It’s early January. The holiday season has just ended. Decorations are coming down, routines are resuming, and everyone around you seems energized by fresh starts and New Year’s resolutions. Yet you feel… empty. Drained. Perhaps even more exhausted than before the holidays began.
If you’re experiencing this right now, you’re not alone. Post-holiday depletion affects physicians at alarming rates, creating a paradox: the season meant for restoration often leaves us more depleted than ever. Understanding why this happens—and more importantly, what to do about it now—can help you navigate these difficult first weeks of the year.
The Physician’s Holiday Paradox
Most people assume holidays provide rest. For physicians, the reality proved more complex. While others wound down, many of us accelerated. We compressed patient schedules before time off, fielded anxious calls from patients worried about holiday coverage, and now face mountains of accumulated tasks. Add personal obligations—family gatherings, gift buying, travel logistics, hosting duties—and “rest” became a cruel joke.
But the depletion runs deeper than simple exhaustion. It’s a unique combination of emotional, cognitive, and existential factors that physicians rarely discuss but commonly experience.
The Expectation Gap
Perhaps nothing drains us more than the gap between expectation and reality. Holiday narratives promise magical family moments, profound gratitude, and joyful celebration. Social media amplifies these impossible standards with curated glimpses of others’ seemingly perfect gatherings.
Meanwhile, your reality might have included: navigating family dynamics that triggered old wounds, feeling guilty about limited time with your own children due to holiday call schedules, experiencing resentment when relatives dismissed your exhaustion (“but you had time off!”), or sitting at dinner mentally replaying a patient interaction gone wrong.
The cognitive dissonance between “I should feel joyful” and “I feel numb” creates shame, which compounds depletion. We judged ourselves for not appreciating privileges others lack—time with loved ones, financial security, meaningful work. This self-criticism became its own burden.
The Performative Energy Drain
Physicians are professional emotion managers. We modulate our affect to comfort anxious patients, deliver difficult news compassionately, and maintain composure during crises. This emotional labor continues through holidays, but in different contexts.
You put on a brave face at your child’s school concert despite feeling exhausted. You show interest in your uncle’s political opinions to keep the peace. You perform gratitude for gifts you don’t want or need. You perform energy you don’t possess at social gatherings because admitting exhaustion feels like weakness.
Each performance depletes your already limited reserves, unlike clinical emotional labor, which at least serves a clear purpose and leverages professional identity. Holiday performance often feels pointless—going through motions to satisfy others’ expectations.
The Meaning-Making Crisis
Here’s something rarely acknowledged: holidays can trigger existential unease in physicians precisely because they force us to confront questions we usually suppress through busyness.
During regular work weeks, purpose feels clear. You diagnose, treat, comfort, and heal. Your identity as a physician provides structure and meaning. But holidays disrupt this framework. Stripped of your professional role, questions emerge: Who am I beyond my job? What brings me joy independent of productivity? How do I define success in relationships rather than outcomes?
For physicians who’ve organized entire lives around medical careers, these questions feel threatening rather than liberating. The holiday pause, rather than restful, becomes uncomfortable—a mirror reflecting aspects of life we’ve neglected. Returning to work feels like relief, but we’re returning more depleted than we left.
The Hedonic Adaptation Trap
Research on hedonic adaptation shows humans quickly return to baseline happiness regardless of positive changes. This explains why anticipated pleasures often disappoint. The holiday meal you imagined for weeks tastes good, but not transcendent. The family reunion includes nice moments but also friction. The vacation day you craved arrives, then passes, leaving you wondering why it didn’t feel more significant.
For physicians accustomed to high-stakes intensity, ordinary pleasures may register weakly. Your nervous system, calibrated to emergency department adrenaline or surgical precision, might find family board games understimulating rather than relaxing. This isn’t personal failure—it’s neurological adaptation. But not understanding this, we blame ourselves for the inability to “just enjoy” simple pleasures, adding guilt to depletion.
What You Can Do Right Now
So you’re already depleted. The holidays are over. What now? Here are strategies designed specifically for where you are today—early January, already exhausted, facing a full year ahead.
Reframe Rest
Stop expecting holidays to erase accumulated fatigue. That’s unrealistic and sets you up for disappointment. Instead, aim for: maintaining baseline rather than deteriorating further, creating a few genuinely restorative moments rather than sustained bliss, and protecting boundaries around the most depleting obligations.
