Transcript
A (0:00)
Marshall's buyers are hustling hard to get amazing new gifts into stores right up to the last minute. Like a designer perfume for that friend who never RSVP'd wishlist topping toys for her kids who came too. Belgian chocolates for the neighbor, A cozy scarf for your boss and a wool jacket for your husband that you definitely did not almost forget. Marshalls, we get the deals, you get the good stuff. Even at the last minute, the find a Marshall's near you.
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Today's episode is the Holiday Blues. When you ask people in surveys what's the one emotion that best characterizes the holidays? Most people give a positive word, you know, of feeling good about, you know, their relationships, for example, the warmth that they feel, the generosity that they feel. But a lot of people, you see three other words that show up in surveys about the most predominant emotion at Christmas time, which is annoyance, disappointment, and sadness. You feel like a grouch and a scrooge as a result of it, and you don't want to be that way. So I have a protocol to help you celebrate Christmas in a very joyful, interior way such that you can be the person that you want to be on Christmas. Hey, friends, welcome to Office Hours. I'm Arthur Brooks. I'm your host, dedicated to helping you with a better life, full of more love and more happiness. That's what people tend to talk about this time of year anyway, isn't it? Merry Christmas to those of you who celebrated Happy holidays. To all of you, this is the end of the year which people are talking about how they can have better relationships, how they can have fun together. And everybody's in a mood to, or at least they feel like they should be in a mood to. To be happier than they would be any other time of the year. Now, for some of you, that's maybe not so easy. Today's episode is the holiday blues. It's the tough time that people have at Christmas or the other end of the year holidays. And if that's you, what you can do about it and if it's somebody that you love, how you can actually help them. That's what I want to talk about here today. Now, as always, please do feedback. I love hearing from all of you. It's very easy to reach me. The email address is office hours@arthurbrooks.com don't forget to leave a review of the episode so that we can get your opinion on this at Spotify or Apple and subscribe to the platform of your choice. Also, leave comments. We love the comments. We Read the comments, we react to the comments. Okay, so difficulty with the holidays that people actually feel. I see this all the time. I talk to people constantly who will confide in me that the hard time of year, not an easy time of year. That's what the holiday blues are actually all about. And you know, one of the things that you, when you talk to mental health professionals is that traffic in and out of therapist's office and psychiatrists office tends to be higher during the holidays and not lower. And if this were a uniformly happy thing, then this would be, you know, Christmas time would be the ultimate antidepressant. But in point of fact it's not. It actually pushes a lot of people in the other direction. And when you ask people in surveys, you know, what's the, what's the one emotion that best characterizes the holidays? Most people give a positive word, you know, of about the feeling good about, you know, their relationships, for example, the warmth that they feel, the generosity that they feel. But a lot of people, you see three other words that show up in surveys about the most predominant emotion at Christmas time, which is annoyance, disappointment and sadness. So I want to talk a little bit, if that's you or somebody that you know, what you can do about it, how to understand why the holidays are so hard for some people and what you can do if that's afflicting you. Now I find in my research and what I see in the work that other social scientists do is there kind of three reasons that people feel a lot of holiday blues. Number one is that holidays never seem to live up to the past. You know, what you're experiencing was always better in the past. And so it's disappointing, it's disappointment. Second is bad memories is trauma, you know, some bad things that actually happened in the past and that, that taint it right now. And so, so therefore that's sadness. That's sadness that overtakes. And the last is, is feeling just really overwhelmed and annoyed at, you know, the spirit of the season and this pressure to actually put on a happy face to decorate your home, to listen to constant recordings of Frosty the Snowman in the CVS and, you know, and hum along and. Yeah, and so that those are the three reasons that those three big words keep showing up again and again and again, which is annoyance, disappointment and sadness. I want to take them one by one, starting with disappointment, understanding, you know, what actually is going on, why people feel disappointed, what you can do about it to understand disappointment and for that matter, sadness coming from trauma of holiday's past. We need to understand the structure of human memory. And this is a super interesting area of neuroscience. People who study memories in the brain. Now, to begin with, there's two kinds of memories that we have as Homo sapiens. We have semantic memories and episodic memories. Semantic memories are general. They're, they're, they're knowledge that you gain and keep about certain things. So a semantic memory of Christmas would be. It's a certain time at the end of the year in late December and when it's usually cold and when people get together and they have a really nice time and give each other presents, you know what Christmas is. Your knowledge of what Christmas is is a semantic memory. Now, not only Homo sapiens have semantic memories. Your dog has a semantic memory. It knows where its food dish is. That's the semantic memory. It's just a knowledge about something. Then there's episodic memories. And this is a lot more human. This is the photo album in your head. This is the video library that's in your head of things that have happened that you recorded and that you remember. Specific things that you remember. And for Christmas, this would be that time that, that, you know, you got nothing but underwear from your family that Christmas or that Christmas when Uncle Fred, you know, got really drunk and barfed in the front yard and beat up the neighbor and got arrested. Or it's, you know, it's a memory of a Christmas past is, is, is an episodic memory. Those two things actually work together. Why? Because episodic memories and the way that they, we maintain them and the way they get corrupted. More on that in a