Disclaimer: This article is for educational and informational purposes only. It is not a substitute for professional mental health advice, diagnosis, or treatment. If you are experiencing distress, please consult a licensed mental health professional. In a crisis, call or text 988 or call 911.
A 2025 Grow Therapy/YouGov survey of 2,458 adults found that 37% of women report feeling worse mentally and emotionally during the holiday season, compared to 26% of men. The American Psychological Association’s Healthy Minds poll found that 41% of U.S. adults expect more holiday stress than in previous years. For high-achieving women, the holidays don’t pause the pressure — they amplify it. Dr. Jaime Bercuson, PsyD, specializes in helping high-functioning women manage anxiety, perfectionism, and overwhelm — including the specific challenges that surface during the holiday season. Licensed in Utah, California, and Florida.
The Season That Asks You to Do Everything
Here is what the holidays actually look like for most of the women I work with: you are already stretched. You are managing a demanding career, a household, relationships, your own mental health, and probably the emotional needs of at least three other people. Then November arrives and drops an entirely new category of obligations on top of everything you’re already carrying. Gifts to research, buy, wrap, and ship. Meals to plan and prepare. Events to attend, host, or politely decline. Travel to arrange. Decorations. Cards. Outfits. Teacher gifts. Charity donations. Family dynamics that require the emotional dexterity of a diplomat.
And through all of it, you are supposed to feel grateful. Joyful. Present. The cultural narrative insists that this is the most wonderful time of the year, and if you aren’t experiencing wonder — if what you’re actually experiencing is dread, exhaustion, and a low hum of panic — something must be wrong with you.
Nothing is wrong with you. The math simply doesn’t work. You cannot add dozens of new demands to a life that was already at capacity and expect your nervous system to respond with sparkle and warmth. What your nervous system does instead is what it’s designed to do: it sounds the alarm.
What the Research Actually Says
Holiday anxiety is not a personal failing. It is a well-documented phenomenon with measurable causes, and the data consistently shows that women carry a disproportionate share of the burden.
The numbers tell a clear story. That Grow Therapy/YouGov survey found that women are 42% more likely than men to report worsened mental health during the holidays. TELUS Health data found that women are 40% more likely to report heightened holiday stress overall. A SurveyMonkey survey of 1,679 adults found that 34% of women worry about overspending during the holidays compared to 23% of men. An Oshi Health survey found that 20% of women take on the main holiday planning role, compared to just 8% of men.
These aren’t coincidences. They are the predictable result of a system in which women — and particularly high-achieving women who hold themselves to exacting standards — are expected to orchestrate the emotional and logistical experience of an entire season while simultaneously performing at full capacity in every other area of their lives.
The Five Pressures That Collide
In my clinical practice, I see holiday anxiety driven by five specific pressures that converge during November and December. Most women I work with are dealing with at least three of them simultaneously.
1. Perfectionism Finds New Territory
If you are a high-achieving woman, perfectionism is probably not new to you. It has been shaping your work, your relationships, and your self-image for years. But the holidays give perfectionism an entirely new playground. Suddenly there are dozens of additional domains where you can fail to meet your own standards: the gift that isn’t thoughtful enough, the dinner that isn’t impressive enough, the decorations that aren’t warm enough, the family photo that doesn’t look effortless enough.
Research published in the Journal of Happiness Studies found that perfectionists experience significantly more distress during holidays because of the gap between their idealized expectations and the messy, imperfect reality of the season. A 2017 meta-analysis by Limburg and colleagues in the Journal of Affective Disorders confirmed that perfectionism is significantly associated with increased anxiety and psychological stress. And a 2022 study in the Journal of Clinical Psychology found that high-achieving women are more likely to exhibit perfectionistic tendencies linked to heightened anxiety.
The holidays essentially double the territory where your perfectionism can operate. And for many women, the standards they hold themselves to during the season are ones they would never impose on anyone else. You would never judge a friend for buying gift cards instead of hand-selected presents. But when you do it, it feels like evidence that you don’t care enough, that you’re cutting corners, that you’re falling short.
2. The Invisible Labor Expands
Research from the University of Bath, published in the Journal of Marriage & Family, found that mothers handle 71% of household mental load tasks — the planning, tracking, anticipating, and coordinating that keeps a household running. During the holidays, that mental load doesn’t just continue. It multiplies.
Holiday mental load includes remembering everyone’s preferences and dietary restrictions, tracking which gifts have been bought and which haven’t, coordinating schedules across multiple families, managing RSVPs, planning menus, anticipating what will run out, knowing whose feelings will be hurt by which seating arrangement, and carrying the emotional awareness of who needs extra care this year. None of this shows up on a to-do list. Most of it is invisible to the people who benefit from it.
