Holiday Survival Guide II: Perfect Gifts and Fighting Fatigue (with Rainn Wilson)

0:00This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human. The 10 % Happier podcast is self-help for smart people. Hosted by veteran journalist and best-selling author Dan Harris, happiness is a skill you can learn, so why not try to master it? Each week, Dan chats with top scientists, meditation experts, and the occasional celebrity in wide-ranging conversations that explore topics like productivity, anxiety, enlightenment, psychedelics, and relationships. He's interviewed everyone from the Dalai Lama to Brene Brown to Mike D. from the Beastie Boys. Join Dan every week for a dose of ancient wisdom, modern science, and a little humor to help you feel better, do better, and be better.

0:41The 10 % Happier Podcast. Listen now, wherever you get your shows.

0:52Pushkin.

0:58Happy holidays, Happiness Lab fans. This is supposed to be the most wonderful time of the year, but many of us kind of wish December came with a survival guide, which is why we asked you to tell us all your holiday stresses so that I and my special seasonal guest, actor Rainn Wilson, can help find some solutions. You probably know Rainn from Dwight on The Office or his countless other acting credits, but Rainn is also an author and a podcaster with lots of wise things to say about spirituality and what it means to be human. If you haven't already, you should check out his show, Soul Boom. Last time, Rain and I discussed dining table dynamics, like how to diffuse political arguments over dessert, and how to deflect annoying questions about your lack of a love life.

1:41But we only scratched the surface on all the seasonal woes you asked us about. So let's dive back into that conversation. So, Rain, I'm just curious, like, when you think about holidays, what do you think about? Although I guess there's one thing you think about when you think about holidays, which is you think about... Your wife, whose name is Holiday, correct? My favorite holiday? Holiday. Is Holiday Rondhorn, my wife. So during the holidays, I'm thinking about a holiday. But listen, I'm a member of the Baha 'i faith. We have our own set of holidays or holy days. But I also grew up celebrating Christmas with big parts of my family.

2:21And I have positive memories. My favorite holiday is Thanksgiving because I feel like if you can put the thanks in Thanksgiving and really just enjoy eating together and connecting over a table, it's incredibly powerful. But yeah, I have good experiences and pleasurable thoughts, but I know it can be fraught for a lot of people. Okay, we're going to have interesting conversation because my instant reaction about holiday is not that it is awesome. It is like you say the holidays are coming and I feel my cortisol levels going up a little bit and my stress hormones. And yeah, I'm not a winter holiday fan.

2:59I'm a Halloween girl. I like the costumes. I like the spooky. I like the candy. Thanksgiving's fine. But the winter holidays, yeah, my stress levels rise. So I'm going to need your help here. You got it. Here we go. Okay. Gift giving. Holidays feel like a time when we're supposed to be giving people stuff. And it means that we sometimes get sucked into the consumerist culture that makes us feel kind of crappy. And this was something that Rachel brought up. She noted that her holiday happiness sucker is the stress of gift giving. How much to spend? Is it a good gift? Do they actually want it? Who do I have to buy it for?

3:35Feeling shame or guilt if someone got you a gift and you didn't match the gift? How can we get past the consumerism in the holiday season? And I think the answer, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the answer is not princess unicorns in the office. I think that that's like maybe not the answer. I was actually going to say that it is exactly the answer. Because if everyone just gave each other Princess Unicorns, the world knows. Princess Unicorn dolls is for anyone, you know, office fan, unicorn fan, princess fan, toy fan. It scratches every itch. For those who don't know, an episode of The Office in which Dwight is buying up all the Princess Unicorn dolls because they're the hot toy of that year.

4:18And the catchphrase is, my horn can touch the sky. And it's a unicorn girl with a big horn. I think you can actually buy princess unicorns out there. I think they market them, but I think it's a great episode and a great stocking stuffer. You know one thing that drives me crazy, Lori, is the pressure to bring something over when you go to visit someone or to have dinner with them. Like you've got to bring a bottle of wine or flowers, maybe chocolates, but or something from your garden or a little plant. Right. But those are in like, why do we do that? We don't have to do that. It I don't like it when people show up like here's wine I don't drink.

