Arthur C. BrooksThe Art and Science of Happiness

Emotions around the holidays

22 Dec 2025 · 1 min

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This content was created by Dr. Arthur Brooks. This content was uploaded by Dr. Arthur Brooks. This is a YouTube video titled "Emotions around the holidays" (created 2025-12-22) containing a single-speaker spoken segment presenting social-science observations about holiday emotions. The speaker explains that although people often report positive feelings about the holidays, surveys also commonly show annoyance, disappointment, and sadness. They attribute those holiday blues to three main causes: (1) nostalgia/idealizing the past so current experiences feel disappointing, (2) bad memories or trauma that taint the present, and (3) feeling overwhelmed and pressured to appear happy (annoyance at seasonal expectations).

Chapters

When you ask people in surveys what's the one emotion that best characterizes the holidays, most people give a positive word about feeling good. 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. I find in my research and what I see in the work that other social scientists do is there are 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. Some bad things that actually happened in the past and that taint it right now. And so that sadness that overtakes and the last is feeling just really overwhelmed and annoyed. 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 hum along. So those are the three reasons that those three big words keep showing up again and again and again, which is annoyance, disappointment and sadness.