It's Holiday Time

It's holiday time and I often find myself getting anxious about gatherings of family and friends.  Part of it is due to forecasting conflict and part if it is due to this issue I have in group situations.  I have a tough time focusing on the person in front of me when there is a lot of commotion going on around me.  It's as if my mind goes into this monitoring mode, scanning the rest of the conversations and activities going on around me.  I'm not sure what I'm scanning for, I just seem to scan and scan and scan.  It's really bad when I'm in a group of people I know as opposed to being surrounded by people I don't know.  For some reason, the tendency to monitor the people I know and care about is much stronger than it is for complete strangers.  I don't think this characteristic has anything to do with all or nothing thinking, but there may be secondary thoughts that do have to do with all or nothing thinking.  I think that I should be able to control my attention.  There's a "should" statement for you.  I'll have plenty of opportunities in the next week or so to monitor my thoughts in these situations and see what's going on.