5:05Here's some chocolates. I'm trying to lose weight. You know, here's some flowers. great they'll be alive for four days and then i gotta throw them out and dump out the stinky water like why do we keep doing that it's well this i know you don't go through this but this is like on extreme overdrive in the holidays right families try to one-up each other and really worried about that and so yeah i mean given that you experience it in the context of the going over the folks houses for the gifts like how do you deal with it i mean one of the strategies I like to tell people about is to try to get back to the best kinds of gifts, which are your presence, maybe a fun experience, curiously asking someone deep questions about their lives.

5:49Those are the things that are going to make them feel much better than, you know, a pair of socks or, you know, a new gadget or something like that. So getting back to the, you know, the reason behind the season, as cheesy as it sounds. The reason behind the season. I love that. Yeah, I think a A framed photograph is always good. And you can get maybe even a photograph they sent you throughout the year or something like that. Because a lot of people, you know, we have these libraries of like 15 ,000 photographs in our photo library that we only occasionally pop up in memories. People rarely stop to get them kind of printed out and put on their shelves.

6:28So I'm just bonus. I'm not really dealing with the psychology behind it, but bonus, a photograph is always a great stocking stuffer. And the beauty is, I think, relative to other gifts, relative to like, you know, I don't know, an iPhone or a trip to Europe or something, it's actually pretty cheap. Yeah, pretty cheap. And I guess a different thing that comes up in the holiday season, which is the stress of finances. Partly about gifts, but partly about, you know, having the best holiday presentation, how much food you buy and all this stuff. Traveling to visit family members. This can be a time when people are feeling like they just don't have enough.

7:02Any advice for kind of that crunch feeling where you're like, I just feel like I don't have enough money right now? Yeah, I mean, I think that if you have to cancel, I think that that's fine to take care of your finances. And I just think on the family's part, we have to always be very cognizant of like, you know, what percentage of someone's salary or savings are they doing? because flying has gotten way more expensive, by the way. I don't know if you've noticed it, but you used to kind of be able to fly anywhere for like, oh, 200, 400, 600 bucks, kind of get anywhere. Now it's like double, triple that.

7:40It's a big investment. So we have to just be very sensitive to where people are financially. Yeah. But I don't know. What do you think? What do you do you tell folks when they're struggling with their balancing commitments and obligations and they want to be a part of a family, but you may not be able to afford it? And maybe that brings low self-esteem because you feel like, oh, I should have more money to be able to spend$3 ,000 to travel my family for a Christmas trip. Yeah. Well, I think this gets back to figuring out what things are really about and maybe something I know you talk a lot about in Soul Boom, which is like coming up with your own rituals, right?

8:22We have the rituals that we're supposed to do. You know, we fly to the family and we have all these presents or whatever it is, but we can get creative with the rituals if we figure out the value that's under it. Like the value is that we're spending some time together, right? You know, maybe that means we get together over Zoom and we play some like, you know, goofy games. We go back to like old COVID days, like connecting that way if you can't fly out. Or we do no presents, you know, maybe all the presents are just crafts or something we make for each other, or it's photos that we print out, drawings that we give each other, write poems for each other.

8:54It sounds cheesy, but really what we want to be doing is showing our togetherness and connection. And, you know, the latest gadget isn't really going to do that. Well said. Yeah, I love that. All right. We had lots of questions on gift giving. I know this is not your domain of expertise. And so maybe I'll have you ask me the question. Okay, let's do it. I like this one because it really feels a little bit out of an office Christmas special. Like maybe it actually happened on the office, but you can, you can tell me, okay, here it is. This is from an anonymous viewer. I once gave an office mate a foot massager, the very same gift she had given me the year before, which I had forgot.

