How To Christmas - Proof Your Life

Small-talk overload. Family feuds. Yep, the most wonderful time of the year comes with its own set of challenges. But read on – there’s help to swerve the festive frazzle

- Lizzie Pook

All should be merry and bright. So why is there a tinsel-shaped knot of dread in the pit of your stomach? That right there is what we’re calling festive anxiety. It rears its ugly head in late November, somewhere between trying to create a Christmas that Jamie Oliver would be proud of, cramming in some festive face time with your entire contacts book, and dropping more than your annual gym membership on presents for everyone from your BFF to Brenda in accounts. If you’re already brainstorming ways to escape Christmas entirely, you need to figure out a plan. Here’s how to Yuletide-proof your mind through to next year and beyond.

Perfect month syndrome (PMS)

There’s nothing like the calendar changing from November 30 to December 1 to turn the grinchiest of Scrooges among us into Buddy the elf, running around trying to make sure this Christmas is the most perfect yet. So what gives? Unsurprisingly, the problem isn’t Christmas – it’s us. “You tend to look back on the Christmases of your childhood through rose-tinted spectacles,” says Sally Brown, a therapist specialising in anxiety. “So when you grow up, you go into a frenzy of organisation and spending in a bid to create that ‘special time’. But you’re trying to re-create something that never really existed; it was never perfect.”