Holiday Meltdown Loading? ‘Absolutely Not’ Says It’s Time to Reboot

Congratulations—you survived Thanksgiving. But if you’re reading this with the lingering energy of someone who ugly-cried in a closet, snapped at a loved one over something stupid, or found yourself stress-eating custard at 11:30 p.m., you’re not alone. December is here, and the holiday gauntlet has only just begun.

On the Absolutely Not!, host Heather McMahan gets brutally honest about hitting an emotional wall over Thanksgiving weekend and why taking time to “reboot” isn’t optional anymore. Whether you’re already running on fumes or bracing for the family chaos ahead, this one’s for you.

How to Recover From Holiday Burnout

When your brain starts buffering

There’s a difference between being tired and being completely fried. McMahan describes the latter with painful accuracy: “I hit a wall of emotional exhaustion and I literally sat in my closet and cried like that for a solid two days.”

The kicker? Nothing was technically wrong. Thanksgiving with her husband, mom, and sister went fine. No family drama. No major blowups. Just weeks of being “on” with zero recovery time—and then her system crashed.

“My body has felt like an old school Dell desktop just warning, warning, virus, virus,” she explains. “There’s a lot of windows open. There’s a lot of cookies. I’m trying to dial up to get back to where I need to be emotionally. And it’s f*cking dialing, but we’re not connecting.”

If you’ve ever felt like you’re going through the motions but can’t actually settle into feeling okay, that’s the dial-up state. You’re technically functioning, but you’re not landing anywhere stable. McMahan calls it “that level of anxiety where it’s dialing up, but I never get in the chat room. And the chat room is at a good healthy emotional space.”

The holiday season is basically malware

The holidays ask everything of you while rarely asking about you. McMahan nails it when she admits what finally broke her: “No one has emotionally asked me where I’m at for a while.”

She’d been going nonstop—press in New York, shows every night, travel, meet-and-greets—for 10 days straight. “There was no downtime to turn my brain off to reset the computer,” she says. And then Thanksgiving arrived, which is supposed to be a break but often isn’t. 

Studies show nearly 80 percent of people neglect their own needs during the holidays while trying to make things special for everyone else. It’s a recipe for hitting your emotional limit fast. Then there’s the family pressure cooker. “It’s that time of year where you somehow for some reason have to have family sit-downs,” McMahan says. “Now you have every cousin you haven’t seen being like, ‘Can we talk?’ And you’re like, ‘Why now, Charles? Why the f*ck now?'”

She compares the whole season to “putting all these people that you only see once a year, or want to see once a year, in a crockpot with a bunch of seasoning and hot peppers and setting it and forgetting it and waiting for the pressure cooker to explode.” The result? You short-circuit in real time. “You’re just twitching, your eyes twitching while you’re putting some cornichons and some Mike’s hot honey on a f*ckin’ cheeseboard,” she describes. “And you’re like, ‘I hate f*ckin’ everybody.’ And that’s the hard thing. It’s a time to be grateful. But then when you hang out with most of the people in your life, you’re like, why do I spend my time with these horrible people?”

It’s not that you’re ungrateful. It’s that you’re depleted—and depletion doesn’t care about the calendar.

Hit the reset button before you detonate

“You have to cool down the computer sometimes in order to be the best version of yourself,” McMahan explains. “And that’s a level of self-care.”

So what does that actually look like? Whatever you need it to. “If you need to go walk around your neighborhood and smoke a cigarette in front of your judgmental neighbors and just leave your kids in the yard for a minute, do what you have to do,” she says. “Hide in the bushes. Just tell everybody that there’s something going on with the lights outside. Be like, ‘Oh, the wreath flew off the door.’ And then you’ve taken the wreath off the door and you just hide in the f*ckin’ bushes and hit a vape pen and maybe watch Real Housewives.” The point isn’t the method—it’s the permission. You’re allowed to remove yourself. You’re allowed to take 20 minutes. 

December is long and the obligations aren’t slowing down, but you don’t have to white-knuckle your way through every gathering until you crack over an air-fried duck. Build in the escapes. Take the laps. And as McMahan puts it, “Reboot, b*tch. Reboot when you need to.”

For more unfiltered holiday survival wisdom, listen to Absolutely Not! wherever you get your podcasts.

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