Speaking of Psychology: The holiday blues, with Elaine Rodino, PhD

For many people, the holiday season can be a time of stress rather than joy even in the best of times. And this year, of course, the holidays will be different for everyone, as the coronavirus pandemic forces us to forgo holiday gatherings and family visits. Elaine Rodino, PhD, discusses the "holiday blues" and how to get through the season, this year and every year.

Elaine Rodino, PhD, is a licensed a psychologist in State College, Pennsylvania, and a fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Pennsylvania Psychological Association. She has practiced psychology for 40 years in California and Pennsylvania. She is a past president of APA Division 46 (Society for Media Psychology & Technology), Division 42 (Psychologists in Independent Practice), the Los Angeles County Psychological Association, and the Central Pennsylvania Psychological Association.

Kim Mills: Do you feel anxious when Christmas lights start appearing in your neighborhood every year? You're not alone. For some people, the holiday season brings with it, not joy and cheer, but stress, loneliness, and sadness. For others, the holidays are a happy time spent reconnecting with family near and far, sharing great meals, engaging in cherished traditions, but not this year.

This strange year, nothing about the holidays will be normal, as many of us will be foregoing family visits, holiday parties, and other traditions. For some people, these changes will be hard to take. For others, they might be a welcome relief.

I'm talking about the holiday blues. You've probably heard the term. While there's no formal diagnosis of holiday blues, these feelings are quite real for some people. What exactly are the holiday blues? How might they be different this year? For those of you who are sad at the thought of a holiday season unlike any other, what can you do to cope this year?

Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills.

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My guest today is Dr. Elaine Rodino, a psychologist in private practice in State College, Pennsylvania. She's an APA fellow and a former president of APA's division of psychologists in independent practice. She's also had a longstanding interest in the holiday blues and has helped many of her patients with this issue over the years. Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, Dr. Rodino.

Elaine Rodino, PhD: Thank you. Good to be here.

Mills: Let's start with a broad definition. What are holiday blues? As I said earlier, there's no actual diagnosis, but is it a real condition, and what are its hallmarks?

Rodino: Yes, it is a real condition, and I'm really glad you noted that it's not a diagnosable condition. It's a condition that usually appears around the holidays and then fades away sometime in January.

Rodino: What are they? What are these feelings? They can vary. To some people, it's a feeling of malaise. They just feel tired. They can't get to things. Other people, it's the traditional bah, humbug attitude. They hate the holidays. Can't wait until they're over. That kind of thing. Some people, they're just stressed out. They're just scattered all over the place and just in a frenzy of needing to do so many things. However this affects people ...

Rodino: For some people, they don't have this at all. So it's not that you must have one of these conditions.

Mills: Right.

Rodino: Again, it's good to know that they do fade away in January.

Mills: How did you first become interested in this topic?

Rodino: That's an interesting story. This was way back when I was an intern in psychology at the Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Center, which since that time has now been taken over by the Didi Hirsch Mental Health Center in Los Angeles.

Rodino: Well, the center at that time was the very first suicide prevention center. The leaders there were the ones that created the programs for suicide and suicide hotlines. Media would very actively come and talk with people, interview us. That's actually how I also started doing work with media and get comfortable working with the media.

Rodino: Well, they would come every holiday time and want to know is true more people commit suicide in December. The response is no, they don't. It's not a higher suicide month. But what the gurus at the Suicide Prevention Center started to formulate was, and coin the term holiday blues, that there were these feelings of blues, but not a diagnosable depression or suicidalness.

Mills: Why do you think that myth persists that there are more suicides around the holidays?

Rodino: Well, I think it's decreased over time, because I've been doing interviews about holiday blues since that time, and I have seen decrease ... In fact, I haven't been asked that question in many years. So I think people are now focusing on holiday blues rather than suicide.

Mills: Or they're reading the statistics, and they see that it's not actually there perhaps.

Rodino: Right.

Mills: You've been a practitioner for a long time.

Rodino: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Mills: Is this something that you see commonly in your practice among your patients? Do you see an uptick in blues during the holidays?

Rodino: Well, I don't believe I have ever had anyone actually come to therapy because of holiday blues, but almost all my patients discuss it in their sessions. During the holiday time, there's always conversations about how they're going to get through the holidays, what they're doing, what the stresses are, how they're going to deal with getting together with family.

Rodino: This year, with the pandemic, it's totally another whole layer of issues going on. And by the way, there are fewer issues, in some respects, because many people are not doing face-to-face gatherings, so there's a reduction in some of the stress that goes on with that.

Mills: So you're hearing that the people, for example, who are afraid to get together with Uncle Morrie because we don't agree on politics, you're not going to see Uncle Morrie this year.

Rodino: Absolutely. But it still comes up, because they're worried about Uncle Morrie showing up on Zoom.

Mills: Don't give him the link.

Rodino: Well, you can always somehow have a technical malfunction and disconnect.

Mills: Sorry, I can't hear you. Well, who is most at risk of getting holiday blues?

Rodino: Well, I kind of see that can be some what you may think of as bad reasons, and you may think of other reasons as good reasons. I find, most of the time, it's related to issues that happened to people earlier in their lives.

Rodino: Under the bad category, examples would be having an alcoholic parent. Often an alcoholic parent would have a way of just really ruining a holiday. As the drinking goes on during the day, they may become hostile, aggressive, and somehow really make an ugly Christmas day or Thanksgiving day. Or kind of the Uncle Morrie stories that they remember.

