Dreading the things you ‘should’ do this holiday season? Maybe it’s time to redefine ‘should.’

Blog Post
Dec. 8, 2023

The holiday season has arrived, and with it … what? Festive cheer? Child-like excitement? A crushing sense of stress and obligation?

As the child of an Evangelical pastor, my greatest association with Christmas is stress, and it has been since before I was old enough to truly understand what that word meant. From second grade through my college graduation, my dad was leading a church "an hour" away from where we lived—except that hour was along one of the worst commutes in the country. We’d leave from our home in Fredericksburg, Va., which sits halfway between Richmond and Washington, D.C., and drive to Annandale, which is right outside of the city. Sometimes it took 45 minutes, sometimes it was three hours, and we were doing it as a family two-to-three times every week from Thanksgiving to Christmas Eve. And then, after the candlelight service[1], we’d get on a United Airlines red eye with my little brother, who had an extremely hard time flying, and arrive at my grandparents’ house in Colorado at 2 a.m. Mountain Time Christmas Day.

My father, my brother, and I at my grandparents’ for Christmas in 2007. We are all in oversized puffy coats — my dad's black, mine pink, and my brother's blue — in front of a barn in the snow. I am 10 and my brother is 5.
My father, my brother, and I at my grandparents’ for Christmas in 2007. I was 10, and my brother was five.

Everyone in my family remembers this era a little differently, but we can all agree that it was incredibly stressful. Eventually, we stopped doing the Christmas Eve red-eyes, but my relationship with the holiday never recovered. I moved up to Boston at 17 for college, and have limited my Christmas celebrations to a week or less since. In both 2020 and 2022, I did essentially nothing, and I sat in therapy before the holiday break, anxious about how I’d function with a whole two weeks off, mostly alone. When you struggle with finding a sense of meaning or purpose for your life — as a majority of American young adults in my age cohort do — intrinsic motivation suffers. Two weeks off can turn into two weeks in bed because there’s no threat of losing your job or pissing off your roommates to get you up in the morning.

In both 2020 and 2022, I was fine. I had maybe 30 minutes of social interaction on Christmas Day last year — a call with my parents as they drove home from the airport, caught up in the infamous Southwest scheduling debacle — and I didn’t feel bad about the limited contact with other people. This year, I’m rethinking my relationship with holidays, and I’m reminded of something I was told when I was doing cognition work: “re-evaluate your relationship with the word ‘should.’" The advice asks us to consider if there’s another word that better conveys why it’s valuable for you to do a thing. Because if there’s no other word that fits the bill, "should" is not a good enough reason to do something or feel bad about not doing it.

You may want to do something because you know it will lead to enjoyment, a cool experience, or a high-value reward, even if your motivation is fluctuating at that very moment. Or maybe it’ll be extremely rewarding for someone important to you, like a child or a partner, and you’ll get a sense of reward by proxy.

Maybe you need to do something, because if you don’t, there will be really unfortunate consequences. In some cases, it can be uncomfortable to admit that you’re going to spend New Year’s at your in-laws house, not because you want to, but because you need to go to avoid a huge blowout. Maybe you spent Thanksgiving with your parents, and your in-laws will feel slighted if they don’t get to see you during the end-of-year-holiday season as well. If choosing between Christmas and New Year’s, you’d rather drive down there for New Year’s— because maybe it feels important that Christmas Day is fun and low-stress for your young kids. So, fine, you’ll go see your in-laws for New Year’s, so you don’t create a firestorm of passive-aggressive texts and intergenerational gossip about you and your partner. It’ll be fine. Probably. Maybe.

Being honest with yourself (and your partner) about the state of affairs is generally in everyone’s best interest. Maybe you go this year, but this is something that you should continue to discuss, as feeling like you don’t have much choice in your holiday plans is likely to lead to resentment and large-scale conflict down the line.

If there is no "want" or "need," and you feel as if you just "should" do it, is it truly in your best interest to do something that will cause stress and/or fatigue while neither creating value nor preventing harm?

Here at the Better Life Lab, Research & Writing Fellow Haley Swenson has written a few experiments around ways to reduce holiday stress by cutting out low-value tasks that are motivated by a vague sense of obligation. I particularly like this line:

"…Make a list of all the things you think you should do or have done in the past, but that nobody spoke of truly enjoying, and put it under the header “To-Don’t.”

I think we all found value in seeing my grandparents, but there were ways that it could’ve been easier. Did we want or need to get on a flight at 11:30 p.m. Christmas Eve so we could be there in time for breakfast on Christmas Day? It’s not like we got the Hallmark movie, running down the stairs to get the presents moment anyway after getting to bed at 5:30 a.m. Eastern Time.

  1. A Candlelight Christmas Eve service is a Christmas tradition that spans many denominations and church cultures. It’s usually a short service, in which the Christmas story is shared directly from the Bible without much commentary, and at the end, you sing all the verses of Silent Night while holding a candle lit by your neighbor in a chain-like fashion. In Evangelical churches, it’s usually in the evening, making a red eye flight possible after the service ends and all the wax is cleaned out of the chairs and the carpet where the kids sit.