You Need to Work on Your Holiday Stress

I’m trying to remember the exact age when Christmas and New Year’s flipped from sounding like fun times to something more… athletic. A logistical triathlon. A season to mentally endure like you’re running hurdles in high heels on an icy track and field day.

Earlier this month, my Oura ring notified me that I needed to “work on my stress.” Yes, we’ve officially entered an era where your jewelry can send a performance review on your inner emotional state. My ring pinged me at work, where I was immediately mocked for being overly-metric’d, further evidence that I’m too attuned to data and not attuned enough to myself.

But I’ll be honest: when my Oura ring framed stress as something I could work on, suddenly it was speaking my native language. My estranged father once told me, “Annie, you’re not that smart, but you work hard.” (Thank you so much, Dad.) But, he wasn’t wrong. Over-working has been my lifelong superpower.

So if “managing stress” is something I can do—something with a checkbox and a verb—I perk up. I feel motivated, even.

Fast-forward to last night. After putting my kids to bed, I put on the same holiday outfit for the fifth time this week. Holiday Party #5. I was an exceptionally boring holiday attendee this year. I blathered to multiple people about rediscovering the word ambivert, and that—even though I couldn’t stop talking—I’ve finally accepted that I’m an introvert trapped in an extrovert’s body that delivers a non-stop word salad.

Instead of enjoying the lights, laughter, connection, or magic of the season, I reverse-engineered my entire evening around traffic patterns and avoiding sabotage of my morning workout—the only part of my day that keeps my family safe and me sane.

Which brings me back to the Oura ring.

The reason it told me to “work on my stress” was because of my poor heart rate variability (HRV).

I interpret ECGs for a living, but HRV is something I only learned about this year. It reflects how well your sympathetic system (“go-go-go!”) and your parasympathetic system (“please stop doing 11 things at once!”) balance each other.

Heart Rate Variability (HRV) is the tiny fluctuation in time between each heartbeat, and it reflects how well your body shifts between “fight-or-flight” and “rest-and-digest” modes. Higher HRV generally means your nervous system is flexible and resilient; lower HRV suggests stress, fatigue, or reduced recovery capacity. Think of it like an engine—your heart rate is the idle speed, but HRV is how smoothly you can rev up and down in response to life’s demands.

Apparently, my nervous system has resigned.

My HRV doesn’t just tank during ER shifts, it plummets while I’m hustling through laundry, putting groceries away, or even writing (the thing I love most). Even as I type this, there’s a gear inside me turning: push, strive, produce, next thing, next thing. Quick on, quick off. No time for a smooth transition — it’s like I’m flipping between rooms in the ER even in my day to day life.

Relaxing, observing, accepting—these have never been natural states for me. This is a constant source of laughter between my husband and me—he who is naturally chill, and me who is naturally thrill. But I felt validated last week at the Women’s Brain Health Initiative conference when one speaker told this joke:

A husband and wife were asked their favourite chair in the house.
The man immediately pointed to the big recliner where he reads, relaxes, and drinks his nightcap.

The woman walked through every room, inspected every chair, sat in each one, and finally returned to the kitchen to say:

“You know… I don’t think I’ve ever sat in any of these chairs before today.”

Every woman in the room burst out laughing—because it wasn’t really a joke. (Although, full disclosure, my husband did do most of the kids lunches and laundry last week so I could attend said conference.)

A huge part of my stress problem is that my self-worth is too tightly bound to productivity. On paper, managing holiday outfits and cookie parties should not register anywhere near the stress of running an overnight ER shift.

But subjectively? My nervous system does not care.

This is where psychologists bring in the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS)—one of the most widely used tools to measure how stressed we feel, regardless of how stressful our lives look from the outside.

The PSS measures your inner appraisal of your life—whether you feel overwhelmed, out of control, overloaded, or unable to cope. And this is where I score… let’s say, suboptimally.

At its core, stress isn’t just what happens to us.
It’s the gap between the demands we face and the resources we believe we have to handle them.

Stress = Demands > Perceived capacity

It’s a bandwidth issue. Even small things feel huge when your internal buffer is gone.

The PSS asks questions like:

• “How often have you felt you couldn’t cope with all the things you had to do?”

• “How often have you felt nervous or ‘on edge’?”

• “How often have you felt confident in your ability to handle your problems?”

Your answers reveal not just the presence of stress, but your relationship to it.

One of my core issues lately is that I’ve allowed nearly everything in my life to become a potential stressor—even the things that originally brought joy (music, writing, exercise, and now apparently… Christmas parties).

Recent surveys using the PSS and similar tools show:

• Over 55% of adults report feeling “high stress” on a daily basis

• Women consistently score higher than men

• Parents of children under 10 report some of the highest stress scores in the population

• In Canada, more than 1 in 3 adults say most days are “quite a bit” or “extremely” stressful

In other words: many of us are living in a near-constant demand > capacity state.

But the hopeful part is embedded in the name itself: perceived stress.

If stress is partly about appraisal, interpretation, and internal bandwidth, then small, doable daily tools can lower the subjective load—even when the objective load stays exactly the same.

Now that stress management has become something on my task list, something with a checkbox beside it, I’ve mentally added a new line to my evenings:

“Sit on the couch once and just observe what is happening in my family.”

And now I genuinely look forward to this micro-moment. It’s two minutes where I’m not multitasking by sorting laundry or loading the dishwasher. (Well… I am multitasking, because I’m complying with the instructions I’ve been given to “work on my stress.” But still.)

There are many stressors we simply can’t eliminate—caring for kids, showing up for work, family events, and the general demands of adulthood. In those cases, the work isn’t eliminating the stressor (impossible), but reducing our reactivity to it. I’m not great at doing the micro things like breathwork, but sticking with 30 minutes of yoga per day, even just at home from the Peleton app, objectively helps my HRV.

Journaling is also generally one of my release valves to calm myself. It’s only when I imagine you reading it and thinking, why did she think this would be interesting for me, or why does she feel so at ease putting her thoughts on display that the therapeutic benefits decline, according to my HRV measure.

And in the situations where we can protect our bandwidth, I’m trying to get better at saying no more often. Next year, I might only attend four holiday events. Maybe I’ll even enjoy one, instead of spending the whole time explain why I’m sailing through.

You’re not alone.

Most of us are operating above our nervous system’s capacity during this season.

I hope reading this provided a moment of ease or at the very least a hearty laugh at my expense.

And truly: whether you attend that party, skip it, arrive late or leave early —I hope you choose the option that is kindest to your nervous system.

With love,
xo
Dr. Anne

PS. If you liked this post, you might be interested in one I recently wrote on Cortisol Curves and putting my Brain DNA in the mail.