Dealing with Social Anxiety Around the Holidays

This past weekend, my husband and I decided to host our neighbours for LONG overdue cocktails. By that I mean they had us to their house multiple times before COVID hit, and we had yet to return the favour.

Awful right?

As we prepared all day Saturday for their arrival, which included grocery shopping, vacuuming, fluffing pillows, hiding any items that would suggest that someone actually lived in this house, and making the beds with hospital corner sheets just incase they happen to enter the bedrooms and strip the comforters, tensions started to arise.

Quit simply, my husband wasn’t doing his tasks at the level that I wanted them done and his lack of concern about the judgement of our soon-to-be guests quite honestly made me jealous, which then pissed me off.

Once I caught myself in the midst of this frantic and controlling behaviour I thought two things to myself:

1. This is exactly why we stopped entertaining for so many years because nobody at this point was having a good time (particularly my husband), and

2. Why was I so concerned anyway? These people are very nice for starters and even if they are secretly judging the dog hair behind woven into the threads of my couch, why did I care so much what they thought?

ACCEPTANCE

That’s right, my social anxiety was linked to a very basic human desire to belong ie. number 3 on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Hello, loneliness will kill you at a rate 30% than alcohol, obesity and smoking combined!!!!

Needless to say, fitting in and connecting with others matters A LOT!

Catching myself at this moment, however, allowed me to shift my focus to being more present to the point where I actually started enjoying preparing for our little visit. Now I can’t say for certain, but by taking the pressure off my need to be accepted (because I can’t control this) and instead putting it on what I could control (a great spread of food and some candles, I suspect I was a much better host…although you’d have to ask them.

For more information on the human need to fit in and how you can lessen the anxiety around trying to portray yourself as the “perfect” person or in my case, the perfect host, CLICK HERE to watch this clip from the Mel Robbins Podcast.