According to poll results from the American Psychological Association last November, 89 percent of adults in the United States were overwhelmed as the holidays approached by concerns such as not having enough money, missing loved ones and anticipating family conflict.

A similar proportion – 88 percent – of the 2,061 adults (18 or older) surveyed by the Harris Poll from Nov. 14 to 16, 2023, who reported experiencing stress during the holiday season said that they have coping mechanisms to help them handle it.

The goal of this episode of The UCI Podcast is to help you develop some strategies to manage the added stressors of this time of year – particularly when it comes to having challenging conversations with loved ones. Our guest is Naomi Tabak, a licensed and board-certified clinical psychologist and director of UC Irvine’s Psychological Services Center. She’ll share tips to help listeners mitigate holiday stress and prioritize their well-being at a time of year when self-care is crucial.

Community members over 18 who are interested in learning more about the UC Irvine’s Psychological Services Center can check out its webpage at https://sites.uci.edu/psychologyclinic.

The center is NOT affiliated with UCI Health or the UCI Counseling Center. If you’re currently enrolled as a student at UC Irvine and are seeking campus counseling and clinical services, please visit the Counseling Center website at https://counseling.uci.edu.

“Soft Feeling,” the music for this episode, was provided by Cheel via the audio library in YouTube Studio.

To get the latest episodes of The UCI Podcast delivered automatically, subscribe at Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

TRANSCRIPT

The UCI Podcast/Cara Capuano:

From the University of California, Irvine, I’m Cara Capuano. Thank you for listening to The UCI Podcast. Our guest today is Naomi Tabak, a licensed and board-certified clinical psychologist and director of UC Irvine’s Psychological Services Center, also known as the UCI PSC.

Located within the School of Social Ecology, the UCI PSC is a training clinic staffed by graduate trainees who are working toward their Ph.D. in clinical psychology. Psychology trainees are supervised by licensed clinical psychologists at UC Irvine and their services help the UCI PSC offer low-cost, evidence-based therapy for multiple mental health concerns to adults over the age of 18. Thank you for taking the time to chat with us today, Naomi.

Naomi Tabak:  

Thank you so much for having me, Cara.

Capuano:  

Let’s start with you. How would you describe what you do on a daily basis at the UCI Psychological Services Center?

Tabak:

I just want to start by saying that one of the things that I really love about my job is that I do so many different things on a daily basis, but they’re all in service of the two main aims of the PSC, which are first to provide low-cost and high-quality mental health care to individuals in our community. And second, to train the next generation of clinical psychologists. So, as director of the PSC, my daily tasks involve everything from administration to coordinating our services with community and campus partners, and then providing training and education for our student therapists.

Capuano:

What initially drew you toward a career in mental health?

Tabak:

Good question. So, I think that my answer to this is twofold. First, I have just always been really curious in people and what makes us kind of develop the way that we view ourselves and the world and the people around us, and then how we make sense and fit into that. And so, that’s kind of the source of like my intellectual curiosity and what drew me to psychology and mental health care generally. So, I’ve always been drawn to novels or TV shows that have really like complex character development – that’s just really endlessly interesting to me.

And then second, I really wanted to find a career that, for me, had some sort of impact. And there are so many ways that we can do that: in your position, through journalism, through policy making or politics, through art. But, for me, really having those like quiet moments of one-on-one connection, that’s what drew me to practicing as a psychologist.

Capuano:

Part of improving and protecting the well-being of people is to mitigate their stressors. So, I’d like to turn our conversation toward what’s just ahead of us on the calendar: the holiday season. For a variety of reasons, the holidays can create stress for people. What are some of the common concerns that people have this time of year?

Tabak:

Yeah, Cara, you’re absolutely right. The holidays can be a time of immense joy and coming together and they can also be a time of major stressors. So first, there are all the just logistical and financial stressors that come up around the holiday season. You might be traveling or hosting family members in your house. If you have kids in the home, their schedules might be disrupted. And holidays are really expensive, too, so there’s the financial component. And then lastly, we’re really managing in this season our own and other people’s expectations for what the holidays are going to look like and what they’re going to feel like.

