← Dr. Trish Leigh Podcast
Dr. Trish Leigh Podcast
Episode #199: Holiday Overstimulation: How the Season Hijacks Your Dopamine—And What Your Brain Actually Needs
00:33:20
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It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas. Well, for many people, the holidays are not just joyful, they are incredibly overwhelming. There is pressure to be cheerful, to socialize, to host, to buy, to rap, and to make memories. And this often collides with an already completely overstimulated world and a brain and nervous system that are running on fumes. So if you feel more stressed than ever at this serene time of year, neuroscience has an explanation for you. The holiday season hijacks your dopamine. From constant notifications and comparison posts, to sugar spikes, to flashing lights and to overcrowded schedules, December becomes the perfect storm of overstimulation. Your brain is pulled in 10 directions, your reward system becomes mis wired and your emotional bandwidth drains quickly. But I have good news. Your brain is adaptable. With the right kind of experiences, you can have a neurological reset and you can restore yourself to calm presence and connection. So I want you to know what's actually happening on the inside with your brain during the holiday season and most importantly, what you can do about it. I am Dr. Trish Leigh, your hostess with the mostess. I want to wish you a very merry Christmas if you celebrate a definitely a happy new Year. But I'm coming to you with the cautionary tale of this should be the most wonderful time of the year. But instead it becomes the most stressful time of the year. And trust me, as the mother of five young adult children who have sent me comprehensive spreadsheets of their Christmas list to a person who's running multiple businesses, this is an incredibly busy time of year and I've already got my plan to keep myself sane. And I'm going to help you make your plan today because during December your brain faces an overload of dopamine triggers and I want to list them for you so that you're aware of them. Then we're going to make your plan. So get a cup of coffee, get a Christmas cookie, not just kidding and stay with me here because we're going to break it down. Okay, so let's, let's talk about this. What are the triggers? I'm going to name them for you. You ready? Gift giving and shopping spending alone. We know it's very dopamine producing but stress inducing. Also social media comparison. You see everybody's amazing life. It's a wonderful life. And there's FOMO and comparison sugar and alcohol which seem to be endless social pressure and expectations. Holiday parties 1 I will be at tomorrow and you can look for the pic on my Instagram. Bright lights, constant Noise. I am not one for over stimulation in terms of visual and auditory input over book schedules. Life's a busy, busy place. In the first place. I'm mentally cracking myself up right now because I have accidentally said a whole bunch of holiday things in there. Busy, busy, busy. You remember that? I forget which cartoon. It's like from Rudolph or something. But I'm cracking myself up because they're just coming out on accident. So that's when you know you're really jazzed up for the holidays. But also it's evening time because my schedule is overloaded and I'm here know, making sure that I get the podcast out for you all because this is important stuff, but I'm cracking myself up. Busy, busy, busy. Oh, I know what that's from. It's from Frosty. Okay. Emotional obligations. So, you know, for me, as a mom of five kids, I'm. It's important to me to make sure Christmas happens and it happens well. Each one of these inputs pushes the dopamine system to fire rapidly now, especially if you consume explicit matter. Also, your brain's already rapidly firing, so you're going to get these unnatural spikes. And at Christmas time, when you add all of that to your already overstimulated life, your brain cannot sustain the pace. So instead of feeling excited and festive, you may end up feeling numb, anxious, completely drained, totally stressed out. You might be irritable and angry. You might not want to participate in all the things that are going on. That could be fun if your brain wasn't so overstimulated. When it comes time to get some work done, you're distracted, you can't focus, you've lost your motivation. You might feel disconnected, which can lead to intimacy issues and arousal dysfunction. You may experience sexual arousal dysfunction, which comes out of baseline arousal dysfunction. Wired and tired. These are all hallmark signs of a hijacked dopamine system. Overstimulation that leads to dysregulation. So the hijack is what happens to you in your life. So this is the hijack is that, okay, you're working and you feel the need to leave your work to go troll something on the Internet or to consume explicit matter. That's how the hijack feels to you. This is important stuff too, because we're going to talk about the hijack, the miswire and the rewire, what you can do about it. The hijack is the feeling you have. So it's you get done with the end of the day and you inherently just go to pour yourself a