This Is What The Holiday Season Does To Your Brain

Christmas time is crazy and stressful time of the year for most of us. It was fun and exciting as kids, you got to travel about and see family, all of whom would give you presents and tasty food, and any notion of school work was long forgotten. Those were the days. Now we’re grown up, we’re the adults that need to organize the family, cook the food, buy the presents, and all the while likely have our big work projects in the back of our minds.

All of this can be rather taxing on your brain, so it’s a good thing it only happens once a year. Being as short as it is, we can still enjoy ourselves and make the most of it, while being assured that once it’s over you can go back to the life you can handle–and the one where you make your money back. If you’ve ever wanted to know what your brain thinks of all of this, you can thank the Huffington Post for putting it together:

Our holidays are not only filled with love and family, but also with the stresses of shopping, traveling and baking.

In fact, a 2008 poll conducted by the American Psychological Association showed that more than 8 out of 10 Americans anticipated feeling stressed during the holidays. Among many other effects, when we experience stress, an enzyme may be triggered to attack a molecule in the hippocampus, which is associated with emotion and memory, according to a 2014 study.?This may help explain why we become irritable and sometimes even forgetful when we’re anxious.

Stress is a given, but there are a few other facets of the festivities that affect our brains, of which you’ll need to head over to the Huffington Post to find out about.