So, I want to just address that first, that there are a number of kinds of stressors that can come up around the holidays. And then I think the one that you and I will focus a little bit more on today is around the stress that comes with family dynamics. And this has been, and probably always will be true for many people, but I also know that it feels especially heightened for many right now in this current social and political climate.

Capuano:

Definitely true. And I love what you said about managing expectations. My dad has a saying: “Expect nothing but expect everything.” And that, I think, really captures the holiday season.

As you mentioned, the holidays bring extended time with people you might not see – sometimes with family members who have different lifestyles or worldviews than our own. What challenges can that “melting pot of folks” create?

Tabak:

Yeah. I love this question, and I love that expression you just shared. I actually wanted to share an expression with you and our listeners as well that really gets at this idea of the inevitable challenges that come around being around family for extended time. So, I heard this expression once and it’s always stuck with me. It is, “Of course your family pushes your buttons. They’re the ones who installed them.” (laughs)

Capuano:

I love that!

Tabak:

Yes. And so, to me – I mean, I’m curious to hear what your thoughts are on it – but, to me, what I get out of that is that as we’re growing up, we’re learning from and forming our worldviews from watching what’s happening around us, right? And from our early childhood environment. And so sometimes and in some ways, we develop kind of in line with that environment. And then in some other ways we may develop kind of in opposition to that environment or purposefully, or not so purposefully, go down a different path in some ways. And so, it’s fairly normal to see things differently from family members and to find it challenging to interact at times. And so, that’s really the first thing I want to say is, is just that it’s fairly normal.

Capuano:

Yeah. I think that’s a really important point to make: this happens to most people.

Tabak:

Yes.

Capuano:

What are some tips or strategies that you would recommend for folks that are trying to perhaps navigate conversations that make them uncomfortable or seem to be heading toward a topic that they’re not interested in discussing?

Tabak:

Yeah, I think we can all anticipate this might happen. And so, I guess that’s the biggest thing I want to start with is just suggesting that – to the best of your ability – you think ahead about how you want to approach these kinds of conversations. And maybe even thinking ahead to what specific conversations may come up at your dinner table or in those small moments in between all of the festivities.

What are some of the issues that are going to push your buttons? Thinking ahead can really prepare you to not be caught off guard and not to respond in that automatic way that may not be the most effective way to communicate. So, that’s the first thing I want to say. But now here’s my actual tip from a psychologist’s perspective, and I want to be transparent that I’m borrowing this framework from a psychologist and researcher Marsha Linehan, who’s developed a ton of skills for managing interpersonal relationships effectively.

So, one of my favorite things that Marsha Linehan writes about is clarifying what our priorities are in interpersonal situations. So, what do I mean by that? What I mean is that whenever we’re faced with an interpersonal situation, we’re balancing three main priorities.

First, we have some objective. The objective could be something concrete like asking your boss for a raise or telling a family member that you disagree with them – some sort of goal or objective that we want to get out of the interpersonal situation. So, that’s number one.

Number two is that when we’re talking about conversations, we’re talking about something interpersonal happening between people, right? So, we have the relationship itself. The question we might ask ourselves here is, “How do I want the other person to feel or think about me after this interaction is over?” And that’s going to vary a lot depending on the specific person you’re interacting with as well as the situation you’re in.

Lastly, the third thing that we’re kind of balancing is our own sense of self-respect. And the question we can ask ourselves here is, “How do I want to feel and think about myself after this interaction is over?”

So, we have these three things, which are all important in every situation. We’re always balancing some objective – some goal for a conversation – a relationship, and our own self-respect. They always matter, but in each specific situation, one might matter a little bit more than the other.

So, if we’re thinking, for example, about a difficult conversation with a beloved elderly family member, maybe a grandparent or great-grandparent, we may kind of weigh those priorities differently than if we’re thinking about engaging in a conversation with maybe a cousin or an uncle who we see once a year or maybe even less, right?