cocktail, right? Endless Sugar and alcohol. You go out to the party hardy tomorrow night, going out with the besties, you know, kind of a bougie Christmas party. We'll see how it goes. But you know, if there's a tendency, if you're. If this is how you self soothe and cope, to overeat and to over drink unless you have a foundation in place. There are a lot more dopamine hijacks at this time of year. So when there's high intensity stimulation and it becomes constant, this is when your system cannot keep up. Okay, so what happens is your nervous system shifts into a miswired state. This miswired state is an overactive reward state pathway. This means that the nucleus accumbens, the tegmental area, we know, the ventral tegmental area, we know that they are over firing. These are the pathways that lead forward to the prefrontal cortex, which is under firing. That's kind of the captain of the ship that's breaking impulses, and it's in charge of impulse control. That captain, the prefrontal cortex, he's in charge of executive function, which means you still get all your work done at the holidays. You don't go shopping to get a dopamine hit. You're able to do your work because of your prefrontal cortex. Spending money is a dopamine hit. Many people overspend at this time of year. Overeating, overspending, over scheduling, making sure you go to everything. High levels of overstimulation. So let's list how the hijack shows up in the mis wiring in your brain. First of all, it leads to. To hyper arousal. You feel edgy, you feel tense, you feel overstretched, you're always on alert. Small tasks can feel big. Then number two, emotional drain. You become just totally exhausted by social interactions, even the ones that you would have normally enjoyed. Now what I've learned is to. You've probably heard me say this before, is to give myself the out when I don't want to go to things, or I'm famous for the Irish goodbye. So when I Irish goodbye, people know I'm done. I'm happy to show up for the amount of time that I want to show up. But then when I'm out, I'm out. I protect my sleep, I protect my nervous system so that, you know, if you. If you're feeling like you don't want to go to something because you would normally enjoy it, you know it's a sign you're miswired. Numbness or shutdown to protect itself Your brain reduces emotional intensity, and this can feel flat or disconnected. In a QEG brain map, this looks like too much alpha. Too much alpha can lead to the numb feeling. Many times it comes from the intense amount of dopamine that the brain has been exposed to. Number four is reduced stress tolerance. Tiny disruptions push you over the edge. Now, I love this concept of stress tolerance, and I talk to my clients about this all the time. Stress tolerances, you and I have the same experience, except for it totally stresses you out, and it might not stress me out at all. I have the perfect example. It's not holiday related, but it happened today, which is why I'm recording the podcast at night, is that I go to start work this morning and there are hackers in my Facebook account, which I believe they have been taken out. But if anything weird happens on Meta, you now know why I was assuming that. We will soon see me posting lots of explicit matter, if you know what I mean. But in real time, we. We could see people being added, hackers being added to my account. While we were given limited. Me and the people who work with me, we were given limited access and we see hackers being added in real time. So one of the women who works for me, she's like, oh, my gosh, there's more people being added. She's kind of having a freak out. And I'm like, I gotta go. We're on zoom. And I said, okay, I got to go take care of this. Because I had to step back to be able to get the clarity to solve the problem. Because if I stay in the problem, I can't have the clarity. And especially there, you know, slack was blowing up with lots of people. I had to step away from all of that noise. That's stress tolerance. There's a lot going on, but I can tolerate it all and I can stay in problem solving. So this is what we're talking about. Tiny disruptions shouldn't push you over the edge. Unlike my hubs. The other day, he opened the fridge door and some sushi jumped out at him, if you know what I mean. It's all on the floor. And he goes to have a freak out. This is a true story. He starts to get mad, and you could see he's gotta, like, yell and, you know, I'm a pretty chill person and my daughter's there. We're both looking at him, like, ready for him. And he also knows that, you know, we have low tolerance for this these days. We have grace for him, but we also think it's unacceptable behavior, and we don't want to have to be around someone who's going to have freakouts. So he composes himself quickly, which is self regulation, and then he eats a piece of sushi off the kitchen floor just to prove how chill he was, which was cracking me up. Stress tolerance. Because he was not tolerating the situation well until he regulated himself with the encouragement of me and Saoirse. Too funny. Okay, number five, Comparison induced social pain. Holiday posts activate neural circuits that are associated with rejection