9:33Then I had to make up something about how I knew she liked it so much that I got her one too. Very embarrassing, taught me not to re-gift. That sounds like an episode of the office right there. That is something absolutely so many characters dwight andy michael could re-gift be like i got you that last year like oh no no i knew you liked it so i i got you a new one but um i'm a huge fan of re-gifting in fact i talked about people coming over like they'll give like little things or chocolates or sometimes it's like coffee and we have this secret stash of like the stuff we've been given. And we're going to take that out.

10:15I have a little baggie, a beautiful little baggie with some gourmet coffee beans in it that someone gave. And I can't wait to go over to someone's house. I'm just going to grab it off the shelf and be like, I got you some coffee. So I'm a big fan of the re-gifting, but yes. You think there's nothing wrong with this. Maybe write down on a little post-it note who gave you the coffee so you don't give it directly back to that person when you find it in the re-gift closet. I like to live dangerously. Just go for it. I live on the edge. I may give it back to the exact same person who gave it to me.

10:45That's how I roll. But yeah, I think re-gifting is awesome. Okay. All right. Well, we'll leave that one in there. I think maybe a piece of advice for this particular person is a little bit of self-compassion. We all give gifts that like bomb sometimes. I have occasionally given a gift to someone that I gave them the year before. Not re-gifted, but just like literally the same gift because I didn't have a good idea of what to get them. And so that's a time to take a deep breath and say, nobody's perfect. Everybody gives crappy gifts sometimes. It's okay. It's the thought that counts. The thought that counts, which is a nice transition to how we can have thoughts that don't feel so overwhelmed during the holiday season.

11:29Next holiday woe that we heard lots of folks bringing up is how we can prioritize balance and rest in a tough holiday season. One anonymous listener on Instagram said that her holiday woe is that it's so hard to be merry with so much to do. How do we find ways to take stuff off our plates during the busy holiday season? Boy, that's great. I feel like this should have been an episode for the office ladies. I feel like Jenna and Angela would have like nailed these questions so much. Well, we could do like I could call them up and see we'll do a second round and I'll do exactly the same questions with them with you.

12:07I love it. Or they'll do next year's Christmas episode. But yeah, you know, my favorite analogy, it's used a lot and people have probably heard it, but it's like they say on the airlines, like when the oxygen mask drops, like you put on your own oxygen mask first so that you can put it on your kids later and other people's. And that's kind of how life works. Like we have to take care of ourselves first so that we can be there for other people. And the purpose of that is so that we can be there for others and be a service to others. So it's super important to get enough rest, not overwhelm, you know, ask people for help.

12:45Again, that perfectionism. And I would love to hear a little bit more about how perfectionism works. And it oftentimes takes us so far away from joy, just that pressure we put on ourselves to exceed expectations, to get self-esteem from what we do instead of who we are. Because I think a lot of that, like, if you're really that busy that you can't be merry, you're doing Christmas wrong. Something's wrong. If you're so busy, there's not time for joy. I'm sure that's not what Jesus and the saints wanted from us. Yeah, I think the key is that like we need to, again, it gets back to this idea of vigilance, right?

13:32Like you kind of have to notice what's going on. And it gets back to this idea that negative emotions are telling us something really important. We were talking before about grief and sort of noticing our sadness. That means we need space and time to deal with it. I think in emotion we really need to notice and allow during the holiday season is overwhelm. Like, you know, when you're baking the cookies and you're slamming the sugar around, you're like, like, that's telling you, oh, this is a signal, like the tire, you know, button coming on in my car. This is a signal that my, you know, overwhelmed tire light is coming on and I need a break.

14:06You know, I need to maybe do a little bit less, less events, less stuff, take something off the plate. When we think about having a happier holiday, we often think what we could add. You know, we need more presents or we need more time or more Christmas carols or more whatever it is. We often don't think of what we can take away. But I feel like the solution to so many of our holiday woes is take something off our plate. For example, taking some work off our plate. This was something we heard a lot, which is that a lot of people have a hard time being merry in the holiday season because they experience a lot of work stress.

