Over Christmas week, Jeff’s extended family had its usual gathering, peaking at about 28 people in one house. There are kids running and yelling, people playing musical instruments, and always someone standing in front of the refrigerator when you want to get something.
One of my kids approached me in tears, saying she doesn’t know what’s wrong with her but she’s feeling overwhelmed by her cousins’ fart jokes. I told her a week with 20+ relatives is overwhelming for a lot of us. Notice how one relative takes three naps a day? And another goes for long walks a lot? And I’m hiding upstairs reading?
I’m a lot better at handling Christmas than I used to be. When I first joined these family gatherings in my early twenties, I had strong preferences about things like:
- Christmas music should not be not played before December, and ideally not before the first Sunday in Advent
- The kitchen should be efficiently run and produce good-quality food
- I should get a gift I like in the family gift swap
- I shouldn’t come in last at board games
Now my standards are more like:
- Nobody gets physically injured (not a given with a lot of rambunctious cousins around)
- People enjoy relaxed time together
- Some family traditions get carried out in some way
- My kids and I get enough food and sleep
I approach some things differently now:
- I’m better about taking introvert time before I’m at a snapping point, rather than staying in the hubbub until I’m freaked out.
- I try not to have expectations about receiving gifts I like. (Although a lot of this is just feeling less stretched for money than I did in my 20s — now I get more small luxuries for myself instead of depending on gift-giving occasions).
- In my own thoughts, I try to lean into “people are enjoying this time together” and lean away from “I could cook this meal so much more efficiently without all these people in the kitchen.”
……
Some methods that try to build equanimity:
- Dialectical behavior therapy (explanation, resources). DBT was originally developed for people with borderline personality disorder who have very unstable emotions, and I think some of the materials tend to be offputting to people who aren’t handling extreme distress. But the basic areas are applicable to anyone.
- Acceptance and commitment therapy / ACT (explanation, resources)
- Various mindfulness traditions / techniques
- Stoic philosophy, I think?
Admittedly I haven’t made much use of any of these.
…..
In terms of Big 5 personality traits (the most evidence-backed of the personality systems), one of the traits is emotional stability vs neuroticism. It’s defined in terms of how sensitive you are to stress, or how much of a tendency you have toward negative emotions like anxiety, irritability, and sadness. (Neuroticism is a confusing name because “neurotic” means something else in Freudian psychology, and it sounds kind of insulting.)
Neuroticism is correlated with having anxiety disorders and depressive disorders, but you can be a kinda sad or anxious person without meeting the criteria for a psychiatric disorder.
Much of the research indicates that people tend to get more conscientious, more agreeable, and more emotionally stable as they age.
I find these findings on personality changes reassuring, especially the decline in women’s neuroticism over the lifespan, which indicates I might continue to get chiller:
Caveats: This study isn’t following the same individuals across time, and I can believe there’s selection bias in which older people are filling out surveys on Mechanical Turk. Studies that go further into old age find that neuroticism tends to increase again.
…….
I’m proud of the progress I’ve made on being more emotionally stable, both for my own sake and for the sake of people I’m close to. I’m also interested to see if I can help my kids (especially the one who’s most prone to anxiety) learn this stuff a little faster than I did.