or inadequacy. So I want you to really think about this. This is why so many people quietly think, I'm just trying to make it through December. Even though the holiday season is supposed to be meaningful, it's supposed to be purposeful. It's supposed to be about contemplation and reflection and gratitude. And now, through the algorithm, we see everybody else having amazing holiday season. And I saw a poster to by a young person not long ago. It wasn't about the holiday specifically, but he was saying it was a young man saying, it's a picture of him and his mom and they look like they're having the best time ever. And it was about him going to look at colleges. And he wrote a whole thing that I found interesting, saying that the second after they took that picture, his mom screamed at him and that they ended up canceling the college tour while he. She berated him the whole time. And his message was, don't believe every smiley face that you see on Instagram. And I thought that was really powerful because that's what happens with the pain circuits being activated. You look and you say, oh, wow, everybody else's life is better than mine and it gives you pain and rejection. Or if you see people doing things and you weren't invited, you then you feel, oh, you're an outsider and you're not measuring up and it impacts your worth. So I want you to be really aware that everything you see isn't always true. First of all, and secondarily, this is your life. You have to cut out what you want. Back in the day, that affected me a bit with my bestie, and she knows this story. She's totally into luxury goods and luxury experiences. And I like to ball on a budget. And you should see the dress in the new, I don't know, fur wrap thing that I just got. It's awesome. Totally balling on a budget. It is not luxury. It's gonna look great, though. So the idea is, you know, I'm more into things that are value because, you know, I'm an enneagram5. I've got avarice. I don't need luxury goods. So, you know, for a little while there, I'm like, dang, I need what she's got. I need some more Gucci. I need some more Louis Vuitton. And then I'm like, I don't need these things. You probably, if you've listened to me for a while, you know that sometimes I'll go on Poshmark and you know, that's my guilty pleasure online. And I'll look at something that I want, like, I got those awesome shoes, and I'll watch them for a while and then I'll lowball offer and I'll get them at a great value. And then I'm very excited. Not even because of the brand, just because of being able to wait. Delayed gratification, not instant gratification. Getting a good value. You know, I'm famous for, you know, kind of pimping out the thing that I worked hard to get at a good value. So this, these are some of the reasons that your brain becomes even more miswired at this time of year. And what I don't want you to do is to cope in the traditional way. I want you to intentionally manage this time of year instead of coping. So let's talk about the quick fixes. More caffeine to stimulate your nervous system. More wine, more cocktails, more sugar, more cookies. More scrolling. So if you're scrolling, you're seeking in your searching for something you are not going to find. That is the ego sending you on a journey that will never pay off. More multitasking, you know, staying busier than ever. Maybe it's more avoidance, avoiding the things that are important or escaping into explicit matter just to take the edge off of all the oversight. Stimulation of the season. These strategies only deepen the dopamine hijack and the dysregulation in the nervous system and the dysfunction in the brain. The real issue isn't that you're doing too little. It's that your brain is being overstimulated constantly in all the wrong ways. So let's talk about what does your brain actually need during this holiday season? Neuroscience shows that the brain thrives on intentional regulation, not more stimulation. That's what I'm talking about with my, my poshmark. You know, getting the shoes thing is that it's very intentional. It's a fun thing for me to do. It's like treasure hunting. It's intentional regulation during this time of year. I always go again, if you've been here with me for a while. You know, I always go on my winter arc early to bed, earlier to rise. I get more writing done early in the morning. Except for the days my Facebook accounts being hacked. I set lots of intentions for the new year. I was just telling Saoirse, we were in the car. I've never been so psyched. I mean, I probably think this every year, but I've never been so psyched for a new year because I am so excited with what I've put together to present to you. To help you understand how the algorithm is miswiring your brain and what you can do about it, I've created a new business for my daughter, which involves my husband, Lee. Equestrian Performance Lab. I'm totally psyched about that. I've got a lot of really exciting things. All my young adult children, most of them are at college, and they just came home for Thanksgiving. They'll be home again in a few weeks for Christmas. So what's now kind of an empty house becomes a full full house filled with shenanigans.
