Hey Friends,
The holidays are a time of both joy and stress. I wrote this piece to give you a behind-the-scenes look at your nervous system in action and why understanding it can make the difference between feeling frazzled or festive. Stick with it. I know it’s a bit technical at times, but it’s full of practical insights to help you navigate the season with more clarity, balance, and connection.
The Duality of the Season
The holiday season often arrives with familiar lights, scents, and social expectations. We tend to think of this time as centered on joy, gratitude, and connection. Yet many people also notice another layer beneath the surface: a rise in tension, fatigue, or emotional heaviness.
Neuroscience offers a helpful lens here. Changes in routine, increased social demands, and stronger sensory cues all stimulate the brain’s emotional networks, bringing underlying feelings closer to awareness. In this way, the holidays don’t create entirely new emotions; they amplify the patterns and chemistry we’ve been carrying throughout the year.
The Truth Beneath Holiday Emotions
Holiday environments are saturated with sensory input, old family patterns, and unspoken expectations. These conditions function less as triggers and more as mirrors, reflecting the emotional chemistry we’ve been carrying throughout the year. Feelings such as gratitude, grief, nostalgia, or irritability often become more pronounced when routines shift, and relational dynamics intensify.
From a neurological perspective, the nervous system doesn’t register the “holiday season” as a separate category of experience. It simply responds to cues from sensory signals, stored memories, and perceived meanings, and adjusts accordingly. This can create a mix of emotions that may seem contradictory but make perfect sense biologically.
It’s possible to feel grateful and anxious at the same time. It’s also possible to feel connected yet overwhelmed. These overlapping states are evidence of the nervous system trying to maintain safety and balance in a highly stimulating environment.
The Emotional Spectrum of the Holidays
Joy and tension are not opposites; they often involve overlapping neural networks, which is why they can co-occur. Reuniting with family, navigating travel, or managing long to-do lists can subtly activate the body’s sympathetic nervous system. The sympathetic nervous system is the branch of your nervous system responsible for vigilance and stress responses. Bright lights, music, crowded spaces, and social expectations all amplify this effect, nudging the nervous system into a mild state of alertness.
Even when circumstances are positive, the body can interpret these signals as potential challenges. When safety feels uncertain due to old conflicts, unpredictable dynamics, or internal pressure to perform, celebration can feel stressful rather than comforting.
This is why it’s possible to feel gratitude and anxiety, connection and overwhelm, or presence and distraction simultaneously. The nervous system is simply doing its work, signaling what it needs to feel secure amid heightened sensory and relational input.
Gratitude: The Physiology of Receiving
Gratitude is often treated as a cognitive exercise: we make lists of things we “should” feel thankful for or compare ourselves to others. While this approach can be useful, it reflects only part of the full physiological experience that research identifies as gratitude.
From a physiological perspective, genuine gratitude is not just a thought; it is a bodily state. It encourages parasympathetic engagement, producing sensations of warmth, openness, and safety in the body. In other words, genuine gratitude is felt, not just imagined.
When we express gratitude only at a surface, intellectual level with thoughts like, “I should be thankful because others have less”, we bypass this deeper, healthful experience. The body, therefore, remains in a state of tension, and the nervous system does not register the sense of ease that authentic gratitude produces.
Genuine gratitude involves vulnerability. It requires softening, openness, and receptivity. It requires allowing yourself to fully receive the moment rather than analyze or perform it. This is why we often feel it as warmth in the chest, a release of tension in the shoulders, or a subtle slowing of the breath. These sensations signal parasympathetic engagement, supporting rest, restoration, and connection. Gratitude without vulnerability is performance. Gratitude with vulnerability becomes connection.
Grievance: The Chemistry of Unmet Needs
If gratitude reflects the physiology of receiving, grievance reflects the physiology of signaling. Feelings of frustration, sadness, or resentment are not the opposite of gratitude; they are data. They indicate where our needs, boundaries, or connections have gone unmet, and where the nervous system is trying to communicate.
Suppressing these feelings does not make them disappear. Instead, they embed in the body’s chemistry, often appearing as muscle tension, fatigue, irritability, or subtle emotional reactivity. These responses are the nervous system’s way of processing unaddressed stress or loss.
Recognizing grievance without judgment allows us to engage constructively. Especially during the holidays, it functions as a guide: each instance of discomfort points to a value, boundary, or connection that matters deeply. Listening to these signals with curiosity instead of shame creates space for repair rather than reactive patterns. Mindful engagement helps the nervous system feel acknowledged and regulated, turning moments of tension into opportunities for understanding, connection, and balance.
Memory, Loss, and the Ghosts of Familiar Dynamics
Even with intentional emotional awareness, the holidays stir old memories and long-standing patterns. Familiar scents, songs, meals, or family interactions activate neural pathways linked to memory, attachment, and emotion. These sensory cues can bring warmth and comfort. But they can also revive grief, agitation, or melancholy.
The nervous system tracks safety, not time. Familiar tones, phrases, or family dynamics can trigger responses rooted in decades of experience. Past losses often surface through absence. For example, an empty chair, a missing voice, or the quiet space where someone once was. Nostalgia can bring both warmth and longing. You are feeling the physiological echo of relationships remembered and missed.
Old family roles may reappear automatically. You may step back into the role of peacemaker, caretaker, or black sheep. These are not regressions. They are patterns encoded in the nervous system that are navigating familiar relational terrain and seeking safety and belonging.
When feelings of depression or agitation arise, they are not signs of weakness. They signal that the nervous system is overloaded, processing unresolved emotions, or protecting you from further distress. Small acts of regulation like stepping away briefly, anchoring to a safe person, or engaging a comforting sensory cue, like a warm cup of tea, can help the nervous system find balance amid emotional intensity.
Regulation: Bridging Gratitude and Grievance
Between gratitude and grievance lies the nervous system’s capacity for regulation. This is the ability to return to balance after experiencing intense emotions. Regulation doesn’t mean forcing positivity or suppressing discomfort. It means allowing all emotions and assuring the body that it is safe to experience them.
Effective regulation teaches the nervous system that joy, sadness, tension, and gratitude can coexist without threat. This skill enables more authentic presence in relationships, better communication, and calmer decision-making.
A simple practice to support regulation:
- Notice the emotion that feels most present.
- Identify where it is felt in the body.
- Breathe into that space with mindful attention.
- Name the experience without judgment.
- Ask: What does this emotion need from me right now?
When we approach emotions with awareness rather than avoidance, the body shifts from reactivity to equilibrium, allowing us to feel fully present, energized, and at our best. Our capacity to regulate shapes how we communicate, connect, and lead.
A Season of Authentic Connection
The holidays are not tests of perfection. They are mirrors of our internal state. They reveal where we feel open, guarded, or still seeking safety and belonging. Ignoring or judging these signals through our ego actually works against the nervous system’s natural regulatory processes and can prolong emotional dysregulation.
Joy and grief, gratitude and grievance, lightness and heaviness coexist because we care deeply. Their presence shows that our nervous system is alive, responsive, and capable of adaptation.
This season can become less about performance and comparison, and more about noticing and connecting. By reading our emotions and body signals, we gain practical control over stress, conflict, and overwhelm, enabling clearer thinking and more effective action.
Even when the heart feels heavy or the mind restless, these sensations are not failures. They are messages guiding us toward regulation, presence, and connection. With awareness, we can choose to engage fully: with ourselves, with others, and with life as it unfolds.
You can recalibrate your chemistry. You can learn to regulate before you react. You can choose to build a stronger connection with yourself and others. This is key to quality of life!
Wishing you safe, regulated, and joyfully connected holidays.
Warmly,
Lee
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