5 Ways 'Joy Pressure' Makes The Holidays Stressful

The push to feel happy, connected, and festive can quietly overwhelm your nervous system. Here's why the holidays often disrupt your peace and sleep.

By Mark Travers, Ph.D. | December 29, 2025

The expectation and pressure around the holidays to be the "happiest time of the year" has been around for years. It's almost as though feeling joy, excitement and warmth is an annual mandate for the month of December. The advertisements show smiling families, social media is filled with gratitude posts and celebration highlights and most conversations are peppered with phrases like, "You must be so excited!"

Yet for many people, December feels more mentally exhausting than uplifting. Instead of a sense of calm and gratitude, there is a peculiar irritability and a strange sense of emotional overload. Luckily, psychological research offers a clear explanation for why this happens. When joy becomes an expectation rather than an emotion, it can activate the very stress systems that undermine wellbeing.

Why Emotional Pressure Feels Like Stress To The Brain

From a biological perspective, the brain doesn't really distinguish between different types of pressure. Whether the demand is external, such as deadlines, or internal, such as the expectation to feel happy, the stress response systems activate in similar ways.

Research on stress physiology shows that psychological demands that involve evaluation, performance or emotional regulation reliably activate the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis, which increases the release of the stress hormone cortisol. And this includes situations in which people feel they must manage or display certain emotions.

A large body of research demonstrates that the effort to regulate one's emotions is a stressor in itself, particularly when they feel compelled to suppress or manufacture emotions to meet social expectations.

When the holidays are accompanied by the unspoken rule that you ought to feel grateful, cheerful and be socially engaged, your brain interprets that as a demand. If your internal state does not match the expectation, your nervous system shifts into self-monitoring and threat detection mode. That internal mismatch is where overwhelm begins.

1. Joy Pressure Is Heavy Emotional Labor

Emotional labor refers to the effort required to manage feelings in order to fulfill social roles. While the concept originated in workplace psychology, researchers now recognize that emotional labor also operates in family and social contexts. During the holidays, emotional labor increases dramatically. People often feel pressure to:

• Appear happy or appreciative
• Avoid conflict to "keep the peace"
• Hide grief, resentment or exhaustion
• Smooth over family tension
• Perform enthusiasm during gatherings

Research consistently shows that sustained emotional labor is associated with emotional exhaustion, stress and burnout, especially when individuals suppress their authentic feelings. Suppression, in particular, is linked to increased physiological stress responses and reduced emotional wellbeing.

In a meta-analysis published in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, emotional labor strategies involving "surface acting" were associated with higher emotional exhaustion and poorer mental health outcomes. These same mechanisms apply when emotional labor happens at home rather than work. In other words, pretending to feel festive can quietly drain the nervous system.

2. Joy Pressure Creates A Psychological Burden Of Expectations

The expectation to feel happy creates a paradox. People are poor predictors of how emotions should feel in specific contexts. When reality doesn't align with expectations, disappointment and self-judgment increase.

Studies on emotional expectations demonstrate that believing you should feel happy makes negative emotions feel more distressing, not less. When sadness, anxiety or irritation arise during a time labeled as joyful, people are more likely to interpret those emotions as personal failures.

This self-evaluation adds a second layer of stress. Not only are you experiencing difficult emotions, but you are also judging yourself for having them. Self-evaluative thinking activates brain networks associated with rumination and threat processing. This keeps the nervous system activated longer, making it harder to recover emotionally. The result is not just sadness or anxiety, but cognitive overload.

3. Joy Pressure Increases Cognitive Load and Decision Fatigue

December is not only emotionally demanding; it can also be cognitively overwhelming. Decision making research shows that mental fatigue increases when people face sustained decision load, especially when those decisions involve social consequences.

During the holidays, people make hundreds of small choices daily (many more than they would make on a normal day). And these decisions, including which parties to attend, what gifts to purchase, how to manage family dynamics and how to respond to the overwhelming number of holiday wishes, can merge together to become your worst nightmare.

Each decision draws on executive functioning resources. As cognitive load increases, the brain becomes less efficient at regulating emotions, inhibiting impulses and maintaining perspective. Decision fatigue impairs self-control and increases emotional reactivity. This explains why small inconveniences feel disproportionately upsetting toward the end of the year.

4. Joy Pressure Magnifies Social Evaluation

Social contexts during the holidays often involve evaluation, even when it is subtle. Questions about relationships, work, life progress or future plans can activate self-comparison patterns in your mind. You find yourself asking, "Am I doing enough?" or, "Did I achieve anything this year at all?"

Social evaluative threat is one of the most reliable triggers of stress responses in laboratory research. Studies show that when people feel observed or judged, cortisol responses increase significantly.

Family environments, especially, can amplify this effect because they involve long standing relational patterns. Old roles and expectations can resurface when you reconnect with your folks. And in doing so, you might end up unconsciously reverting to a younger version of yourself, becoming more emotionally sensitive and feeling unaccomplished. The combination of social evaluation and emotional labor creates a perfect storm for stress activation.

5. Joy Pressure Leads To Emotional Numbness

Many people report feeling flat or disconnected during the holidays rather than overtly anxious. This is also consistent with stress research.

When stress activation is prolonged, the nervous system can shift into a conservation mode. Emotional blunting and detachment are common responses to sustained demand. And while this response may look like apathy from the surface, it is an attempt by your nervous system to protect your resources.

When emotional systems are overtaxed, the brain prioritizes energy conservation. That can feel like disengagement, reduced joy or emotional shutdown. Ironically, this state is often misinterpreted as evidence that something is wrong, which adds further self pressure to feel differently.

How To Protect Your Mental Health From Joy pressure

Mental health during high demand periods improves not by increasing positivity, but by reducing unnecessary emotional load. Here are a few evidence-based strategies picked straight from the literature:

1. Normalize emotional variation. Accepting that mixed emotions are normal reduces self judgment and lowers stress responses.
2. Reduce emotional labor. Authenticity, even in small ways, is associated with better emotional outcomes than surface level positivity.
3. Set realistic social limits. Boundary setting reduces emotional exhaustion and preserves cognitive resources.
4. Prioritize recovery time. Stress recovery is not optional. Periods of low stimulation help restore emotional regulation capacity.
5. Shift expectations from joy to meaning. Meaning based goals are more psychologically sustainable than happiness goals.

The holidays do not have to be joyful to be worthwhile. They can also be quiet, reflective, imperfect or emotionally complex and still support your well-being. Holiday overwhelm is not a failure of gratitude or resilience. It is a predictable psychological response to emotional pressure, cognitive overload and sustained stress activation.

When joy becomes a requirement rather than an outcome, the brain responds with vigilance rather than ease. And understanding this allows people to approach the season with greater self compassion and fewer unrealistic demands.

Holiday pressure is felt most acutely by parents. Take the science-backed Parental Burnout Assessment to know where you stand.

Do you like the pressure of hosting and entertaining holiday get-togethers, or do you like your Decembers quiet and cozy? Knowing you animal avatar can uncover why you socialize the way you do: Guardian Animal Test.

A similar version of this article can also be found on Forbes.com, here.