Estimated reading time: 8 minutes

Christmas can feel impossibly heavy.

While television adverts overflow with synthetic joy and Instagram feeds showcase picture-perfect family gatherings, many of us sit alone with a persistent ache that refuses to shift. Finding Christmas depressing isn’t a personal failure—it’s often the most honest response to a season that demands performance when you’re barely holding together.

Financial stress amplifies during December.

Loneliness becomes more acute when everyone else seems surrounded by people who care. Grief doesn’t take holidays; it intensifies when empty chairs at the table become impossible to ignore.

Moreover, the cultural expectation that you should be grateful, joyful, and celebratory creates a secondary burden: shame for feeling exactly how you feel.

What if we had another way?

The “Mind-Body-Heart-Soul” framework offers a holistic approach to navigating Christmas on your terms, not society’s. This isn’t about forcing happiness or pretending everything’s fine.

Rather, it’s about respecting your whole self—your thoughts, your physical needs, your emotions, and your deeper sense of meaning—through a season that can otherwise feel like drowning in tinsel.

1. Mind: Managing Expectations and Boundaries

The mental trap of Christmas starts long before December 25th arrives.

Social media serves up an endless parade of seemingly perfect celebrations, creating a distorted standard against which your reality feels inadequate. What you’re seeing isn’t real life; it’s curated highlights designed to generate envy.

Consequently, your first act of self-preservation is setting boundaries.

Saying “no” to events that drain you isn’t selfishness—it’s survival. You don’t owe anyone your presence at gatherings that make you feel worse.

Furthermore, declining invitations doesn’t require elaborate justifications. “I’m not able to make it” is sufficient.

Consider reframing the entire premise of the holiday.

Christmas is just one day on the calendar. You get to define what it looks like for you.

Perhaps a quiet day with a book you’ve been meaning to read constitutes a perfectly valid Christmas. Maybe staying in your pyjamas and watching films you love sounds better than forced festivity.

There’s no universal template for how this day must unfold.

The mental work involves recognising where expectations come from and deciding which ones you’ll accept. Not every tradition serves you.

Some were never yours to begin with.

Therefore, give yourself permission to reject the script everyone else seems to follow.

2. Body: Respecting Your Physical Needs

Christmas culture actively works against your body’s fundamental needs.

The festive cycle—sugar-laden treats, excessive alcohol, disrupted sleep patterns, abandoned exercise routines—creates a physiological environment where depression flourishes. Your mood isn’t just “in your head”; it’s intimately connected to how you treat your physical self.

Maintaining a routine becomes your anchor.

Sleep at roughly the same time each night, even when social pressure encourages staying up late. Your body doesn’t care that it’s Christmas Eve; it still needs seven to nine hours of rest to function properly.

Additionally, gentle movement helps regulate mood more effectively than any festive cocktail.

A twenty-minute walk in nature costs nothing and provides genuine relief.

Food matters more than we typically acknowledge.

Whilst indulging occasionally won’t destroy you, subsisting entirely on chocolate and champagne for days creates blood sugar crashes that masquerade as emotional despair. One nourishing meal each day—something with protein, vegetables, and actual nutrients—gives your brain the fuel it needs to cope.

Looking after your body isn’t vanity or weakness.

It’s the first line of defence against a dipping mood. When everything else feels chaotic and uncontrollable, you can still choose to drink water, take a walk, and get enough sleep.

These small acts accumulate into something larger: proof that you’re worth caring for.

3. Heart: Honouring Your Emotions

Christmas doesn’t erase loss or loneliness.

Instead, it highlights absence with brutal clarity. Empty chairs at the table become unbearable.

The person who always rang on Christmas morning isn’t there to call. What you don’t have—family, partner, community, financial security—feels more painfully obvious when advertisements insist everyone else has everything.

Here’s what I learned after losing my best friend Alastair: you cannot bypass grief by pretending it isn’t there.

