On Holiday Blues by Ilana Simons:

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It’s holiday time. Holiday time can be depressing. This is the time of the year when store windows sing with (commercial) cheer, house decorations insist we be HAPPY, and families flaunt their families. In turn, the “holiday blues” can set in just around now: From November to January, people who-are-often-loners-but-generally-feel-OK can get atypically depressed.

Holidays suggest we should be more joyfully social than a lot of us naturally are. So we doubt our simple love of solitude. A pressure for bliss can also make our (naturally imperfect) family or friendships annoy us all the more.

Who Parties?
Modern psychology makes a very cool distinction between people who thrive on stimulating environments and those who don’t. The distinction actually came out of research on pain thresholds: Some of us are more stoic about events like jamming our fingers or breaking our ankles than others are. In 1967, a researcher named Asenath Petrie defined two types of personalities: the “augmenter” and the “reducer.” The “augmenter” is sensitive to excitement: She feels pain more than most and dislikes other types of chaos, including heavy drinking and loud noise. In contrast, the “reducer” has a high threshold for action. She loves a party and is a social type; she has a bigger tolerance for pain, seeks crowds, and tends to turn her music up louder than others do. So: Different people have different relationships to stimuli. Some can’t get enough of the crowd; some like to shut it down.

This difference doesn’t even come close to explaining all the reasons why some people in your family like to launch the toast and belt out Christmas carols while some sneak away to the porch with a novel. But these scientifically proven differences can obviously be comforting things to think about: If you sometimes feel like the Grinch at Christmas time, the impulse might, in part, be simply natural. Some people don’t thrive in the hubbub of a crowd.

My book, A Life of One’s Own: A Guide to Better Living through the Work and Wisdom of Virginia Woolf, is part psychology, part memoir, and partly a loving tribute to a novelist I’ve studied for a long time. I’m a literature professor who began training in clinical psychology because I loved the vivid window Woolf offered onto the mind. I still consider Woolf to be history’s big genius (even among psychologists) in describing how the head works.

In one chapter of my book, I describe Woolf’s appreciation for occasional solitude. Woolf thought it was a big mistake to think you could ever fully crack open and know another person. Sometimes (especially at holidays?), we crave complete intimacy with others. We dream of a mind-meld with friends or family. But that ideal can be a dangerous illusion, Woolf says. A more stable stance actually means respecting people’s differences, or accepting the limitations in fully “knowing” people you love.

Holiday months make this message a big one for me. Holidays have absorbed the tone of a lot of American culture, in which bigger and bolder feel right. We live in a culture that increasingly demands exposure—that demands we say it all, quick and straight. In our political talk shows, for instance, the smartest and snappiest guests are ones who can reduce their ideas to a soundbite. And, in our online lives (in Myspace pages, dating services) utter self-exposure seems normal. But Woolf wants to save the other human impulse: toward quiet, and toward solitude. She called privacy necessary for a deep, creative life. In privacy, we have a chance to reject or accept other people’s advice. In privacy, we also think through things with less self-consciousness—and so nurture our original voices. We don’t feel a need to simplify our ideas so much; we appreciate ambivalence. In solitude, we escape the holiday insistence on a steely-bright smile.

When Virginia Woolf encourages us to value solitude, she gives us a bit of encouragement through holiday blues. If you’re coming home from some holiday dinner and feel, I just want to be alone, she understands the need. She celebrates it. She tells you to just go to bed with a book, already. Be an “augmenter” for a day, she essentially says, and why not?

Tomorrow: I’ll talk about Woolf’s advice on breaking routines.

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Ilana Simons, A Life of One's Own, Virginia Woolf, guide, biography, 20th century literature, human nature, personal growth, fulfillment, women, psychology, Penguin Books, books