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I heard the kids in the basement, Declan and Sheamus were down there. I probably shouldn't even repeat what they were doing, but they were playing this game that was like a fake Russian roulette game with, like, truths and lies, but I could hear them burst into roaring every, you know, two minutes. And it just, like. Even though it was very late, it was the middle of the night, just warms my heart being able to hear these kids have fun together. So I'm so glad, you know, that's what the season's about, enjoying your people. It's about sitting on the couch in front of the fireplace, going out. You know, Search loves to go to the barn. So we both got warm weather clothes, she got a heated vest. Not me, because I run back and forth to the car. But, you know, spending out town, spending time outside, there's nothing more soothing than being in a barn with a lot of horses and no people at night in the winter. We did that the other night. We got back tonight, but tonight it wasn't like that last Friday, I think it was. It was just so peaceful. It was chilly. And I'm like, man, I could stay here forever. That's what this is about. So this is what your brain wants at this time of the year. It wants slow dopamine, not fast dopamine. It wants the happiness trifecta from slow dopamine at lower levels combined with serotonin for joy and oxytocin. For connection. So fast. Dopamine. Let's talk about where that comes from. It comes from sugar, spike, crash, right? Everything that comes fast, it crashes hard, too. Social media, even just the scrolling and the seeking, but especially if it's hypersexualized content, if it's drama, if it's violence, spike, crash. Alcohol, spike, crash. Chaos. I used to be addicted to chaos, man. I could tell you some stories and I should. I should tell you some stories. The chaos I created in my life.
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To. To keep chaos at high levels, to keep, I guess, making me feel purposeful. Man, that was cruel to myself and to my beautiful family. Thankfully, I figured it out and our home is filled with joy and peace. And it is chill. It is super chill now. But you have four babies right in a row. You're begging for chaos. I moved a whole bunch of times because I never felt at home. I didn't realize it wasn't that I didn't feel at home in my house, it's that I didn't feel at home in myself. And of course, when I figured that out, my house was loaded with toxic mold. So I ended up getting very sick. But at the same time, I was glad to have found my true self. Novelty overload. It's very important to include novelty in your life. And I have a podcast coming up in two podcasts, making sure you get healthy novelty. But there's such a thing as novelty overload. Doing new things all the time just to keep yourself at chaotic levels, that's no fun. Fast dopamine spikes quickly, crashes faster. Now let's talk about slow dopamine. It's combined with serotonin and oxytocin, but are some places that it comes from, number one, meaningful connection. So that meaningful connection, of course, is with other people. So tomorrow, the besties and I, we're going to the holiday party. We're going to my friend Chanel's house before to have, yes, we're going to have a cocktail or two. But they will. It'll always be in check, thankfully, you know, to have a pre party cocktail and to just spend time together as besties, which is so lovely. We'll hang out together by ourselves and we'll all go over to this bigger party together and, you know, we'll end up, all of us will end up working the room and saying hi to everybody because that's what we do. So this way we can have meaningful connection. I'm sure we'll dance. We're awful. But we will have fun dancing together. Meaningful Connection. But you can have meaningful connection to your favorite sports team. Go Bills, if you know what I mean. You can have meaningful connection to a brand new. You can have meaningful connection to an influencer. We want to make sure they're healthy and motivational and moving you towards your goals. But you can have meaningful connection in lots of different ways with people in your life, hopefully with your friends, with your family, with yourself, and of course with, you know, the, hopefully what will be the super bowl champions this year. Okay. Also, slow dopamine comes from creativity. Your creativity is individualized for you. Let's just, we'll leave it at there. We should do another, you know, podcast on that. Restorative movement. I move my body every single day. I work out and I walk. I always do it in nature, which is the next one. I roll my boxing bag out into the yard. I. I work out in my front yard. So I'm sure my neighbors think I'm insane. But the sun is in the front yard in the afternoon and most times in the winter I can't get out to work out until the afternoon. So that's why I do it, because the sun is more important than my neighbor's perceptions of me. So that's what I choose to do. Daily rituals. These are really, really, really