second. Is what affects semantic memory. So your impression of Christmas might actually be a product. Your impression, your knowledge about Christmas is affected by all the memories that you have about specific Christmases in the past. You get the point that I'm trying to make. Obviously now, to begin with, your episodic memories, that library, that video library, it's quite inaccurate. And there's a ton of research on this that what you remember about Christmases in the past actually didn't happen. And it sort of happened. It was truthy, but it's not really what happened quite accurately. And there's a ton of research on how episodic memory gets corrupted. For example, there's a number of studies that ask what happened on a particular date. So you, I could ask you what happened on 9 11. I mean, not what happened historically, but what happened in your life. What was going on in your life at 9 11? What did you See, how did you experience the news of the terrorist bombings on 9 11? And what you say is most likely not going to be very accurate. So people will say, I saw this, I did this, I talked to this person. And if you really do have accurate records of what happened that day, you'll find that it diverges quite a lot. And people are shocked when they see that their accounts of a particular date differ so much from really happened on that date. And they say, no, that's. People will often think that the historical record is wrong, that their memories are right, but it's not true. It's not the case. There's a whole bunch of reasons that your memory actually changes. And this is why you can't rely on memories from decades ago of witnesses to a particular crime. That's the reason that it's unreliable evidence. People's memories from a long time ago. The hippocampus of the brain where episodic memories are stored. That's kind of like the library where the volumes are being inserted. Experiences that we have, and the passage of time goes in and kind of. It moves all the books around. Any episodic memory that you have of a particular event, Christmas 1988, for example, is actually a bunch of little memories of little episodes that are stored in different places. And those files get corrupted and they get crosswired and they get influenced by what other people tell you. I mean, you can induce an episodic memory in a person by telling them over and over and over again when they're a kid about something that happened before they had memories that they would retain. You say, when you were one, this happened. When you were one, this happened. And by the time that the kid is five or six years old, they have a memory of when they were one. Well, it's not. It's a false memory. And that's the same thing for any of us. When people keep telling us a narrative about something that was not accurate, it will become the narrative because it will corrupt the episodic memory in the hippocampus of our brains. That happens all the time. The second thing is that we have a natural tendency to remember the past as better than it was. And there's a reason for that that's called fading affect bias. We, in real time, for things that are happening right now, we have a negativity bias. We tend to see the negative sides a lot more strongly than the positive sides because negative emotions keep you alive, and positive emotions are nice to have. And so you're paying a lot more attention to the negative, that's just part of what it means to be a surviving, thriving member of the Homo sapiens. But when the thing has passed, you can edit out a lot of the negativity that didn't actually lead to problems. And what you remember are the things that were beneficial to you, the things that actually profited you, which tends to be the more positive side of things. And so you edit your own memories to get rid of the stuff that you don't need and keep the things that you still do use. I'll give you an example of fading F bias. I've been on campuses my whole life, and I've witnessed a lot of reunions. Now, I know from being a faculty member on campus that the first semester of the first year for people going to college is super hard. They're calling home. I'm so lonely, come pick me up. I don't have any friends. I just failed an exam. Life sucks. But when they get together for the reunions 10 and 20 and 30 years later with the people they met during the first semester of their first year of college, and it's all like, it was so great. It was the best time of our lives. It was so wonderful. If only life could still be like that. What's the difference? And the answer is the fading affect bias is a process of editing their own hippocampus, their own set of episodic memories, getting rid of the current misery that they had and keeping the knowledge about their friends, which is almost all positive. That's how it works. It's what they learned and when they benefited from, is the remaining memory. And so the result of this, all of this altogether other, is that we tend to have episodic memories of Christmases in the past as better than they actually were because you don't remember the conflict around the table. You don't remember the fact that, you know, Aunt Marge got a fishbone stuck in her throat and, and it was scary. And you don't remember that Uncle Fred actually got in a fight with a neighbor. Or if you do, it actually seems funny to you because it turned out okay in the end. And, and it was pretty unpleasant at that particular time when, you know, you got into a shouting match with somebody, but it turned out to be okay. And so you edited that out. You edited out the, the, the part that made you want to cry on that particular day. And the result is your library of Christmas days in the past is a library of lovely memories as kind of snapshots, as Polaroids. It's Christmas cards. It's, those are a good representation of your, of your edited episodic memory of Christmas's past. What are you comparing those to? You're comparing those two Christmases right now, this Christmas, when you're sitting around with your family. And guess what? It's an actually accurate experience of human life, which is a bunch of good and a bunch of bad all happening at the same time. A combination, a tossed salad of positive and negative emotions being experienced in real time in the limbic system of your brain. And you're doing a cost benefit analysis of the experience that's quite accurate right now and comparing it to one that's quite inaccurate from before. And the conclusion you come to is Christmas is. Were a lot better in the old days. This is why people always say the old days were better, as a matter of fact. But holidays in particular seem like they were more fun, they were more warm, they were more wonderful, they were sweeter.