3 Ways To Make Your Family Get-Togethers Less Stressful

If you love getting together with your extended family but also find that the time spent planning and executing on these plans tends to be particularly stressful for you, you might find yourself shying away from these kinds of events. Luckily, there are things that you can do to help these events feel less stressful for you and everyone else involved.

To help you see how this can be done, here are three ways to make your family get-togethers less stressful. 

Reconcile What You Want With What Is LIkely To Happen

One of the biggest reasons why you might feel stress when attending family events is because you worry that how you want things to go likely won’t be how they will actually go. And while it makes sense to plan things as well as possible, you’re going to find the whole process a lot less stressful if you’re able to reconcile what you want to have happen with what will likely happen.

Especially if you’re involving kids or elderly loved ones from assisted living facilities, there’s really no telling how they’ll be feeling on a day-to-day basis. So if a big part of your plan involves everyone feeling great and having all kinds of energy and great moods, you might want to reel your expectations in based on actual evidence rather than best-case-scenarios. 

Communicate To Share The Load

In many families, one person or small group will take on the majority of the planning and preparing for family events. However, this leaves all the stress planted firmly on these few people. So if you’re wanting to have less stress, you’re going to have to communicate with others to share the load. 

To help you in doing this, put on your delegation hat and assign different families or family members tasks throughout the event. This way, everyone is putting in effort to make the get-together prove to be fun and successful. 

Anticipate That Things May Not Go As Planned

Despite all of your planning and preparation, there are going to be things about your plan that won’t go as you’d hoped. And while you can allow this to make you upset and ruin your day, you can also choose to be more flexible and go with the flow of the day. And when you make this choice, you allow the stress that would have come with disappointment to just roll off your back. 

Knowing this, it can be helpful to anticipate that things may not go as planned sometimes. And while having Plan B or Plan C can help put you more at ease, being okay with the idea that things might have to change or get shifted around can help you feel less stress as well. 

If you want your large family get-togethers to be less stressful for you, consider using the tips mentioned above as you plan for your future events.