14:39Yulia on Instagram says, Hey, I saw your post about the holidays. Here's my woe. It's hard for me to stop and settle into a relaxed rhythm without thinking about work. Any ways that you can fight workaholism in the holidays that you're settling in with the hot chocolate, but back of your mind is like, you have to edit that podcast. There's emails in your inbox. Who's going to answer them? Yeah, I just I think that workaholism is something that has to be unpacked. So it often comes from kind of a most overused word of the decade, trauma. But there oftentimes is a trauma component to workaholism of like, I'm only going to get love by accomplishing.

15:24And not only that, I've got to accomplish a lot. Not just accomplish the regular amount. I've got to accomplish more than anyone else. And that is going to get me love. It's going to get me noticed, get me acceptance, get me embraced, get me complimented. And if that is the case, that's going to take a little work. That's going to take years, not months, to kind of undo about – it's kind of like – it's similar to like a deprivation mentality. There's so many people that grew up poor, and they just feel like they need to earn in order to survive, even though they've got plenty of money. but like a kind of a panic sets in.

16:05It's like the old stories about people that grew up in a, in an orphanage, but they, and they're in the living in a multimillion dollar house later on in life, but they still hide cookies under the mattress. And this is a phenomenon. This actually does happen where there's a feeling of safety of having that cookie under the mattress. So workaholism, you know, a deprivation mindset, these are kind of cookie under the mattress moments and you've got to go back to the beginning of like, hey, where did this come from and why? So sometimes it's hard in the holidays. You've just got a lot of, it's the end of the year, you've got a lot of stuff due.

16:42And it's just how it shakes down. Being prepared, planned, say, here's going to be my work days. Here's the days I'm, especially with phones and emails. I I took email off my phone. Nice. Because I feel like, you know, I could check my email three times a day from my computer. I don't need to be checking my email, Lori, 20 times a day and getting back to people. I always feel this compunction. I got to get back to them right away. The itchiness. The itchiness. Yep. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. It's like I can slow it down. 5 p.m. I'll get on. I'll respond to three or four emails and then move on. But, you know, I've got to unpack this workaholism, see where it comes from and recalibrate to feel like I am enough.

17:31I'm going to have enough self-worth. I don't need to accomplish so much and be so perfect in order to get love. Yeah, this is great because there's two pieces of advice in there. One kind of local for the holidays and one broader local is do little silly hacks to get the work out of your holiday celebration. So if that means just deleting your email app just for, you know, one week in December while you're home with the family, great. And then it'll make it a little bit harder, give yourself a little bit of friction to go to the normal itchy finger, check your email or jump into work. That's the kind of local.

18:05And let me say part two of local. Another thing that really works because I am a phone addict, okay? Straight up. Phone on a shelf. Elf on a shelf? Phone on a shelf. Yes, yes. For your holidays? Here you heard it here. Phone on a shelf, folks. Phone on a shelf. Have your phone. Don't worry. Just put it up on the shelf. Have it not in your pocket. Interact with people. You feel that itch? Just go over to the shelf. You can check it real quick. If you want to take a photo, go get it. Take the photo. Put it back. But this will reduce. I don't know what the data is. But for me, when I do something like that, I would say I'm interacting with my phone 10 times less.

18:49but I'm not missing out on anything. Yeah, this is the sad thing about human psychology is how easy it is to put in a little bit of friction. Like, it's not like you put your phone in Antarctica. Like, it's just on a shelf. Or a safe or something. Or a safe, you have to crack it. No, it's just on a shelf, but just not being in your pocket, in your hand, right next to you on the dinner table, it just makes it a little bit trickier to go for it. And yeah, you'll just use it a little bit less. So phone on a shelf, hashtag phone on a shelf 2025. There you go. Hashtag phone on a shelf. My wife and I used to host these like kind of youth events when my son was a teenager and preteen.

