, we can choose not to accept other people’s expectations for us or the season. Because they expect or believe something doesn’t make it so or right for us. We have to determine for ourselves what we need and want. We need to ask ourselves:
– What do I want this season to represent or mean to me?
– How do I want to feel
– What can I actively do to make the holidays be more of what I want?
Our reality is how we choose to define it. We can do that positively or negatively. We can refuse to continue to agonize over past actions, thoughts, and situations if we have no control over them. Our dredging them up for an encore is going to accomplish nothing but make us feel even worse. We need to derive whatever benefit or lesson from it and move on.
We can counter our loneliness by working to be with others, finding ways to participate, volunteering, helping others, and giving of ourselves. When we reach out to someone else, we extricate ourselves, at least momentarily, from our sad inner focus.
We can soften our sense of loss, which we feel so keenly at this time of year, by not allowing ourselves to dwell on the void and what used to be. Instead we can remember the good times, that we have wonderful memories that will always be with us, and look for ways to enhance that positive feeling.
Finally, we can give ourselves permission to be individuals and enjoy the season in any way we choose: To share, appreciate, and be thankful for whatever we have. We can allow ourselves to ignore the media hype, crass commercialism, and demands of family and friends.
We can allow ourselves to harken back that sense of wonderment we experienced as that first-holiday child, taking in the sights, sounds, smells, and touch and acting spontaneously on them. While we may not create that elusive and illusory “perfect happiness,” we can, at least, turn that holiday mood from blue to pink.