The idea here, and really my main tip that I want to put out there, is to just think about which one of these things matters a little bit more in the specific conversation you’re approaching. And then try your best to act in line with that, to try to prioritize the objective or your relationship with the other person or your own self-respect.

Capuano:

It sounds then like you’re suggesting people consider their relationships before they even go into the environment when they’re spending time with those folks. Is that true or do you make those decisions on the spot? What work goes into that?

Tabak:

I think there’s always a little bit of both. As I mentioned before, I think it can be so helpful to try to anticipate a bit, especially if you’re nervous. Especially if there’s some anxiety around gathering with certain family members over the holidays, I think it can be incredibly important to try to anticipate and prepare.

At the same time, we can’t an anticipate everything, right? There’s going to be things that come up that catch us off guard or are unexpected. And in those moments, we’re going to be making some sort of a judgment call.

And so, let me give maybe a kind of an example that might be helpful. Let’s say a family member states something that really goes against what you think or believe in terms of a social issue or a political issue. If we’re thinking about balancing our self-respect and the relationship and the objective, there may be times where we feel it is the most important thing to do to state that we disagree or to state our own thoughts or opinions. And that’s perfectly valid. Perfectly valid.

Now, there may be other times when we decide in that moment that it would be okay for us to not engage in that conversation, that it might be okay to value the relationship and not engage fully in what might be a difficult and maybe not productive conversation.

Capuano:

Excellent advice. It sounds like you do have to have a certain level of being able to make that decision at the moment.

Tabak:

Yeah. And that’s hard.

Capuano:

It is hard.

Tabak:

It’s hard. Especially, again, thinking about holidays as potentially a stressful time of year, and then thinking about the fact that many of these kinds of difficult conversations that I’m kind of hinting at here are likely bringing up strong emotions for people. And it’s really hard to not act in an automatic kind of way when we’re feeling a strong emotion.

Capuano:

Very true. I think we’ve all been there. I have seen before a recommendation of it’s okay to go in with a line that you’re prepared with.

Tabak:

Totally.

Capuano:

Something along the lines of, “I really don’t want to engage in this conversation right now.” Would you agree with that?

Tabak:

Yeah. I mean, I think that goes back to what we were kind of saying about preparing ahead of time, that it can be really helpful to go into these difficult situations with kind of a line or a phrase or just something to remind yourself of when you feel those emotions rising and when you think, “Oh, I may fall into a pattern I don’t want to fall into right now.”

Capuano:

Great point. And like you said, it’s a tough time of year to keep your cool because you have so much else already going on.

Tabak:

Yeah.

Capuano:

Is there anything that we didn’t get to today that you wanted to share?

Tabak:

I guess I would just want to tell our listeners that – kind of going off your last point – that this can be a difficult time of year and it’s so important to take care of ourselves, whatever that means to you. And that’s going to look different for everybody.

If you find that you’re needing some extra support, there are so many options out there for professional help. If you’re experiencing a mental health crisis, for example, there are kind and caring people available 24/7 to answer your call at the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, which you can reach by dialing 9-8-8. Then, there are so many local and virtual clinics where you can find quality mental health care.

Capuano:

Thank you for that reminder. And thank you so much, Naomi, for joining us today and sharing your wisdom around this topic.

Tabak:

Thank you.

Capuano:

To our listeners: The UCI podcast wishes you a holiday season that brings you joy and is also as stress free as it can be.

Community members over 18 who are interested in learning more about the UCI Psychological Services Center can check out their webpage at: sites.uci.edu/psychologyclinic.

We should note that the UCI PSC is not affiliated with UCI Health or the UCI Counseling Center. If you’re currently enrolled as a student at UC Irvine, and you seek campus counseling and clinical services, please visit the Counseling Center website at: counseling.uci.edu.

I’m Cara Capuano. Thank you for listening to our conversation. For the latest UC Irvine news, please visit news.uci.edu. The UCI Podcast is a production of Strategic Communications and Public Affairs at the University of California, Irvine. Please subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.