The holiday season seems to fall earlier and earlier each year as stores put out their decorations and marked-down merchandise and radio stations start playing Christmas music.
Yet somehow, our feelings always remain the same, whether joyous or anxious. You might look forward to a time of year when you visit with rarely seen relatives, even if the pandemic this year keeps gatherings restricted to visits on Zoom — or eating starch-laden treats like gingerbread or jelly doughnuts.
Whether or not you look forward to festivities around the winter solstice, there’s a good chance that it will affect your brain in one way or another.
The obvious changes you’re feeling are likely chemical-related: A balance of serotonin and dopamine in your brain that impact your levels of happiness. Dopamine is associated with reward-seeking behavior and pleasure seeking — the reason we’re drawn to those Christmas cookies and eggnog — or stopping by to see the light displays on a local street, while serotonin reinforces feelings of worth and a sense of belonging — the reason so many of us have our own holiday traditions that get passed on from year to year.
Events like the anticipated annual town Christmas tree lighting and how they make us feel haven’t gone unnoticed by researchers, like one team at the University of Copenhagen who carried out an imaging study where they sought to locate the “center” of Christmas spirit within the human brain. They gave their test subjects Christmas-themed images. They found that among the participants who celebrated Christmas, there was an increase in brain activity happening in their sensory motor cortex, the premotor and primary motor cortex that governs physical activity, along with the parietal lobule.
Earlier studies have suggested that these regions of your brain play a part in an individual’s sense of spirituality, as well as your bodily senses and deciphering facial emotions. The study has yet to be tried with a larger sample size so we can’t interpret too much from this one experiment, but it is notable that feelings of festiveness can impact activity in your brain.
It’s fair to say that not everyone gets positive feelings about Christmas and the winter holidays coming around the bend, however.
For some, it can be the opposite — and even those who enjoy it can experience a considerable amount of stress — having to think of the right gifts all while under a budget and being able to either navigate a crowded shopping center or hoping all your packages arrive on time, during a season when postal and shipping services are already faced with considerable traffic, along with having to prepare copious amounts of food for friends and guests.
The mounting stress provokes a physical response in your body, automatically releasing the compounds of both adrenaline and cortisol. The release of cortisol has been known to significantly impact the hippocampus, causing both a decrease in memory and your ability to perform multiple tasks at a time — which is why you might realize you forgot an order or two on your shopping list while addressing those cards.
One common custom shared by most of the holidays celebrated around this time is the giving and receiving of gifts — and for some of us, the feeling of giving gifts to loved ones and seeing their reactions as they peel away the wrapping paper is just as good, if not better, than receiving presents.
There’s a scientific reason for that. The trait of being generous is wired into the reward circuitry of your brain, provoking a release of dopamine and endorphins. Researchers have dubbed this phenomenon a “helpers’ high”: those feelings you experience after giving — whether it’s your time or material wealth. The chemicals produced by this high can manage your feelings of stress, while reinforcing your desire to continue to give.
Perhaps the reason we have so many warm feelings of holidays from the past is due to the large gatherings of family and friends, which certainly could be complicated this year depending on the vaccination status of various members of your social circles. Nevertheless, large gatherings among people you are fond of spurs the release of oxytocin in your brain — the same chemical behind maternal behavior and social attachment.
Lastly, there’s the common complaint so many of us have about that time between Thanksgiving and Christmas: Overindulging in our favorite foods and drinks — typically rich in proteins and sugars. This too can affect your brain.
It activates a pathway in your brain between the hypothalamus, responsible for hormone and body temperature regulation, and the immune system. The immune system provides a response in the form of low-grade inflammation, which can lead to us feeling stuffed if we eat too much stuffing or Panettone. After one meal, these feelings tend to subside of course, though continuing to indulge can lead to chronic conditions like Type 2 diabetes.
As much as these feelings seem to overwhelm us during the holiday season, they tend to disappear for better or worse once January comes along and life tends to carry on as normal, with the days finally getting longer once again.
The good news is that now neuroscience can spot feelings like the helper’s high and those are things that don’t necessarily have to disappear with the holiday’s festivities.