important. Daily rituals give safety to your nervous system. They anchor you. So like my winter arc, that's a change in my daily ritual because it gets dark early. I get up, the house is really quiet and peaceful and chilly and I turn the heat on. Daily rituals anchor you, anchoring events. So if you feel like you're floating around and you're restless, daily rituals might be more important for you. Gratitude. Being grateful, that is so important for slow dopamine and you know, to help you feel peaceful. Acts of generosity. I serve people more than I serve myself. That gives you slow dopamine. I'm always helping other people. These are the experiences that support sustainable reward pathways that are not over activated, that are perfectly activated. It helps you to feel calm, motivated and emotionally steady. And I laugh because when we're on our way back from the burn search and I were talking about mood and I said, I said, I am so grateful that I've always had a stable mood. I'm basically always in a good mood and like it, it, it varies like one degree. I was thinking this, I need to make a podcast on if there's two of you, if there's two versions of you, you're definitely miswired because there's only one version of me. There has been for the longest time. There was two versions a really long time ago. They weren't even that far off. There is one version of me. If you and I meet, this is how I am. Tomorrow night at a party. This is how I am when I give a conference. This is how I am. There's just one of me. And I said to search. Thankfully my mood's stable and she was driving because she just got her learner's permit and I don't know, she like jerked the car and my foot hit the, the middle console twice and she's like, how about stabilizing your foot? You know, just so funny. But I do have stable mood, so that's good. So the predictability and the rhythm of all of these things is important because your nervous system loves patterns. So when you build small, simple rhythms into your day, it can really go a long way. And here's the important part. Healthy rhythms. Because if you have a compulsion or an addiction, or if you're pulled towards explicit matter or pulled towards social media or drama or violence or news or over listening to podcasts, that's the routine that's hijacked your brain. Going back to the first thing that we've talked about and miswired it. Now we're talking about the slower rhythm that's healthy for you. Like a consistent morning routine for decades now. I get up, I always drink either lemon water, I usually drink like a really big thing of green drink, like a vegetable drink so that I'm hydrated first and foremost. And then I will have coffee. Then I sit and I do my morning routine. Then I always do mindful movement in the morning. I do something called the five Tibetan rights. They're totally awesome. It anchors me into my day right away, eases me into my day. And then I get going, I make breakfast, all that jazz, get going for work. But I've been doing that morning routine to anchor myself in. Feels like a lifetime. Daily walks. I take a walk almost every single day, set meal times and especially if you can have meals with your people, because that's kind of disintegrated in 2025, moving into 2026. So we want to keep these rituals going. A stable wind down ritual in the evening doesn't include explicit matter, doesn't include a lot of alcohol, it doesn't include marijuana. All of these rhythms signal to your brain we are safe. I know the hubs is waiting for me because we got a new fireplace and I said, get all those candles going now. We have like fake Candles, but they look real. I'm like, get all the candles going. I'll be back. Because we will chill out together in our evening routine. This routine alone lowers anxiety and it strengthens your emotional regulation. Another thing that you can do, number three, and what we're talking about are micro moments of solitude every five minutes can recenter your system. There are neuroscience studies that show three minutes. A mindful breathing can reset the system. Quiet is the medicine for an overstimulated brain. So even just try sitting in your car before entering a gathering. I started taking five deep breaths before I go into things. I took three back in grad school. I probably told you that story when I was going to take my GREs. It was an undergrad going into grad school. You know, it can really pay off. Taking mindful breaths, taking a short walk between activities. No phone moments by a window or getting outside and just leaning up against a tree, being a tree hugger. Right? It can go really, really far. These micro pauses re balance your neural state and hardly anybody does them. And they are just so simple and they go a long way. Okay, number four, sensory boundaries. Holiday environments bombard your senses. So reducing the inputs can really give you a lot of control back. So here are some things you can do. Are you ready for it? Just have silent rides. That's what we call it in the car. Silent rides. Or lower the volume. Give your brain some