Finding Calm in the Collective Stress of Christmas

This week is one of the most stressful weeks of the year…

There are cards, emails and presents for many and various people to be organised, perhaps you’re catering for a lot more people than usual and there are complexities of travel, accomodation or hosting to be considered.  It's a combination that can be a nightmare to navigate.

Collective Stress

This is the part of Christmas that is overlooked and yet subtly plays into how we feel at this time of year.

Collective stress is an anxious feeling that many people feel around Christmas; whether that's to do with all of the arrangements, finishing off work commitments for a Christmas deadline, buying much wanted but costly presents or worrying about how the family dynamics will play out when everyone is together. A feeling that rubs off on each other.

Everyone is under some kind of stress. If you decide to go shopping for presents, purchasing in person to get the right gift, shops are busy with feverish people similarly shopping in an atmosphere of stress and anxiety.

Bombarded by adverts, the messaging of Christmas is that it's a time for splurging and that expensive gifts and a picture perfect Christmas lunch or New Year's Party is what is necessary to celebrate. It's really challenging to feel alright about having a good enough Christmas rather than aiming for an idealised image of what Christmas should be.

 We are social creatures and we pick up on this sense of stress that hangs in the air, especially if individually we are responsive to emotional atmospheres. “Are you ready for Christmas?” is common in conversations at this time of year which reinforces a sense of doubt about being prepared.

Anxiety is subtly transmitted from person to person, in the same way that students gathering before an exam will ask each other “Have you revised?” and then feel even more anxious about the exam.

Like a flock of birds that have landed, it only takes a few to be scared before that’s transmitted to the whole flock, which then takes flight. The whole group responds to possible danger or in our case, the stress of the Christmas season.

Finding Calm

If we are influenced by stress around us, and I think we are, the only way to successfully respond to that, is to retain enough calm to notice these feelings but to not get caught up in them. Easier said than done!

That requires a good amount underlying mental steadiness and enough self-awareness to metaphorically step back and practice more steadiness! It’s helpful to accept that if our nature is always to tend to be anxious or to strive for perfection, these factors alone will keep us in a state of constant anxiety and will not produce a deeper sense of calm.

Practising Calm

Practice helps. If we are going to find some calm inner space, the somatic options of the body are always calming - yoga practice of any length (short is good too), a focus on using steady breathing, taking a walk or a relaxing bath.

Cognitive approaches like meditation can be good, but might just be tricky unless we feel comfortable and mentally steady enough to sit quietly for a while. 

Whatever you choose, a little suitable practice each day will take you through the stresses of the season. It will also help you to weather the turbulance of the stress of those around you!

This is the practice of yoga – to build into our structure, whether that’s in our day, our year, our life or deep into our patterns of thought and behaviour – an ability to retain a steadiness of mind that becomes part of who we are.

This is yoga.

And Christmas time is the perfect time to practice our yoga and our steadiness.

Have a very Happy Christmas!