Rodino: That's why those kinds of jokes persist, because they did happen. There could be some pretty hostile family arguments, and people storming out. I never heard of food fights, but ... For children, it could be pretty memorable in negative ways. So people may feel uncomfortable with holidays without even particularly remembering why, but they just are uncomfortable with it.

Rodino: On the good side, some people have early childhood memories of everything being so perfect. They had families, maybe their father decorated the house, and it was the best, most lit up house in the whole neighborhood. Or their mother baked 300 cookies, and wrapped them beautifully, and delivered them to all the neighbors. These then get taken on as traditions, and people feel they need to do that kind of special, over the top holiday. That can bring a lot of stress. It's the expectations of what they feel, either negative or positive.

Mills: So then for this year, the people who have those good memories, they may not be able to share them. What's going to happen to those folks?

Rodino: Well, yeah. Well, see, even those good memories become problems, because it adds to the stress that they feel that they need to follow in those traditions that their parents did. I always advise people to start their own traditions, either as yourself or a family.

Rodino: If people always just follow traditions ... My favorite thing to say is if we never changed and evolved, we would still be celebrating the way they did in the medieval times. Things would have never changed. Clearly, people zig and zag, and create new ways of doing things. This year is major change, so people do need to become creative and think up new ways to celebrate.

Mills: You have some strategies? Are your clients asking you? Or are you just discussing what you might do instead?

Rodino: Well, yeah. What I would also advise is just Googling ideas for pandemic holidays. In fact, preparing for this interview, I Googled it to see what was there. There were pages of ideas. There's something for everyone

Mills: A survey that we did at APA quite a while ago, it was actually 2006, it found that women were more likely than men to report higher stress during the holidays. I think we theorize that a lot of the work of preparing for these celebrations falls on women. Does this ring true for you? Is it your experience that women experience the holiday blues more severely or in greater numbers?

Rodino: Yeah and no. I don't think I can say statistically in greater numbers, but the issues are different. I think the men have more often been concerned about the Uncle Morrie situations, and the women more worried about the 300 cookies. That would be the doing more.

Mills: Yeah.

Rodino: Yeah. But the men also would be decorating the house to be the best in the neighborhood.

Mills: For people who are feeling trepidation right now, or looking ahead to November and December, what would you advise people to do in order to cope, particularly if they're feeling stressed already?

Rodino: Well, one thing is realizing that it's time limited. Another is doing self-care things, making sure you keep up with the usual self care things that you do, whether it's exercising, taking a warm bath, just taking a break and reading a book. There needs to be just some time that you just check out from the holiday stress part.

Mills: Wearing your therapist hat, what about people who were having the holiday blues and feel really bad? How do you know when you're slipping from just basic holiday blues that will go away into something that could be more serious or longterm?

Rodino: Yeah. I think it is two things. One is how dysfunctional is it making you during the holiday time? Are you just staying in bed, pulling the covers over your head, and just waiting for the calendar pages to slip by?

Rodino: Then the other thing is how long does it last into January? Usually, this starts fading first couple of weeks in January. So if people are still feeling that, like say the second, third week of January, then they really should talk with a psychologist, because they could be issues that really need to be sorted out and processed.

Mills: Speaking of January, the blues might go away, but then you've made some New Year's resolutions, and maybe by the third or fourth week, you're seeing, "Well, I can't go to the gym, and it's really hard to work out at home." Are people beating themselves up because they're not keeping the resolutions?

Rodino: Yeah. That's another whole set of issues, right? The New Year resolutions, that's actually another podcasts you can do, because there are tips on making them reasonable, and not have this magical thinking that you're going to become this different person on January 1st.

Mills: I think it would be good maybe to talk a little bit about that now, because then people can be prepared. Then you start thinking about it in December, like you know that January 1st is coming. What are realistic ways of preparing for trying to be better, say, in the new year, but not going over the top?

Rodino: Well, exactly the way you said it. I think it is good to think ahead and think, well, it's a new year, fresh start. Hopefully, 2021 will be a better year. What do I want to accomplish? What do I want to do?

Rodino: Have it be reasonable, because as I said before, you are still you. Don't think you're suddenly going to be this superhuman being capable of these grand things. You're not going to do an Ironman kind of thing if you don't even take a hike.

Mills: What about you? Do you have some coping strategies that you're working on for this year?

Rodino: I think just hoping that we can all get out and socialize again. But in the meanwhile, in terms of coping strategies, I do a lot of video virtual meetings. Aside from my practice being totally virtual, I do socialize a lot. I'm so surprised that I almost have to remind myself that I'm not meeting people in person.

Mills: So it's really helpful.

Rodino: Yeah, yeah.

Mills: That's a good thing to keep in mind, I think, as we get toward Christmas and you can't go see the grandchildren, but you can Zoom with them.

Rodino: Right. That's right.

Mills: Well, this has been very helpful. I hope that a couple of these tips will make people feel better as we get into the holiday season. I want to thank you for joining us today, Dr. Rodino.

Rodino: Thank you.

Mills: You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at www.speakingofpsychology.org or wherever you get your podcasts. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, email us at speakingofpsychology@apa.org. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lee Winerman. Our sound editor is Chris Condayan. Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I'm Kim Mills.