Thanksgiving stress and anxiety is a real thing. Just as the holiday season brings its own baggage of stress and anxiety, Thanksgiving day has its own. But worry not, there are some ways to circumvent it and those are exactly the things that we are going to talk about in the words below. So, let’s talk about how to deal with Thanksgiving anxiety and related stressors.
So, What’s Stressful About Thanksgiving?
As with any festive anxiety, there are no exceptions for Thanksgiving. As a festival, Thanksgiving is celebrated in America and other countries on the continent of North America as a way to give thanks to family, friends, and many other positives in life. This festival is usually celebrated by cooking its staple meal, a Thanksgiving turkey but can also include other staples such as pecan pie. Many families also incorporate religion in this festival by including a prayer at the end of Thanksgiving festivities. In the United States, Thanksgiving is a national holiday. But what are the reasons that make it a nuisance in terms of stress and anxiety?
Read More: Holiday Anxiety: What and When To Do Something About It
The Stressors of Thanksgiving
While there are different stressors that lead to Thanksgiving anxiety, there are some common denominators that often lead to the same outcome. Let’s talk about them first and then we’ll talk about some resolutions for these stressors.
Cooking Up The Staples
A lot of time and mental power is invested in the cooking of many of the staples that relate to Thanksgiving. The Thanksgiving anxiety symptoms start to develop when you are literally trying to cook a turkey that averages around 12 to 15 pounds, sometimes even averaging above that. That takes a lot of time and you also need the patience of a chef with years of experience under their belt. But the thing is usually the one cooking the dinner is not Carmy from The Bear Series and even he went through that Thanksgiving anxiety, and he is just a fictional character. Naturally, you as a real person are also going through the same thing. Cooking a Thanksgiving turkey is an extensive undertaking. Therefore, it is one of the biggest stressors during this day as it kind of becomes a type of performance anxiety.
Poor Time management
Like Christmas and the holiday season, your schedule is all over the place and tends to go haywire whenever something additional is added to it. It is the same for the period leading to Thanksgiving Day and therefore Thanksgiving anxiety. Poor time management is the result of not being able to do things for Thanksgiving in a given period of time that you yourself allotted. This transforms and evolves into Thanksgiving stress in no time if it is left this way.
Co-Occurring Mental Conditions
One of the side-effects of Thanksgiving anxiety is that it can convert into or come with other mental conditions such as depression. Pre-existing conditions such as an eating disorder or bipolar disorder can also be exacerbated and can exacerbate Thanksgiving stress and anxiety. It is a two-fold relationship and both are very considerate in terms of reciprocity, which doesn’t bode well for you, especially if you already have a pre-existing condition. This is because anxiety and stress, no matter what they relate to, tend to be either secondary symptoms of a mental condition or can evolve into something much more harmful by virtue of being mental conditions themselves. Thanksgiving anxiety is also a hard matter when it comes to eating disorders as Thanksgiving is all about dinners and food, and in celebrating a festival one can go overboard by overeating or experience the worst kind of anxiety due to being extremely worried about adding weight.
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Cleaning Up and Making Arrangements
Cleaning up before and after the festival can also contribute to Thanksgiving anxiety. It is part of the making arrangements chore of the festival. All of this contributes to overbearing stress and anxiety that keeps on stacking up in the lead-up to Thanksgiving day. While keeping abreast of the time, cooking, and arrangements, it does become hard for the host of the Thanksgiving dinner, especially, to arrange everything.
Social Gatherings
Thanksgiving, for all intents and purposes, is a social matter. Social anxiety is likely going to be relegated as Thanksgiving anxiety as a result, especially if it is the case you are anxiety-prone or suffering from some kind of anxiety disorder such as obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) making social gatherings quite possibly the worst kind of stressor. It can also lead to anticipatory anxiety relating to family interactions if it is the case there are a lot of fault lines in the family for one reason or another. Perhaps, these family or even friend group interactions might seem overbearing to you because of the high expectations that your family has for you.
So, How Do You Deal With Thanksgiving Anxiety?
These are some of the ways that one can get rid of Thanksgiving anxiety:
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Plan Ahead
To ensure that poor time management does not become a habit and the arrangements that you have made do not clash on the festival day, plan ahead. You can do it in a range of different ways that will help you avoid Thanksgiving anxiety, for example, keeping up with a to-do list, discussing with someone and taking advice from them, making a checklist, and of course using a hanging calendar that can be hanged on a wall or placed on the fridge, so you can keep abreast of everything related to Thanksgiving and make plans accordingly. Making a game plan of sorts can also work really well!
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Managing Expectations and Setting Boundaries
If you think social anxiety will kill you before Thanksgiving interactions, then you yourself will have to manage the expectations that the family members and peer groups have with you. Not doing so, will allow everyone who you will be meeting on Thanksgiving to overstep the boundaries you have. Also, high expectations that people keep with you will always lead to anxiety for you because nobody is perfect or flawless, so you are bound to take stress in order if you are not satisfying their expectations. This is why it is always better to inform your family and friends to keep realistic expectations from you as one can end up feeling discouraged, or even like a failure, which isn’t good for mental health or will probably induce Thanksgiving anxiety. Communication is the only way out of this one.
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Focus On Self Care For Better Mental Health
Co-occurring mental conditions can always exacerbate the Thanksgiving anxiety symptoms. The double dose of simultaneously occurring conditions will be extremely debilitating for the sufferer. It is best to focus on oneself rather than focusing on the festival shenanigans. You can do this by making some lifestyle changes, such as exercising to improve your body image and also keeping you away from the Thanksgiving anxiety related to eating or weight or you can try to improve your mental health by going for treatment with methods such as psychotherapy or psychiatric medication management.
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Recognizing It Might Be Seasonal Affective Disorder
If we get deeper into mental issues that relate to Thanksgiving anxiety there is one thing that you will indeed find that needs to be understood properly. This one thing is called seasonal affective disorder, which is a kind of depression that only strikes during a particular season, usually winter or anytime after the fall season due to changes in the daylight hours, which in turn affects the circadian rhythm (our internal clock). It could be possible that the symptoms that you are feeling and believe to be Thanksgiving anxiety may just be SAD in the background while displaying symptoms that are similar to Thanksgiving stress such as sadness, anxiety, social avoidance, and insomnia.
Read More: What is an OSFED Eating Disorder?
Wrapping Up!
We have talked a lot about festive anxiety relating to Thanksgiving day and we have also talked about the subject: How do you deal with thanksgiving anxiety? If it is the treatment that you are looking for, for example, something like telehealth psychiatry, or treating something like Thanksgiving anxiety or another thing entirely, such as psychosis, you can find all that Inland Empire Behavioral Group.
