How to keep healthy habits during the holidays when your calendar fills up

Why health habits stop during the holiday season

For most of the year, a working adult's evenings and weekends are mostly theirs to plan, even when they are busy. That is where the habit happens: the walk after work, the Tuesday and Thursday class, cooking dinners for the week on Sunday afternoon.

In the holiday season, more of that same time gets booked by other people, and usually before the week even starts. The company sets the date of the office party. The school sets the date of the winter concert. Whoever is hosting decides when the family dinner is. A friend picks the Saturday that works for most of the group. On top of that, year-end work can keep you at the office late on a few nights before things close for the holidays.

None of these are bad things, and most of the time you want to go. The habit stops because these events use the same evenings and weekends the habit used to use, and there are more of them in these weeks than at any other time of the year.

The habit is the one thing nobody else is waiting on

When the walk and the office party land on the same Thursday, the party has a host, a boss, and coworkers who will notice if you are not there. Nobody is waiting on the walk. When the 6 p.m. class and the school concert land on the same Tuesday, there is a kid looking for you in the audience. So the habit gets moved without much thought, and on any one night that is a fair choice.

The trouble is that in the holiday season this happens on a lot of nights, across five, six, or seven weeks. Each time, moving the habit looks like a small thing. Added up over the season, it means the habit mostly stops happening.

What the holiday season usually looks like for the habit

Here is what this looks like for a few people. A project manager goes to a spin class every Tuesday and Thursday at 6 p.m. The first Thursday in December is the office party. The next Thursday is a coworker's going-away drinks. The Tuesday after that is her son's school concert. After that she stops going, and she does not go back until February.

A man walks with his neighbor every Saturday morning. From Thanksgiving on, every Saturday has something on it: a drive to his in-laws, a kid's birthday party, or holiday shopping. The walks stop, and neither of them ever really decided that.

A woman who cooks her dinners for the week every Sunday afternoon loses three Sundays in a row. The first one goes to gift shopping, the second to a cookie exchange, and the third to the drive home from her parents' house.

An office worker stays late three nights the week before the office closes for the holidays to finish year-end work, and then has two family dinners that weekend. That week the habit does not happen at all.

In each of these, nobody decided to stop the habit. It was moved one night at a time, and by the middle of December it had not happened in three weeks.

The time off that turns out to be full

There is a second pattern that shows up a lot. Many people expect to have more free time in late December, when work slows down or the office closes, and they count on those days for the habit. Then the days fill up with travel, hosting relatives, kids home from school, returning gifts, and errands that waited until work slowed down. One person took the last week of December off planning to go to the gym every morning, and spent the week hosting six relatives and driving to the airport twice.

A Virginia Tech professor who studies exercise and nutrition said in a Virginia Tech news story that people expect to have time off over the holidays, and that this expectation is part of what makes the season hard. You do get the days off. They usually fill up with other things.

When "I'll start again in January" becomes the plan

By the middle of December, a lot of people stop trying and tell themselves they will start fresh in January. One person said "I'll just start in January" in the second week of December, which was the same thing they said the year before. It is a very common thing to tell yourself, and it makes sense why people do. It is also the same restart loop as "I'll start Monday," only with a longer wait. That loop has its own page: why healthy habits keep restarting on Monday. This page is about what happens to the habit during the season, while those weeks are still going on.

Why holiday eating tips and "non-negotiables" lists do not fix this

Most public advice about staying healthy during the holidays is about food and drinks at parties and about how many hours to sleep. When it gets to habits, it usually says to keep a short list of "pillar habits" or "non-negotiables" and to keep a smaller holiday version of your routine.

The food advice does not deal with the problem on this page. The habit did not stop because of what was on the table at the office party. It stopped because the Thursday evening it used to happen on was booked by someone else.

The non-negotiables lists and the smaller-version ideas have a different gap. They assume the habit still has a time on the calendar and only needs to be shorter. During the holiday season, the problem is that the time itself keeps getting booked by other people. A shorter version of a habit still needs a time to happen in.

What to think about when a holiday week fills up

Here are some plain questions to ask about your own holiday season. They are meant for thinking about, not as a procedure, a checklist, or a template.

• Looking back at last year's holiday season, which week did the habit stop, and what was on the calendar that week?
• Which evenings and weekends this season are already booked by someone else, and have I looked at those with the habit in mind, or only with the event in mind?
• Is the habit on the nights and weekend times that holiday events usually land on, like weeknight evenings after work and Saturday afternoons?
• When I said yes to an invitation, did I notice it was the habit's time, or did I find out on the day?
• Am I counting on time off in late December that is already filling up with travel, hosting, or family?
• Have I already started telling myself I will pick it back up in January, and how did that go last year?

The holiday season is a stretch where the habit needs to be thought about week by week, because the calendar in these weeks is not your usual one. This page does not lay out how to do that. That part is what practical time management around one practice is for.

How this differs from nearby Healthy & Awake guides

This page is about keeping one health habit going during the holiday season, while the weeks are happening. Nearby pages answer different questions.

• Why healthy habits keep restarting on Monday is about missing a day midweek and waiting for Monday to start over. "I'll start in January" is that same loop with a longer wait.
• Getting back on track after a busy week is about one disrupted week that is already over. The holiday season is several weeks in a row.
• How to prioritize health on a busy schedule is about one hour where the walk and one other thing need the same time. In the holidays, the competing plans were often booked weeks ahead by other people, and they keep coming.
• Keeping a health habit on a work travel week, health habits for working parents, and why health goals fail on a busy schedule cover work trips, kids' schedules all year, and the general reason goals fail when the week never had room for them.

How do I keep healthy habits during the holidays when my calendar fills up?

During the holidays, a health habit usually stops because other people book more of your evenings and weekends: work parties, family dinners, school events, friends' get-togethers, and travel to see relatives. Each of those has someone waiting on you, and your walk or class does not, so it is the one that gets moved, week after week. Keeping the habit through the holiday season starts with seeing that the calendar is the problem in these weeks, and thinking about the habit each time a week starts to fill up, instead of finding out on the day that there was no time for it.

When is practical time-management support worth considering?

When you already know what to do for your health and the problem is that one practice keeps losing its time when your calendar fills up, including in the holiday season, practical time management around that one practice is a different kind of help than another list of holiday eating tips.

Where Healthy & Awake Time Management fits

Healthy & Awake Time Management is a $47 practical time-management course for working adults who already know what to do for their health and keep losing one practice when their calendar fills up, including in the holiday season. It is educational time management around health, not medical care, not a nutrition plan, and not a holiday challenge. One payment includes lifetime access on the current offer, and the current offer comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee. It will not make the holidays less busy.

Also related: Why healthy habits keep restarting on Monday and How to prioritize health on a busy schedule. Back to Healthy & Awake.