Written by Holley Hillis Beauchamp, PMHNP-BC
It's November, which means the holiday season is officially approaching. The stores are already playing Christmas music, your calendar is starting to fill up, and someone has probably asked what your plans are for Thanksgiving.
Maybe you love the holidays. You enjoy decorating, spending time with family, making favorite recipes, and watching the excitement build as the season approaches. You genuinely look forward to the traditions you've created over the years.
But somewhere between coordinating family schedules, planning meals, shopping for gifts, and trying to make everything special, that excitement starts turning into stress. Instead of looking forward to the holidays, you're mentally calculating how many weekends you have left to get everything done.
And when someone cheerfully announces that they can't wait for Christmas, you find yourself wondering whether they've considered who is going to buy the presents, wrap them, plan the meals, decorate the house, and remember that the school needs cookies by Friday.
The holidays are supposed to be enjoyable. So why do they sometimes feel like another full-time job?
When the Holidays Become Another Responsibility
For many women, the holiday season involves a considerable amount of work that isn't always obvious to the people around them.
There's the shopping, cooking, decorating, cleaning, and traveling, of course. But there's also the planning that happens long before any of those activities begin. Someone has to remember which family members are hosting, coordinate everyone's schedules, figure out what gifts to purchase, keep track of school events, and make sure the ingredients for Thanksgiving dinner are actually in the house.
This is part of what's often called the mental load, or the ongoing cognitive work involved in anticipating needs, organizing responsibilities, and keeping track of everything that needs to happen.
During the holidays, that mental load can increase significantly. Your ordinary responsibilities don't disappear just because December is approaching. You're still working, managing your household, attending appointments, and handling everyday obligations. The holidays simply add another layer of planning on top of everything you're already doing.
And because so much of that work happens mentally, it can be difficult for other people to recognize how much effort it requires.
You might hear someone say, "Don't stress about it. It's supposed to be fun," while you're trying to figure out how to coordinate three different family gatherings without disappointing anyone.
The problem isn't necessarily that you dislike the holidays. It's that enjoying them has started to require an exhausting amount of preparation.
Why Expectations Make Everything Feel Harder
One of the biggest contributors to holiday stress is the gap between what we expect the season to look like and what it actually involves.
We imagine cozy evenings, beautifully decorated homes, happy family gatherings, and meaningful traditions. Social media certainly doesn't help. It's difficult not to compare your ordinary, somewhat chaotic December with someone's perfectly photographed holiday home, coordinated family pajamas, and elaborate homemade cookies.
Even when we know those images don't represent everyday reality, they can still influence what we think the holidays are supposed to be.
For some women, this becomes a form of perfectionism. You don't just want to celebrate Christmas; you want everyone to have a wonderful Christmas. You want the children to have special memories, your family to feel appreciated, and every tradition to happen the way it's supposed to.
Those are understandable desires. But when the responsibility for creating a meaningful holiday experience falls primarily on one person, even enjoyable traditions can start to feel like obligations.
Perfectionism can also make it difficult to recognize when something is good enough. Instead of enjoying the dinner you've prepared, you're worrying about whether everything turned out correctly. Instead of relaxing after decorating, you're noticing what still needs to be finished.
Eventually, the effort of creating the perfect holiday can interfere with your ability to enjoy the holiday you're creating.
Holiday Anxiety Often Starts Before the Holidays Do
Anxiety doesn't always show up as panic or an obvious sense of fear. Sometimes it looks like mentally preparing for every possible problem weeks before anything has happened.
You might find yourself worrying about how much money you're spending, whether family members will get along, how you'll manage competing obligations, or whether you'll have enough time to accomplish everything.
This is a form of anticipatory anxiety, where distress is driven by thinking about future events and possible outcomes.
A certain amount of planning is useful, especially during a busy season. But when planning turns into persistent worry, it can become difficult to mentally disengage from everything that needs to happen.
You may notice that you're having trouble sleeping because you're reviewing your holiday to-do list. You feel tense when someone mentions another event. You become irritable when plans change, even if the change itself is relatively minor.
For women who already experience anxiety, the additional uncertainty and expectations surrounding the holidays can make existing symptoms more noticeable.
And sometimes the anxiety isn't really about the holidays at all. It's about the pressure to manage everyone else's experience while trying to keep your own stress under control.
Family Gatherings Aren't Always Relaxing
Holiday gatherings can be wonderful opportunities to reconnect with people we love. They can also bring up complicated emotions, particularly when family relationships are strained or expectations are difficult to navigate.
Maybe you're trying to divide time fairly between your family and your partner's family. Maybe someone becomes upset when you can't attend every gathering. Perhaps there are relatives whose comments make you uncomfortable, or longstanding family dynamics that seem to reappear the moment everyone sits down for dinner.
Even when you genuinely enjoy seeing your family, spending extended periods navigating different personalities and expectations can be emotionally exhausting.
For people who struggle with anxiety or people-pleasing, the pressure to keep everyone happy may be especially difficult. You might agree to plans you don't have the energy for, avoid setting boundaries because you're worried about disappointing someone, or feel responsible for managing tension between other family members.
The holidays can make these patterns more noticeable because there are simply more opportunities for competing expectations.
It's worth remembering that disappointing someone isn't always the same as doing something wrong. You can care about your family and still have limits on your time, energy, and availability.
Sometimes a healthier holiday season involves accepting that not everyone will be completely satisfied with every decision you make.
