Holiday Stress for Women: Why We’re Already Tired by Christmas
I love Christmas. I love having everyone together, the food, the lights and the things we do every year because we’ve always done them. I even like some of the fuss that comes with it, which is probably why it took me so long to realize that Christmas itself wasn’t necessarily what was wearing me out.
It was everything that happened before we ever got there.
Christmas seems to start sometime in October now. We’re still buying Halloween candy and figuring out costumes when the Christmas aisles start appearing, someone mentions Thanksgiving plans and somebody else wants to know what we’re doing for Christmas. Before one holiday has happened, we’re already thinking about the next two.
Meanwhile, regular life doesn’t move out of the way to make room for any of it. We still have work, groceries, laundry, appointments, bills, family things and all the ordinary responsibilities that were taking up our days in September. We just start layering the holidays on top of them, little by little, until what felt manageable in October can feel very different by the middle of December.
That’s the part of holiday stress I don’t think we talk about enough.
Holiday stress starts long before Christmas
By November, there are simply more things taking up space in our heads. Where are we having Thanksgiving? Who is coming? What are we bringing? Are we traveling? Somewhere in there we start thinking about Christmas gifts too, and if you’re the person who tends to remember what everyone likes, what size the grandchildren wear, who already has what and which person is impossible to buy for, you know how quickly those little things add up.
And a lot of it is fun. I don’t want to talk about the holidays as though women are dragging themselves through two miserable months wishing we could cancel the whole thing. I genuinely love this time of year, and I know a lot of women do. We want the people, the traditions and the memories. We just don’t always realize how much we’re carrying in order to make all of those things happen.
Then Thanksgiving comes and goes, and there really isn’t much of a reset anymore. Black Friday starts before the leftovers are put away, Cyber Monday follows, December arrives and now the list we were casually building in October has become a calendar. There are gifts to finish, packages to mail, food to think about, things to attend and the annual surprise that Christmas is somehow only three weeks away even though we have been talking about it forever.
By the middle of December, I can absolutely love Christmas and also understand the woman who would like everyone to stop asking her questions for five minutes. Those two things can exist at the same time.
Sometimes nothing is wrong. It’s just been a lot.
I think this is one reason holiday stress can sneak up on us. There may not be one big thing we can point to and say, “That’s why I’m exhausted.” It can simply be the accumulation of weeks with more decisions, more people to think about, more places to be and fewer stretches of time when our brains aren’t keeping track of something.
Our routines tend to shift right along with it. We stay up later because there’s something else to finish, or because nighttime is finally quiet and we aren’t ready to give that up yet. We eat differently because there’s food everywhere, meals happen at odd times or we’ve been out all afternoon and suddenly realize we never really ate lunch. We lean a little harder on caffeine because we’re tired, then wonder why we’re wide awake when we finally get in bed.
For me, digestion is one of the places stress tends to announce itself. I can be going along thinking I’m handling everything just fine while my stomach has a completely different opinion, and I’ve learned not to dismiss that quite as quickly as I used to.
The older I get, the more interested I am in those little changes because our bodies are often keeping a much better record of what we’ve been carrying than we are. Especially in midlife, when sleep may already be less predictable and hormones can change how stress feels, two months of later nights, different food, extra commitments and very little real downtime can start showing up in ways we don’t immediately connect to the holidays.
Maybe your patience is getting shorter or you’re waking up tired even after what should have been enough sleep. Your stomach is fussier, your head feels crowded, you’re reaching for things you don’t normally crave or you just don’t have much left by the end of the day. None of that requires a disastrous holiday season. Sometimes December gets here and we’re worn out because we’ve been doing December since October.
There’s another side of the holidays, too
Of course, not everything we carry during the holidays comes from having too much to do. This time of year has a way of bringing people and memories right to the surface, including the ones we wish were still sitting at the table.
There are traditions that don’t feel quite the same anymore and families that have changed. There are years when relationships are complicated, money is tighter, someone needs more care or traveling home doesn’t feel as simple as it once did. Sometimes you can be sitting in the middle of a perfectly good Christmas and still miss someone so much that it catches you off guard.
