Coping with Christmas

In the words of Slade, "It's Christmas", or very nearly. The festive season is upon us, and so are the potential stresses which come with it.

Christmas is a busy time of year for mental health services. When I first qualified as a clinical psychologist, and for quite a while afterwards, I worked in inpatient adolescent wards. In the earlier years, before cuts to community services meant we were busy all year round, there tended to be noticeable peaks in the number of patient referrals at certain points in the year: at exam time, back-to-school time, and Christmas time. It's been a while now since I worked in wards but even so, whatever the context, if I'm seeing someone for individual therapy around Christmas, we tend to spend time planning how to mitigate the stress of it and make sure there are clear plans in place for if things feel too hard. I'm thinking about Christmas, but the stresses might just as easily relate to other festivals this month, like Hanukkah or Kwanzaa, or to festivals at other times of the year.

The expectations we have of group celebrations, particularly Christmas, are often soft-focus rom-com, twinkling lights, gentle music in the background, and a mulled wine on the go. Cosy, connected, calm. In reality, the pressure to have a nice day, combined with an infrequent trip home or to see old friends, is often a recipe for a row. The contrast between what we imagine everyone else to be having – the perfect Hallmark Christmas – and whatever is going on for us, can also loom large. This can happen whether that's a solo Christmas, one with friends not family, one where the tension over Christmas breakfast can be sliced with a knife, or one where we try frantically to see multiple family members who don't all get along and end up dashing about, frazzled.

Wherever we are, much of the anguish can boil down to a conflict between expectations and reality, both for ourselves and others. It's one thing to feel sad, but a whole extra layer of pain if we're also beating ourselves up about feeling sad because we think we should be happy.

So, can ideas from psychological therapy be helpful at Christmas?

Game plans

One concept I use is from dialectical behaviour therapy: radical acceptance. This involves accepting the reality of what is going on, even if it's painful. It doesn't mean we approve of something bad or even feel neutral about it, but it means we do accept what we can't change, even if we don't like it, rather than struggling against our current reality.

In some ways this is about understanding and accepting where we have control. There are always some things we do have control over in our lives, and radically accepting the uncontrollable so that we can focus our energy on those things we can control can help us feel better.

We can't control what other people do – other people's rituals or behaviours at Christmas. We can try to anticipate and control our reaction. We can also control our boundaries, even if it doesn't always feel like it. Planning in advance what we are happy with doing or not doing and how to gracefully say what we want can be useful. It is also often helpful to plan for worst-case scenarios so that if a family row blows up or if misery descends for some reason there are already some game plans ready for action.

Thinking about the pros and cons of the strategies we normally use to help manage stressful times, and working out whether these are helpful for us, is a useful part of this. We all have coping strategies which can end up making us or other people feel worse. Whether it's drinking too much, spending money we don't have, shutting down and withdrawing or more overt acts of self-harm, clocking those strategies which might have outlived their usefulness can then enable us to experiment with other options. We can also think about identifying some 'roadblocks' – maybe a word or phrase or image that can stop us in our tracks and help prevent us doing something unhelpful. These might work by prompting us to do something else instead, or reminding us of a reason why we want to.

A wider-lens view

Doing something differently might also include thinking about the roles we get invited to play in our family or social group. If we want to change these we can experiment again: by acting the opposite of what people expect, or leaving space for someone else to take on the role we might have outgrown.

This doesn't mean ignoring what other people want. In fact, thinking about Christmas from other people's perspective can help it go better for everyone, and give us the positive feeling we get from doing nice things for others. If we're thinking about making the

day enjoyable for someone else, we might also be less invested in it being a certain way for us, which can help shake some of that pressure of Christmas expectation. Studies of general wellbeing at Christmas show that people tend to feel worse at this time of year, with one exception. Followers of Christianity tend to feel happier. Maybe it's because there's a higher spiritual meaning that can be tapped into, helping people to sidestep their own desires and think about the needs of others and the meaning of the day with a wider lens. Even if religion isn't part of our Christmas experience, we can still shift our perspective to take a wider-lens view.

Reflective questions can help: What is Christmas about for you? What is the underlying value you want this Christmas to embody? How can you keep that in mind, and perhaps give yourself permission to swerve all previous traditions and create your own? Which bits of Christmases past have gone well? How can you repeat or amplify those things this year?

If it all goes to pot, principles of self-compassion suggest we should try to be gentle with ourselves. Christmas can be intense. A row or the use of an unhelpful coping strategy doesn't mean that all is lost, especially if we can take time to calm down and speak to ourselves in the way we would to a good friend.

It doesn't have to be a perfect Christmas for it to be worth celebrating. Maybe it'll just be good enough, and for most of it we won't fall into the bear traps we want to avoid. And if we do fall into one of them? Then that's just human. Happy Christmas though, I hope it's a good one.

Dr Lucy Maddox is a consultant clinical psychologist and researcher. Her new book, A Year To Change Your Mind, shares ideas from the therapy room which can be useful all year round.