If you always wait until the last minute to buy gifts before the holidays, your procrastination might actually be a common form of anxiety in disguise.
“Holidays are inherently stressful, even if you love the holidays. We wait until the last minute because it’s natural to want to avoid stress,” said Shannon Garcia, a psychotherapist at States of Wellness Counseling based in Illinois and Wisconsin. “That’s your brain attempting to be helpful. Procrastination gets labeled as laziness. It’s not laziness, it’s avoidance. And avoidance is anxiety.”
That’s why this kind of anxiety often shows up as being constantly distracted from your main task. You might sweep your room before you finish your crochet blanket gift, for example. “You can occupy yourself with other unimportant tasks to avoid the one that needs to get done,” said Anita Chlipala, a Chicago-based marriage and family therapist.
Garcia said people who experience gift-giving anxiety often feel guilty, irritable and indecisive about their behavior. “You’ll think you’re just ‘bad’ at the holidays when in reality, it’s anxiety,” she explained.
As the gifting deadline approaches, you may also notice tightness in your chest, restlessness, fatigue or even trouble sleeping, Garcia added.
The good news is that this kind of anxiety can be addressed if you’re willing to be a little gentler with yourself. Here’s how.
How To Stop Your Gift-Giving Procrastination
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Gift-giving procrastination is common, but with some simple reframing, you can start taking action to address the underlying causes.
To stop feeling guilty and annoyed about your gift procrastination, you need to reframe your thinking. Here’s how.
Understand where it’s coming from.
To stop yourself from being overcome by anxiety, you need to know that it’s happening.
Reflect on why you keep avoiding this task. “Gift procrastination can be a protective factor against failure,” Chlipala said. “They could think, ‘Well, I didn’t really put much effort into the gift,’ or, ‘There wasn’t much left in terms of gift options.’ When you buy a last-minute, you can blame the circumstances instead of yourself, which, in your anxious mind, you rationalized to avoid personal responsibility.”
Challenge your negative thinking.
Garcia said it helps to think through the worst-case scenario of what could happen when your recipient gets your gift: “Is it that the person won’t like the gift? That you’ll be judged for what you chose or how much you spent? Then ask yourself honestly how much of that is actually within your control,” she suggested.
Understand what really makes a great gift.
A good gift for your loved one doesn’t need to be a “perfect gift.” “An anxious brain will try to convince you that there’s such a thing as a ‘perfect gift,’” Chlipala said. “That’s a lot of pressure and an impossible expectation to maintain each holiday season.”
Don’t focus on the moment your giftee sees your present. Researchers have found that gift givers place too much emphasis on the surprise of opening a gift rather than on what the gift recipient would want.
Chlipala advised gift givers to ask, “What gift they would like that brings them joy, can truly be enough and they would still appreciate it?”
Now, with knowledge of what makes a good gift in your arsenal, here’s a departing bit of hope. “Remind yourself that this isn’t a character flaw,” Garcia said. “It’s anxiety. Simply recognizing that can take some of the power out of it.”