I think that can be hard because there’s so much pressure around the holidays to be happy and grateful, as though feeling one thing means we can’t possibly feel another. But we can love the people who are with us and miss the ones who aren’t. We can look forward to Christmas and still have parts of it that are hard. We can be grateful and tired at the same time.
Most real holidays probably contain a little bit of all of it.
I don’t want to need a vacation from Christmas
This is probably where my own thinking about holiday stress has changed the most. For years, I thought in terms of getting everything done. I would make the lists, keep going and tell myself I could rest when it was over, without really thinking about the fact that the thing at the end of all that work was Christmas.
And I actually wanted to be present for Christmas.
I don’t want to spend October, November and most of December using up every bit of myself and then expect some cheerful, well-rested version of me to appear on Christmas morning. I’d rather notice earlier when I’m starting to do too much and make a few adjustments while they can still make a difference.
For me, that doesn’t mean creating some perfect holiday wellness plan because I know how that would go. It’s more ordinary than that. I can notice when the calendar is getting too full before I add something else. I can ask for help before I’m aggravated that nobody thought to offer. I can eat an actual meal on a busy day instead of getting to four o’clock and realizing I’ve been living on coffee and whatever I grabbed while walking through the kitchen.
More than anything, I think I want to leave some ordinary life in the holidays.
There is nothing wrong with an ordinary Tuesday night in December when nobody is going anywhere and nothing Christmasy needs to happen. Ordering dinner doesn’t ruin Christmas. Neither does buying the cookies, leaving a few decorations in the box, saying no to something or deciding that a tradition can change because the people doing it have changed too.
I’m not sure when we decided every available corner of December needed to be filled with something, but I’m becoming much more protective of a few empty ones.
I still want the Christmas part
That’s really what all of this comes down to for me. I’m not trying to do less Christmas because I don’t love it. I’m trying to stop arriving at the part I love with nothing left.
I want to sit down while everybody is still there instead of finally sitting down after they’ve gone home. I want to hear the conversation without half listening because I’m mentally figuring out what needs to happen next. I want Christmas morning to feel like Christmas morning, not like the final event on a calendar I’ve been trying to keep up with since October.
Maybe getting ahead of holiday stress has less to do with figuring out how to survive Christmas Day and more to do with noticing how early we start carrying it. The holidays are going to take up some extra space. Of course they are. There are people we love, things we want to do and memories we still want to make.
I just don’t think they need to take all of it.
If some of this feels familiar
If you’re reading this and realizing that sleep, digestion, energy, mood or brain fog tend to get a little louder when life gets full, you may not know which one to pay attention to first. Maybe that's already been building for you. That’s one of the reasons I put together a simple Stress Assessment. It gives you a place to look at how stress may be showing up for you and where you might want to start.
That same connection is also why I talk so much about gut-brain health. Our gut and brain are in constant communication, and supporting that connection has become one of the foundations of how I take care of my own mental wellness. Happy Juice is the daily drink I use to support the gut-brain axis, mood and everyday stress response.* If you’ve never heard of it, you can read what’s in it, why I use it and decide for yourself whether it makes sense for you.
None of this is about making the holidays stress-free. I’m pretty sure no assessment or drink is going to make your family stop asking where the tape is. It’s simply about understanding your own stress signals a little better and having a few ways to support yourself while real life is still happening.
I’d like to get to Christmas this year and realize I didn’t only pull it off. I was actually there for it.
Nelea R. Lane
The Happy Juice Chick | Founder, The Stress Less Era
Independent Brand Partner with Amare Global #137603
936-209-7222 — yes, you can text me.
Nelea Lane is a Certified Mental Wellness Coach and writes about the gut-brain connection, stress, and everyday mental wellness for women in midlife. Learn more on the Meet Nelea page.
This article is for educational purposes only and is not medical advice.
👑 From the Stress Less Era 👑
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