Quick summary: Naming the specific ways the holidays could go wrong, then separating what you can control from what you cannot, gives October anxiety a fixed place on the page instead of an open loop in the mind. The same mechanism that helps students perform better after writing down exam worries can free working memory during family travel, spending decisions, and predictable arguments, which matters because unmanaged seasonal stress is a common driver of low mood, sleep disruption, and strained relationships. A short written pre mortem is a practical well-being tool that individuals and clinicians can use before December, so people arrive at the season with one concrete plan for each controllable risk rather than a vague dread they only face once it is too late to change.
It’s early October, and if you’re honest, the holiday dread has already started. Not the excitement, the other thing. The mental spreadsheet of travel costs, the family table, the argument you have every single year about the same trivial thing, and the vague feeling that January you is going to be exhausted and a bit disappointed. Most of us deal with this by not thinking about it until December, when it’s too late to do anything except endure it.
The Stoics had a technique for exactly this. Seneca called it premeditatio malorum, or rehearsing the bad stuff in advance. Not because he enjoyed misery, but because he believed that what catches you off guard hits twice as hard. The things you’ve already faced in your head can’t ambush you in quite the same way.
Modern psychology came up with a similar idea and gave it a more practical name. Psychologist Gary Klein calls it the pre mortem. His version was designed for teams. Before a project starts, everyone imagines that six months have passed and the project has failed spectacularly, then works backwards to figure out what went wrong. It works because imagining failure gives people permission to say the uncomfortable things they might otherwise avoid in a planning meeting. Do it alone, in a notebook, and it gives you permission to say the uncomfortable things you might otherwise avoid admitting to yourself.
Here’s the 15-minute version, built for the season ahead: Set a timer. At the top of the page, write, “It is early January, and the holidays went badly.” Then list everything that went wrong. Be specific and be petty. The flight was delayed and you snapped at your partner. You spent £400 you didn’t have on gifts nobody needed. Your uncle brought up politics at dinner and you took the bait again. Your mother cried in the kitchen and you pretended not to notice. Write the version you’re afraid will happen, the one you’d never say out loud.
When the timer goes off, go back through the list with a pen and mark each item with one of two letters: C for what was actually in your control, and N for what wasn’t. This is Epictetus’s dichotomy of control, and it does most of the work. Half your list will probably be Ns: other people’s moods, travel chaos, the price of everything. Those get crossed out. Not forgiven, not reframed, just crossed out. They are not yours to carry.
For every C, write one sentence. Not a resolution, but a plan. “I will leave the room when politics comes up instead of answering.” “I will set the gift budget at £150 total and tell my sister first.” “I will book the morning flight so a delay doesn’t ruin the day.” Then close the notebook.
There is also a psychological reason why putting your worries on paper can help. Research has found that students who wrote about their worries before an exam performed better under pressure, suggesting that getting anxiety onto paper can free up some of the mental capacity that worry occupies. Your holiday list can work in much the same way. The dread stops looping because it has somewhere to live.
The pre mortem can also make you act earlier. When you imagine how things could go wrong, you are more likely to notice problems that ordinary planning overlooks. You might spot the December version of yourself making a mistake while October you still has time to do something about it.
The point is not to spend October dreading December. It’s the opposite. You do the worrying once, on paper, in fifteen minutes, and then you’re done. The disaster already happened. It happened in your notebook, where it can’t hurt anyone, and January you gets the version of the holidays that October you actually planned for.
Theo Huxley writes as the author of “The Emperor’s Journal”, a guided journal that pairs a short Stoic reading with one writing prompt. He publishes the Stoic Sayings.
