Verified by 
Key points
- Managing the end-of-year holidays can be particularly taxing for adults with ADHD but some targeted coping tips can help.
- Break down large tasks, like shopping for gifts, into compartmentalized, well-defined tasks.
- Focus on your strengths and sense of "enough-ness"—that you can be good enough, use your unique strengths, and enjoy peace of mind.
Advice for managing the end-of-year holidays is ubiquitous. Even for people without ADHD, looking forward to the holidays and some time off from the typical routines is a mixed blessing. Work and school are often replaced with an upsurge in other, out-of-the-ordinary demands. Cooking, shopping, traveling, hosting people, and any number of commitments quickly fill up the “holiday break” schedule.
Such loss of structure and facing up to nerve-wracking expectations and commitments can be particularly stressful for adults with ADHD. Even though they arrive in a relatively predictable fashion on the calendar, the holidays still seem to catch people unprepared and scrambling to keep up with all there is to do – sometimes feeling more stressed by holiday demands than those of a typical work or school week.
Although not the stuff of "Scrooge" or "It’s a Wonderful Life" or even Adam Sandler’s "Hanukkah Song," a repurposing of some strategies for coping with ADHD might help you navigate the holidays and conjure a bit of the holiday spirit.
Define and Compartmentalize Tasks
Many holiday tasks are thought of in broad terms: “make cookies,” “get gifts for everyone,” or “decorate the house.” But each represents a multi-step endeavor.
It is almost essential for individuals with ADHD to define the separate, specific (and actionable) tasks that go into each one of these holiday chores. Some starters for each of these might be “decide what cookies I will make,” “decide for whom am I shopping for gifts,” or “retrieve decorations from the attic.”
Such compartmentalization of specific, action-based tasks improves (but does not guarantee) the likelihood of implementing intentions earlier in the season rather than waiting until the last minute.
Task Bounding, Including Social “Tasks”
With this outline of specific, actionable holiday steps, you can better figure out your plan for doing them. Task bounding – either by time (setting a start- and end-time for cooking today) or by task (“I will put up the tree/menorah/kinara/Festivus pole today”). Such parameters help make a task less overwhelming and more “doable”—and more likely to happen. Being able to “see” a realistic endpoint increases the likelihood of taking the first step to get there.
As unseasonable as it might seem, relationships and social obligations are “tasks,” too. Social interactions are a high cognitive load task. You use up a lot of mental energy carrying on conversations, supervising your children during holiday gatherings, and engaging the emotional self-control for dealing with family, co-workers, and neighbors, especially some who may be especially taxing, such as Uncle Leo and his bourbon-fueled political rants.
Play to your strengths. If you know your self-control resources wane after an hour, have an exit strategy and plan to leave before you get depleted (or at least track how you are doing at the one-hour mark and stay for 15-minute increments at which point you can reassess).
When at an office party or other gathering where social missteps might have consequences beyond the holidays, arrive with a game plan to, perhaps, not drink alcohol, avoid some of your jokes that might not go over well, or make other adjustments to the context beforehand, rather than relying on in-the-moment impulse control.
Even marathon family gatherings might not be a good fit for you. You might arrange your arrival or departure around the most enjoyable events of the get-together and avoid those that are potential trouble spots, be it Uncle Leo’s third bourbon or just making sure that you don’t end up overdoing it with drinking. Avoiding temptation in the first place is a hallmark of good self-regulation.
Develop an Enough-ness Mindset
Lastly, in addition to promoting the generosity of personkind, the holidays are a cauldron of comparisons, expectations, traditions, and other standards that might be unrealistic or at least unhelpful.
It is all too common for adults with ADHD to assume a one-down or less-than mindset due to past frustrations and setbacks. Trying to keep up with neighbors’ decorations, interpreting whether others "really" like your gifts, worries that family disapproves of how your children or pets (or spouse) behave or any number of other forms of scorekeeping is futile and toxic.
Try to focus on being “good enough.” If getting gift cards was the best way to personalize gifts, so be it. Only two types of holiday cookies: one set that came out fine, the other slightly burned? No problem. Even when cookies are bad, they are good!
Identify and focus on your strengths. Perhaps you chat up the shy cousin who is standing apart from the festivities. Maybe your gift is a personalized note in a holiday card rather than just signing your name, or a handmade gift of your making. Perhaps you hear out Uncle Leo, shrug your shoulders, and say, “You’ve given me something to think about.”
The notion of equifinality is that there are multiple ways to arrive at a positive outcome. Perhaps that is another way to approach the holidays and the diverse ways we can join together and find some peace and enjoyment, despite all the tasks.
