Stress in the Season

Stress in Season: From Survival to Choice

The holiday season is often described as joyful, meaningful, and connecting. And for many people, it is. It’s also loud, fast, emotionally loaded, and deeply demanding.

What’s important to understand is this: the holidays don’t create stress out of nowhere. They amplify what’s already present — in our bodies, our relationships, our expectations, and our sense of meaning.

Stress during this season isn’t a personal failure. It’s a predictable human response to increased demand, disrupted routines, and heightened significance.

The Role of Stress: Why It Exists at All

Stress exists for a reason. From a CampWell SAFE perspective, stress serves three essential roles:

• Alert — signaling that something requires attention

• Mobilize — providing energy, focus, and readiness

• Protect — helping us respond to perceived threat or challenge

Stress is the nervous system saying, “This matters.” Not, “You’re doing something wrong.”

During the holidays, what “matters” tends to multiply: family, traditions, finances, relationships, values, and memories — including loss and grief. The more meaning something carries, the more stress tends to accompany it.

Levels of Stress: Not All Stress Is the Same

We often talk about stress as if it’s a single experience, but in reality, it exists along a spectrum. Understanding where we are on that spectrum matters — because the same strategy that helps in one zone can be ineffective or harmful in another.

Low Stress: Under-Activation

Low stress might sound appealing, but it’s not where growth or connection happens.

This state often shows up as:

• Disengagement or apathy

• Low motivation

• Emotional flatness

• Going through the motions

During the holidays, low stress can appear as withdrawal or numbness — especially for those who are overwhelmed or grieving. This isn’t laziness. It’s protection.

Low stress isn’t something to fix. It’s information that engagement, rest, or meaning may be missing.

Optimal Stress: The Window of Engagement

This is the zone we’re aiming for — not stress-free, but appropriately stressed.

In this state, we experience:

• Focus and clarity

• Energy and presence

• Emotional access

• The ability to respond rather than react

Here, the brain and body are working together. We’re alert, but not alarmed. Activated, but not overwhelmed.

This is where challenge leads to learning and discomfort leads to growth. Well-designed programs, healthy relationships, and effective leadership all intentionally operate in this zone.

The challenge of the holiday season is that recovery time often disappears. Without rest and regulation, we can slide out of this window quickly — not because we can’t handle stress, but because we aren’t resourced to sustain it.

High or Toxic Stress: Over-Activation

High stress isn’t just “more stress.” It’s a different biological state.

This zone often looks like:

• Reactivity or emotional flooding

• Tunnel vision and rigid thinking

• Shutdown or impulsivity

• Loss of perspective

When stress is high, the nervous system prioritizes survival. Stress hormones flood the body, and access to the prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain responsible for logic, empathy, and decision-making — decreases.

This is a critical reframe: When stress is high, we don’t lose our skills — we lose access to them.

During the holidays, family dynamics, disrupted routines, lack of sleep, and unresolved history can stack quickly. Suddenly, we’re responding to the present with a nervous system shaped by the past.

High stress is not a moral failure. It’s a biological state.

Stress Lives in Layers

Stress rarely shows up in just one way. It often operates across multiple layers at once:

• Physical: fatigue, illness, travel, disrupted sleep

• Psychological: expectations, self-talk, perfectionism

• Psycho-social: family dynamics, belonging, boundaries

• Psycho-spiritual: meaning, grief, values conflict, identity

The holidays don’t just stress our schedules — they stress our identities.

Stress Responses: Fight, Flight, Freeze, and Fawn

When stress crosses into perceived threat, the body responds automatically. These responses are not personality traits. They are protective survival strategies.

• Fight: irritability, control, defensiveness

• Flight: avoidance, overworking, distraction

• Freeze: shutdown, indecision, numbness

• Fawn: people-pleasing, over-giving, loss of boundaries

Naming these responses creates compassion — for ourselves and for others. They are not failures. They are adaptations.

From Reaction to Relationship: A Mindfulness Lens

This is where Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn, offers a critical shift.

Mindfulness doesn’t remove stress from the holidays. It changes how we meet it.

At its core, MBSR is built on three pillars:

• Awareness — noticing what’s present

• Non-judgment — meeting experience without labeling it as wrong

• Choice — responding rather than reacting

As Kabat-Zinn says, “You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.”

Mindfulness doesn’t make the season easier. It makes it truer.

The Compass of Awareness: Stress, Season, and Choice

At Compass of Awareness, I use a simple orienting model to help people move from autopilot to intention.

Imagine a compass:

• North – Body: What sensations are present? What is the nervous system signaling?

• East – Mind: What thoughts, stories, or expectations are active?

• South – Environment & Relationships: What external factors are influencing me?

• West – Meaning & Values: Why does this matter? What’s being touched here?

At the center of the compass is Choice — informed by awareness of all four directions.

During the holidays, seasonal demand acts like a pressure ring around the compass, amplifying everything. The goal isn’t to eliminate that pressure. It’s to orient before reacting.

Awareness creates space. Space creates options.

Carrying This Forward

Stress is not the enemy. It’s information. Awareness is not a personality trait. It’s a skill. Choice is not always easy — but it is always possible.

The season will pass. How we relate to stress can stay with us.

As you move through the coming weeks, consider this simple reflection:

What’s one signal your stress gives you — and one way you want to meet it with awareness instead of autopilot?