Holiday stress can be reduced by switching focus to time spent together, Halifax psychologist says

Inflated prices can mean inflated stress at Christmas time. But a lot can be avoided if people put more emphasis on the time they spend with people rather than money they spend on people.

Simon Sherry, a clinical psychologist with Crux Psychology and a professor in Dalhousie University’s department of psychology and neuroscience, said there is already a lot of stress around finding and purchasing the right gifts, but that is exacerbated this year by inflation and the current economic climate that means all those gifts cost more, and there is not as much money left on pay day to buy them anyway.

“It’s a good time of the year for us to realize that the pursuit of junk values makes us unhappy over the Christmas season,” Sherry says. “If we’re going to emphasize junk values like commercialism and capitalism, we’re going to have an unsatisfying Christmas.”

He said that’s an especially important message when times are tough.

“Everything is expensive right now, and a meaningful, satisfying Christmas does not lie in greater expenditures on luxury items.”

He said the junk values come from commercials that create artificial needs, and people need to instead emphasize family values. However, he said, “what we need to do is take those values and put them into action.”

That could include taking family routines and traditions like a family dinner or Christmas Eve get-together. Things that are exciting or adventurous experiences, like a sleigh ride or snowball fight “are the glue that bonds people together,” Sherry said.

He said that will count for more than a materialistic gift exchange where the focus is on purchasing and giving the best or the right material things.

“Look at Santa. He’s our secular Christmas icon, and look how he’s doing,” Sherry said. “He’s enormously stressed, he’s immensely time pressured, he’s medically obese and he’s prone to binge-eating. He embodies this Christmas notion of material abundance, that we need to be buying things and giving gifts. I don’t think that’s the essence of Christmas: I think that’s a really important message when Christmas is happening during inflationary times and recessionary times.”

He said when there are children involved who will be comparing notes about how their Christmas went with peers at school or in the neighbourhood, “there is enormous pressure to ‘keep up with the Joneses,’” and “you are often comparing yourself upward to people who have more and looking enviously at their ostentatious displays of wealth and privilege.”

He said that and photos others share online “can make you feel, quite unnecessarily, like a failure. I think this is a good time to teach children that there is more to life than the pursuit of empty materialism.”

If children are taught to “endlessly pursue junk values and commercialism and materialism, it really sets them up for a lifetime of dissatisfaction.”

He said when gifts are purchased, “they should be lasting and meaningful, not empty and disposable.”

But he still believes that we would be much better off to “focus on holiday rituals and activities that foster stability and belonging and excitement, and many of those activities are free or low-cost.”