When I ask women in my practice what makes the holidays so exhausting, they rarely point to any single task. It’s not the cooking or the shopping or the traveling in isolation. It’s the holding of it all — the cognitive and emotional weight of being the person who makes sure nothing falls through the cracks, while everyone else gets to simply show up and enjoy.
3. Financial Anxiety Intensifies
Money is one of the most common sources of anxiety year-round, and the holidays turn the volume up. That SurveyMonkey finding — 34% of women worry about holiday overspending versus 23% of men — reflects a broader pattern: women tend to carry more of the emotional weight of financial decisions, particularly when those decisions involve caring for others.
For high-achieving women, financial holiday anxiety often has less to do with actual affordability and more to do with what the spending represents. Can I show the people I love that I value them? Will this gift communicate what I want it to communicate? Am I being generous enough, thoughtful enough, present enough? The anxiety isn’t really about money. It’s about worth — yours and theirs — expressed through a spending language you didn’t choose but feel bound by.
4. Family Dynamics Resurface
The holidays compress family contact into concentrated, high-stakes encounters. For many women, this means re-entering dynamics they’ve spent years learning to manage from a distance. The critical parent. The competitive sibling. The in-law relationship that requires constant calibration. The family member who drinks too much. The conversations you’ve learned to avoid.
What makes this particularly activating for high-achieving women is the collision between who they’ve become and the role their family still assigns them. You may be a leader in your professional life, someone whose judgment is respected and whose boundaries are clear. But at the family dinner table, you’re the people-pleaser, the peacekeeper, the one who manages everyone’s feelings so the evening doesn’t implode. That regression — from competent adult to childhood role — is disorienting, and the anticipatory anxiety it generates often begins weeks before the actual gathering.
5. Your Coping Structures Collapse
This is the one that catches most people off guard. During the rest of the year, you probably have structures in place that help regulate your anxiety: a morning routine, regular exercise, consistent sleep, protected alone time, a therapist appointment every other week. The holidays systematically dismantle every one of those structures.
Your sleep schedule shifts. Your exercise routine gets crowded out by obligations. Your alone time evaporates. Your diet changes. Your alcohol consumption may increase. The rhythms and rituals that normally anchor your nervous system are disrupted precisely when you need them most. You are flying without instruments during a storm, and wondering why the turbulence feels worse than usual.
The Anxiety Spiral You Might Recognize
When these five pressures converge, they create a specific pattern I see over and over again in my practice. It looks like this:
You start the season with good intentions. You tell yourself this year will be different — you’ll set boundaries, keep things simple, stay present. Then the obligations start arriving. You say yes to a few things you meant to decline. The to-do list grows. You start managing it with the same intensity you bring to your professional life, because that’s what you know how to do.
The anxiety builds. You lie awake thinking about what you haven’t done. You feel behind even though the season has barely started. You snap at the people closest to you — not because you’re angry at them, but because your nervous system is overloaded and has nowhere to discharge. Then you feel guilty about snapping, which adds another layer of anxiety on top of the original anxiety.
By the time the holidays actually arrive, you are so depleted that you can barely experience them. You go through the motions. You smile in the photos. And when it’s over, you feel a wave of relief so intense it’s almost indistinguishable from grief — because you know, somewhere underneath the exhaustion, that this wasn’t how it was supposed to feel.
If that description makes you want to cry, you are not alone. And you are not broken. You are having a completely rational response to an irrational set of demands.
What Actually Helps: Evidence-Based Strategies
I am not going to tell you to light a candle and practice gratitude. Those things are fine, but they do not address the structural and psychological forces that drive holiday anxiety. Here is what actually works, drawn from clinical research and from what I see making a difference for real women in my practice.
Make Pre-Commitment Decisions
One of the most effective anxiety-reduction strategies is making decisions before you are in the emotionally activated moment. Right now — before the invitations start arriving, before the guilt kicks in, before someone asks if you’re hosting this year — decide what you will and won’t do.
How many events will you attend? What is your gift budget? Which traditions are genuinely meaningful to you, and which are you maintaining out of obligation? What will you say when someone asks you to take on something you’ve decided not to? Making these decisions in a calm, grounded state is fundamentally different from making them in the moment, when anxiety, guilt, and social pressure are all competing for your attention.
Protect Your Anchors
Identify the two or three practices that most effectively regulate your nervous system — sleep, exercise, alone time, whatever they are for you — and treat them as non-negotiable. Not “I’ll try to get to the gym.” Not “I’ll sleep in if I can.” Fixed. Scheduled. Protected with the same fierceness you would protect a work deadline or a child’s medical appointment.