When the Holidays Bring Grief Instead of Joy
Not everyone approaches the holiday season with excitement, and sometimes the reasons have very little to do with shopping lists or busy schedules.
For someone who has experienced a loss, the holidays can be an especially difficult time of year. Family traditions, familiar places, and annual gatherings may highlight the absence of someone who is no longer there.
Grief can also involve experiences that aren't always visible to others. Pregnancy loss, infertility, estrangement, divorce, or major life changes can make the holidays emotionally complicated.
A woman navigating infertility may find family gatherings difficult when conversations repeatedly turn toward children or pregnancy announcements. Someone grieving a pregnancy loss may be thinking about the holiday season they imagined experiencing with a baby. Another person may be struggling with the absence of a parent, partner, or family relationship that once shaped their traditions.
And sometimes the hardest part is feeling expected to be cheerful when you're not.
There can be considerable pressure to put difficult emotions aside because it's supposed to be a happy time of year. But grief doesn't follow the calendar, and meaningful celebrations don't require you to pretend that everything feels wonderful.
It's possible to enjoy parts of the holidays while also feeling sadness, disappointment, or longing. Those experiences aren't mutually exclusive.
Is It Holiday Stress, or Is Something Else Going On?
Feeling overwhelmed during a busy season doesn't automatically mean you're experiencing a mental health condition. Temporary stress is a normal response to increased responsibilities, financial pressures, and competing demands.
However, the holidays can also make existing psychiatric symptoms more noticeable.
Anxiety may become more difficult to manage when schedules are unpredictable and expectations increase. ADHD-related difficulties with organization, time management, and prioritization may become more challenging when there are additional deadlines and responsibilities. Depression can affect motivation, energy, and the ability to experience pleasure, making activities that are supposed to be enjoyable feel unusually demanding.
Sleep disturbances can further complicate the picture. Late nights, travel, changes in routine, and increased stress can affect sleep quality, which in turn can influence mood, concentration, and emotional regulation.
Some people also notice seasonal changes in their mood as daylight hours decrease. Seasonal affective disorder is a pattern of depression associated with particular times of year, most commonly beginning in the fall or winter. It involves more than simply disliking cold weather or feeling tired during the holidays.
The important distinction is whether your symptoms are temporary and manageable or whether they're persistent, worsening, and affecting your ability to function or enjoy everyday life.
If you're experiencing ongoing anxiety, low mood, irritability, emotional exhaustion, or significant changes in sleep and motivation, those symptoms deserve attention regardless of the season.
How to Make the Holidays Feel More Manageable
Reducing holiday stress doesn't necessarily require canceling every gathering or abandoning traditions you enjoy. Often, it begins with examining which expectations are realistic and which responsibilities you've taken on simply because you've always been the person who handles them.
One useful question is whether a particular tradition genuinely adds meaning to your holiday or whether it's something you feel obligated to maintain.
Maybe you love hosting Thanksgiving but dread preparing an elaborate Christmas dinner. Maybe decorating is one of your favorite activities, but coordinating gifts for every extended family member has become overwhelming. There's no requirement that every tradition receive the same amount of time and energy.
It can also help to make responsibilities more visible. Rather than asking your partner or family members to "help" with holiday preparations, consider dividing ownership of specific tasks. Someone can take responsibility for planning a meal, purchasing gifts for certain relatives, or coordinating a family gathering from beginning to end.
That distinction matters because delegating individual tasks doesn't always reduce the mental load if you're still responsible for remembering, organizing, and supervising everything.
Setting boundaries around your schedule is equally important. You don't have to attend every event, accept every invitation, or explain every decision in detail. Sometimes the most practical way to protect your mental health is to leave enough space in your calendar to actually rest.
And if the holidays are emotionally difficult because of grief, strained relationships, or other personal circumstances, give yourself permission to approach the season differently. You may want to create new traditions, simplify existing ones, or spend time with people who understand what you're experiencing.
The goal isn't to eliminate every source of stress. It's to make room for the parts of the season that actually matter to you.
You Don't Have to Make the Holidays Magical for Everyone
Somewhere along the way, many women begin to feel personally responsible for creating the holiday experience everyone else remembers.
You're supposed to organize the gatherings, preserve the traditions, make everything special, and somehow remain cheerful throughout the process.
But there's a difference between participating in the holidays and carrying the responsibility for everyone else's enjoyment.
You can love Christmas without wanting to spend every weekend in December preparing for it. You can enjoy hosting without volunteering to organize every gathering. You can appreciate family traditions while recognizing that some of them no longer fit your life.
And you can acknowledge that the holidays are stressful without being ungrateful for the people and experiences you have.
If you're already feeling overwhelmed before the season has fully begun, consider what you might be able to change this year. Maybe that means fewer commitments, simpler traditions, more shared responsibilities, or giving yourself permission to stop trying to make everything perfect.
Sometimes the most meaningful holiday memories come from ordinary moments that weren't carefully planned at all.
You deserve to enjoy the holidays, too. Not just organize them for everyone else.
About Hawthorn Clinic
At Hawthorn Clinic, we provide psychiatric care for women through every stage of life, including evaluation and medication management for anxiety, depression, ADHD, and mental health concerns related to reproductive and hormonal transitions.
We recognize that stress, anxiety, and emotional exhaustion don't occur in isolation. Our approach considers the whole picture—your symptoms, responsibilities, relationships, medical history, and life circumstances—so treatment decisions are individualized to your needs.
This article is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for individualized medical or mental health care.