Rest for physicians often looks different than conventional recovery. Some of us restore through intense physical activity, intellectual stimulation, or solitary pursuits rather than social gatherings. Honor what actually replenishes you rather than what “should” feel restful.
Practice Selective Authenticity
You can’t be authentic everywhere—that’s exhausting in different ways. But identify one or two relationships or settings where you can drop the performance. Maybe it’s a close friend who understands medical life, or your partner during an honest conversation, or even yourself during a solo walk.
In these protected spaces, admit the truth: “I’m exhausted and don’t feel particularly festive.” This limited authenticity prevents the complete disconnection from self, which makes depletion so acute.
Reduce Decision Fatigue
Physicians make countless decisions daily. Holidays pile on more: what gifts to buy, which events to attend, what food to prepare, how to manage conflicting family demands. Each decision depletes willpower reserves.
Simplify ruthlessly. Establish simple rules: gifts only for children, attendance only at events you genuinely want to experience, and minimal hosting obligations. Outsource where possible—purchased cookies serve the same function as homemade. Preserve decision-making capacity for what truly matters.
Create Micro-Restorations
Rather than expecting extended time off to provide complete restoration, build tiny restoration moments throughout the holidays. These might include: ten minutes of morning silence before household chaos begins, a brief walk between obligations, saying no to one request per day, or twenty minutes with a book that absorbs you.
These micro-restorations won’t solve burnout, but they prevent the complete depletion that comes from sustained output without any input.
Acknowledge the Transition
Post-holiday depletion intensifies when we pretend holidays never happened—jumping immediately back to full clinical schedules and maximal productivity. Your nervous system needs transition time.
If possible, schedule a lighter clinical load for the first week back. If that’s impossible, at least acknowledge internally that you’re in transition. Extend yourself grace for slower processing, forgotten details, or reduced tolerance for complexity. Treat yourself as you’d treat a colleague returning from medical leave—with patience and lowered expectations during reacclimation.
Rewrite the Narrative
The story you tell yourself about holidays shapes your experience. The narrative “holidays should be magical, but mine never are” guarantees disappointment and depletion. Try alternative narratives: “Holidays are complex, containing both difficult and meaningful moments,” or “I navigate competing demands with reasonable skill given impossible circumstances,” or even “Holidays are just another season; they don’t define my worth or happiness.”
These reframes reduce the gap between expectation and reality, diminishing depletion’s intensity.
The Deeper Work
Ultimately, post-holiday depletion signals something important: the unsustainability of how we’re living the rest of the year. If a brief time away leaves us feeling worse rather than better, our baseline is the problem.
This doesn’t mean holidays themselves can fix systemic issues in healthcare—impossible workloads, moral distress, administrative burden, inadequate support systems. Those require collective action and institutional change. But it does mean we might examine how we’re complicit in our own depletion.
Are we taking on more than necessary because we can’t tolerate being ordinary? Are we avoiding difficult personal conversations by staying too busy to have them? Are we defining our worth entirely through professional achievement because other identity dimensions feel underdeveloped or threatening?
These questions don’t have easy answers, and exploring them might feel uncomfortable. But awareness itself reduces depletion’s power. When we understand why holidays drain us, we can respond strategically rather than simply enduring and judging ourselves.
As decorations come down and routines resume, remember this: feeling depleted after holidays doesn’t mean you’re ungrateful, weak, or broken. It means you’re human, navigating genuinely difficult circumstances with finite resources.
The goal isn’t perfect holiday joy—that’s fantasy. The goal is sustainable energy management that honors your actual needs rather than imagined ideals. It’s approaching this annual cycle with self-compassion, realistic expectations, and strategic boundaries.
Next year, you might try one small experiment: identify your single most depleting holiday obligation and decline it. Notice what happens. The world likely won’t end. You might discover that protecting your energy isn’t selfish—it’s essential for showing up as your best self in contexts that truly matter, including patient care.
The post-holiday season needn’t leave you empty. With understanding, strategy, and self-compassion, you can move through this transition maintaining enough reserves to engage meaningfully with the year ahead. Not perfectly. Not euphorically. But sustainably, which might be the most important thing of all.
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