The holidays will try to take these from you. Every cancelled workout and shortened night of sleep reduces your capacity to tolerate stress. Protecting your anchors is not selfish. It is the most strategic thing you can do for everyone around you, because a regulated nervous system is the foundation of everything else.
Practice “Good Enough”
This is particularly important for perfectionists, and it is harder than it sounds. Choose specific, low-stakes holiday tasks and deliberately do them at 70% instead of 100%. Buy the pre-made pie instead of baking from scratch. Send a group text instead of individual cards. Use gift bags instead of hand-wrapped packages with coordinated ribbon.
The goal is not laziness. The goal is building your tolerance for imperfection in a controlled way, so that when something inevitably doesn’t go as planned — the turkey is dry, the flight is delayed, your aunt says something cutting — you have practice sitting with “not perfect” without spiraling.
Name the Labor and Redistribute It
Invisible labor stays invisible until someone names it. If you are the default holiday planner in your family — and statistically, you probably are — make the labor visible. Write out every task involved in making the holidays happen. Then have a conversation about redistributing it. Not “Can you help me?” (which positions you as the project manager who is delegating), but “Here is everything that needs to happen. Which pieces are you taking ownership of?”
This is a boundary conversation, and it will feel uncomfortable. Your anxiety may tell you it’s easier to just do it yourself. In the short term, that’s true. In the long term, absorbing unsustainable labor to avoid a difficult conversation is one of the primary engines of both anxiety and resentment.
Set Financial Boundaries Out Loud
One of the most anxiety-reducing things you can do is name your holiday budget and communicate it to the people in your life. “We’re keeping gifts to $50 per person this year.” “We’re doing experiences instead of gifts.” “We’re donating to a cause instead of exchanging presents.”
The anticipatory anxiety about financial conversations is almost always worse than the conversation itself. And in my experience, most people are relieved when someone else says it first. You are probably not the only one in your circle who is stressed about holiday spending. You may just be the first one willing to say so.
Prepare for Family Dynamics
If you know that certain family interactions trigger your anxiety, prepare for them the way you would prepare for a challenging meeting at work. Identify the specific triggers. Decide in advance how you will respond. Have an exit strategy for conversations that escalate. Arrange a signal with your partner or a trusted person who can help you disengage when you need to.
You do not owe anyone unlimited access to your emotional bandwidth, even — especially — during the holidays. Setting a boundary with a family member is not abandoning them. It is protecting the version of yourself that is capable of being present and kind, rather than depleted and reactive.
Use Your Body When Your Mind Won’t Cooperate
When anxiety is acute — your chest is tight, your thoughts are racing, you can feel the adrenaline in your hands — cognitive strategies often don’t work because your prefrontal cortex is partially offline. Your body, however, is still available. Box breathing (inhale for 4 counts, hold for 4, exhale for 4, hold for 4) activates the parasympathetic nervous system and can reduce acute anxiety within 60–90 seconds. The 5-4-3-2-1 grounding technique (name 5 things you see, 4 you hear, 3 you can touch, 2 you smell, 1 you taste) interrupts the anxiety loop by pulling your attention into the present moment.
These are not permanent solutions. They are circuit breakers — tools that buy you enough nervous system regulation to make a conscious choice about what to do next, instead of reacting from a place of overwhelm.
When It’s More Than Seasonal Stress
There is an important distinction between holiday stress — which is situational and resolves when the season ends — and anxiety that the holidays are intensifying but didn’t create. If you recognize yourself in this article and the description feels familiar not just in November and December but year-round, the holidays may be illuminating a pattern that has been operating beneath the surface for much longer.
The perfectionism. The invisible labor. The difficulty saying no. The gap between how things look and how they feel. The running on empty and calling it normal. These are not holiday problems. They are life problems that the holidays make impossible to ignore.
If that resonates, it may be time to talk to someone — not because you are in crisis, but because you deserve to stop managing and start actually living. Therapy is not just for when things fall apart. It is for when you realize that holding everything together has been costing you more than you want to keep paying.
You Deserve a Holiday That Feels Like One
The holidays should not be an endurance test. They should not require the same intensity and performance pressure as the rest of your year. And you should not have to earn rest by completing an impossible list of obligations that no one person was ever meant to carry alone.
You are allowed to have a holiday season that is smaller, quieter, and simpler than the one the culture prescribes. You are allowed to say no. You are allowed to set a budget and hold it. You are allowed to skip traditions that drain you and keep the ones that nourish you. You are allowed to rest without justifying it, to ask for help without apologizing for it, and to measure the success of your holiday not by how it looked but by how it felt.
That is not lowering your standards. That is raising them — to include your own wellbeing on the list of things that matter this season.