It is common knowledge that you are forced to deal with many different personalities during the holidays. You're suddenly forced to talk to your coworkers during the company's Christmas party. You run into the strange neighbor down the street during the Christmas parade. You see many of the other parents at the Christmas concert. You're invited to the in-laws' home for Thanksgiving dinner. You take your children to the mall for Christmas photos.

We start to stress before the holidays, but many of us aren't really stressing about the consumerism of Christmas or the fact that we have to buy a gift for someone else. We start getting depressed or anxious with all of the activities that are coming up. And we get anxious, depressed, or frazzled because we have to interact with a multitude of people during the holidays whom we normally don't have to interact with.

Most of the people we deal with have some sort of quirks that are occurring within their personalities. Many of us don't realize when we are interacting with other people that the other people might possibly have personality disorders or mental health problems. We are so focused on trying to behave in a social manner ourselves and trying to improve our own social performance that we often forget to look at other people as possible sources of our angst during social interactions.

Most of us have had to put up with that weird uncle or the quirky kid in school. We may not have done it well, but we made it through the social interaction. We can reduce our fear and anxiety around interacting with others when we start to take their personalities and their negative traits into mind while we are interacting with them. We can step outside of ourselves and stop feeling insecure or attacked by other people's odd behaviors by educating ourselves on the types of people we will meet.