While the holiday season is supposed to be a time of joy, connection, and lots of filling up on delicious holiday dishes, for many people, the pleasures fall short of their hopes. For some people, Thanksgiving and Christmas celebrations inspire stress, the pressure to live up to family expectations, and overeating to feed one’s emotional pain, along with psychological and/or physical isolation. Parents juggle restless kids in unfamiliar settings, hosts fret over creating “perfect” gatherings, and privacy can be hard to come by. Given the stressors of travel, the pressure to ensure that everyone is “happy,” difficulty sleeping, and/or negative body image stirred up due to eating more than usual, these challenges can contribute to an overall body-mind-spirit feeling of being “stuffed” and erotically and sexually unsatisfied.

According to a 2023 American Psychological Association survey, 43 percent of U.S. adults felt that the stress of the holidays makes it hard to enjoy them. In addition to that, in a more recent 2025 study published in the Eating and Weight Disorders journal, Thomas et al. analyzed over 10 million social media posts that showed a body image dissatisfaction spike during this season. The study found that unwanted weight gain from the holidays, followed by New Year’s resolutions and fitness goals, caused negative body-image issues. To strengthen this point, in 2023, Abdulan and his colleagues in Nutrients found that on Christmas, people ate three times their recommended daily calories, with some meals coming out to almost over 6,000 calories.

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