19:26And we would always have a basket and all the phones go in the basket. And because a bunch of 15 year olds doing activities or playing games or what have you is so much better when they're not just on the phone documenting everything, looking all the time. And maybe families can do that. Can you have over the holidays, you find a great deal more connection and mental health by putting phones in a basket or kind of say, hey, for this dinner, I've got a basket. Everyone, let's put your phones. What do you think? And you can decorate the basket. It could have little pieces of holly or like, you know, menorah symbols or whatever your own faith tradition is to put the phones in a basket.

20:07Or characters from like one floor of the cuckoo's nest because it has to do with mental health. So, you know, deranged human beings and say, we're not going to end up like these people. We're going to put our phone in a basket. But that might be something you want to communicate ahead of time to say, hey, for our Christmas dinner, I have this idea. What if we put our phones away and not just in our pockets, but away? We got off track here a little bit, but there was something else you were going to bring up. Oh, but yes, but there was the meta point, which I love, which is workaholism. You're not going to solve it between, you know, December 24th and December 26th.

20:46It's a bigger issue that you need to process some trauma and so on. And I think this is a broader point for everything we're talking about here. Like some of our families have some deep-seated stuff. Some of us are going through some grief that's really hard. Some of us are navigating lots of perfectionism beyond just the holiday dinner table. Take a breath. You don't have to solve everything over the holidays, but noticing those moments of frustration, noticing the pain points during the holidays gives you a nice checklist of things that you can pay attention to in the new year when you get a little bit of a breath later.

21:17So it's kind of, you know, if your tire light comes on, you don't necessarily have to immediately screech off the road and deal with your tire light then, but you kind of take some time to put it in the queue to deal with later. I think when these holiday wokes come up, it's often a great signal to us that like, hey, this is something I might need to pay attention to down the line. You make a great point here, which I think encompasses all of the questions we've been talking about, which is like, what needs to be handled over the holidays and what needs to be handled over the 11 months that are 10 months that aren't the holidays?

21:47Yes, yes. Whereas like, wow, I am a perfectionist or wow, I'm a workaholic or wow, I feel lonely when I'm in groups or, you know, I feel a pressure to have the perfect gift or whatever it is. There's stuff to be worked on throughout the year so that you're better prepared for the holidays. And then there are stuff to kind of like, like you say, quick fixes and hacks and little things you could do to make your holidays better. But there may be, you know, some a real tough conversation you have with yourself, with your therapist about, hey, I want to I want to work on X, Y and Z so that I can go into the holidays next year with more joy and more freedom.

22:30You know, big picture.

22:37The 10 % Happier podcast is self-help for smart people. Hosted by veteran journalist and best-selling author Dan Harris, happiness is a skill you can learn, so why not try to master it? Each week, Dan chats with top scientists, meditation experts, and the occasional celebrity in wide-ranging conversations that explore topics like productivity, anxiety, enlightenment, psychedelics, and relationships. He's interviewed everyone from the Dalai Lama to Brene Brown to Mike D. from the Beastie Boys. Join Dan every week for a dose of ancient wisdom, modern science, and a little humor to help you feel better, do better, and be better.

23:15The 10 % Happier Podcast. Listen now, wherever you get your shows.

23:27We now get to our last set of holiday challenges that we all need to do better about. And this is why I'm especially excited to have you on the show, because our last holiday challenge is ways that we can create more meaning and joy. And I think you, of all the people I know, have had some of the best insights into what we can do to deal with this crisis of spiritual meaning that we have all the time. But I think this comes out a lot during the holiday season. I know Soul Bloom talks a lot about what we can do to fix our spiritual crisis. Any soulful ideas, rituals, strategies we can use to feel a little bit more spiritually connected during the holiday season?