empty space. Get that default mode Network activating. Dim the lights. That's the candles. There'll be dim lighting and candles going when I get done here. Skip over stimulating events. I'm very mindful of where I go. The mall is a place I go in a very limited time. All the stores play super loud music. I will not go there for a long time. Limit your time on social media. It's very important. That's a number one thing that you can do. Choose smaller, quieter gatherings. Like I was telling you about, the besties, calmer environments support calmer nervous systems. That's why I keep my home calm now at all costs, I will have a calm home. Number five, let's practice presence instead of performance. So we get wrapped up in performing instead of experiencing. And I talk to people who struggle with sexual arousal dysfunction about this all the time. If you have ed, people say I can't perform. I'm like, no partner needs you to quote unquote, perform. They want to have the experience with you. But even social media, but especially pornography, you're watching performances and you watch people perform over and over and over, which Gets you in this mindset because of the dopamine that life is a performance. It's not. It's an experience. So my favorite thing is to have impromptu gatherings where people come over, because then I don't have to worry about, you know, what food I have or what I'm. How I'm putting things on. So when it comes to hosting or people pleasing or proving yourself to others, that is not what we're going for this holiday season. We're going for experiences. Your brain doesn't need, nor does it want perfection. It wants presence. Presence generates slower dopamine, which strengthens your emotional circuits and it restores your sense of connection. So this is what we're talking about. My goal for you is rewiring your brain so that you can have the most beautiful holiday season. With these small shifts, you can help your brain move from miswired to rewired. So here's what we're going to talk about right now. Your brain hack strategies. Three simple steps. I've told you a lot already. Take one hour a day without screens. Put it in your calendar. Set an alarm so you don't do it. That will help you immensely. Even if you don't do number two or number three, use one sensory soothing ritual. A candle, warm tea, soft lighting. I combine a lot of them. There'll be warm tea waiting for me, too. It's probably cold now because I told the hubs I'll be back in 20 minutes. Get all the senses and use it to stimulate your system in the morning and to down regulate your system in the evening. Think old school. Before there were lights, what would people do? That's kind of what I do at home where we have very low lighting in the evening and it helps the brain come down. And then in the morning, like the sun comes up. Okay, here's a really good one. This is my favorite one, and I know some people might be annoyed. Have one meaningful conversation per week. I try to make all my conversations meaningful, but that one will go a long way. One act of generosity. Give. Go out of your way to serve. You can make it fun if you want to pay the toll, the person behind you, or just listen to your friend. One intentional pause at every gathering. If things are getting away from you, just take a pause. Either walk outside, go to the bathroom, sit in the chair in the foyer I'm famous for. I can't be found if I haven't Irish goodbye. I'm just chilling in a quiet place like the foyer. It goes a long way, especially if My husband wants to stay, and you know, I don't. And I want to chill. I just step out from the overstimulation. These micro adjustments will nurture those circuits that help you feel calm, connected, and fully alive. So here's what I want you to know. If you are overstimulated by the holidays, it doesn't mean you're not a holiday person or you're bad at doing the holidays. It means your brain is overloaded. And if you're stimulated in the first place during the holiday season, you're going to be even more overstimulated. And the problem isn't you. It's a modern environmental hijack of your neurobiological system. Because your brain was never designed for this level of intensity. Doesn't want more noise, more sugar, more scrolling, more alcohol, more explicit matter, more screens, more pressure. It wants regulation. It wants meaningful, intentional stimulation. The kind that remind you who you are and what you want. So this season, instead of trying to do it all, give your brain what it actually wants and needs. Slowness, presence, rhythm, connection. Your brain will thank you, my friend. Okay, so stay with me because next episode, we're going to talk about the winter blues. What is it? And how does brain overload fit in? I'm going to tell you the neuroscience behind it. So until next time, remember, control your brain or it will control you. Enjoy this holiday season. Stay present. And I really hope that we. When you're looking around, you realize how grateful and how wonderful you actually have it. And I'll talk to you next time.