Forcing fake happiness doesn’t heal anything; it just postpones the inevitable crash whilst making you feel additionally guilty for “ruining” the day. Feel it to heal it.

If Christmas Day means sitting with sadness, then sit with sadness.

Your emotions don’t need your permission, but they do need your acknowledgement.

Connection matters, but not the kind society prescribes.

You don’t need to attend large gatherings where you feel more alone in a crowd than you do by yourself. What helps is reaching out to safe people—a trusted friend who understands, your Support Coordinator, a Psychosocial Recovery Coach who can hold space for what you’re actually experiencing.

Sometimes a single honest conversation does more than a dozen forced social occasions.

Honour what your heart is telling you.

If it says you need to be alone, be alone. If it says you need company, seek company.

Nevertheless, don’t confuse what you need with what others expect. Your emotional truth matters more than their comfort.

4. Soul: Finding Meaning and Connection

The commercial Christmas sells a specific version of meaning: buy things, give things, prove your love through spending.

For many NDIS participants, this creates impossible pressure when finances are already stretched thin. Thankfully, meaning doesn’t require money.

It requires attention.

Volunteering or small acts of kindness generate what researchers call the “helper’s high”—a genuine neurochemical response that combats depression. Helping others shifts focus away from your own suffering without invalidating it.

You might spend an hour at a community kitchen, ring someone who’s also alone, or simply hold the door open for strangers at the shops.

The SALT Foundation’s mission centres on this truth: meaning comes from connection, service, and recognising the dignity in every person.

You don’t need elaborate spiritual practices to access this. Sometimes meaning looks like sitting in silence, listening to music that moves you, or walking in nature until you remember you’re part of something larger than tinsel and turkey.

Your soul—that part of you that asks “what’s this all for?”—doesn’t care about Instagram-worthy moments.

It cares about authenticity, purpose, and genuine connection. Give yourself permission to find those things in whatever form they take for you, even if that form looks nothing like traditional Christmas.

Conclusion

A meaningful Christmas doesn’t resemble a Hallmark movie.

It doesn’t require a perfectly decorated tree, expensive gifts, or a house full of relatives. Sometimes the most meaningful Christmas is the one where you simply survived, where you honoured your needs instead of everyone else’s expectations, where you chose kindness toward yourself rather than performance for others.

You get to decide what this day means.

More importantly, you get to decide what it doesn’t mean. If Christmas 2025 looks like you, alone in your flat, reading a book and drinking tea—that’s enough.

If it looks like a quiet walk followed by takeaway curry—that’s enough.

You are enough, exactly as you are, feeling exactly what you feel.

Action Steps

Taking care of yourself doesn’t require grand gestures. Small, concrete steps make the difference.

1. Choose one event to say “no” to. Practice the sentence: “I appreciate the invitation, but I’m not able to make it.” Then stop talking.
2. Plan one nourishing meal for Christmas Day. It doesn’t need to be elaborate. Something with protein and vegetables. Something that reminds your body you’re worth feeding properly.
3. Schedule a call with your Support Worker or a friend. Put it in your calendar. Make it real. Connection doesn’t happen accidentally during the hardest season.

Frequently Asked Questions

Call to Action

You don’t have to navigate this season alone.

The SALT Foundation’s Psychosocial Recovery Coaches and Support Workers understand that Christmas can amplify mental health challenges. We’re here to help you get through the holidays in a way that respects your needs, your limits, and your dignity.

If you need extra support this season, reach out to The SALT Foundation.

Because sometimes the most meaningful gift you can give yourself is asking for help.

Daniel G. Taylor

Daniel G. Taylor has been writing about the NDIS for three years. His focus has been on mental health and psychosocial disabilities as he lives with bipolar disorder I. He’s been a freelance writer for 30 years and lives across the road from the beach in Adelaide. He’s the author of How to Master Bipolar Disorder for Life and a contributor to Mastering Bipolar Disorder (Allen & Unwin) and he’s a mental health speaker.