What the Holidays Reveal About the Life You’re Living
With Christmas just around the corner and the holidays having already started for many, this can be a crunch time for many. A friend of mine summarised what many are thinking, "I just need to get through Christmas and then I can relax."
The truth is that Christmas will come and go, but the stress, overwhelm, and general feeling of dis-ease will continue.
Why? Because nothing magical happens once Christmas has passed. Santa unfortunately has not given us a new brain or nervous system and so on we trudge, barely surviving the holidays and feeling relieved to be back at work, to have structure back — until we are a few weeks in and again our brain and nervous system make themselves known and soon enough we are exhausted, stressed and wishing it was the holidays again.
So what’s really going on?
For many people, it’s not that life suddenly becomes harder at Christmas. It’s that the patterns we’ve been running quietly in the background all year become more visible when the usual distractions fall away.
As a society, we spend billions on self-care, quick ways to feel better in the moment. And some of these absolutely help. But when the focus stays on symptom relief alone, the relief is often short-lived.
External pressures matter. Workloads, family demands, mental load all of it is real. And at the same time, what often keeps stress looping is internal: the way our brain has learned to respond, the beliefs we’ve absorbed about productivity and worth, and the state of our nervous system after years of operating at pace.
Christmas has a way of gently holding up a mirror to this.
Not to judge us — but to show us what’s been there all along:
The exhaustion we’ve been pushing through
The disconnection we’ve learned to ignore
The guilt that appears when we try to rest
The low-level anxiety that never fully switches off
If this feels familiar, it’s worth saying: the holidays themselves aren’t the problem. They simply create space sometimes uncomfortable space to notice how we’re actually living. Stress, overwhelm, and exhaustion have become so normalised for so many of us who have full lives. In fact many assume this is just how life is. It makes sense that we’ve adapted this way. But it comes at a cost. Sometimes the cost is obvious, a health issue, a relationship breakdown, disconnection from others - but other times it is more insidious. Life just becomes less enjoyable, you start to lower your expectations and baseline against your friends, who also are experiencing the exact same thing.
I know this because it was me.
I took pride in how much I could handle. How capable I was. How much I could get done. And slowly, the cost showed up in my health, my relationships, my ability to be present, and my sense of connection to myself.
So as the structure of work loosens even briefly it can be revealing to notice what shows up underneath.
Is it hard to rest without feeling guilty?
Do you feel a pull to stay “productive” even on a day off?
Do you find yourself constantly checking your phone?
Do you prioritise everyone else’s needs before your own?
Are you searching for small hits of relief just to take the edge off?
For a long time, I told myself these patterns were circumstantial. What I now understand is that they weren’t created by Christmas and the holiday period. They were already there. This season simply removes some of the noise and shows us how we operate when the busyness pauses.
So as you move through Christmas and the holidays, a gentle question to sit with might be this:
Can you afford another year that feels like this?
Another year where exhaustion is your baseline.
Where you miss moments while you’re living them.
Where connection with yourself is always postponed.
Where “someday” keeps getting pushed further away.
Because here’s what I know to be true:
2026 can be different. Not through force or motivation — but through awareness and choice.
Not later.
Not when things calm down.
Not when you have more time.
But now.
