Happy Holidays? The Mood-Memory Spiral and the Holidays

The holidays come with a mixed bag of emotions. For example, both the wonderful joy and the desperate loneliness of Christmas have been reflected in the songs. We can be happy tonight walking in that winter wonderland or having a blue Christmas without you. Charlie Brown and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer experienced the highs and lows of the season.

The strong emotions of the holidays can have an equally strong effect on memory, starting a spiral of mood and memory. This spiral can make us even happier as mood and memory feed off each other, but the spiral can take us down as well.

Mood matters for memory both in terms of perceiving and remembering. The mood we experience colors the way we see the world. If I am happy and it starts to snow, I focus on how beautiful the snow is, how much fun my sons will have, and how pleasant hot chocolate is beside the fire. If for some reason I am annoyed when the snow starts to fall, I think about driving in it, worry about getting to work, and wonder if we have enough milk (and with 2 teenage sons, we never have enough milk). The snow is the same either way. But what I see depends on my mood.

Mood also determines what I remember from Christmas past. My current emotional state serves as a guide through my memories. If I am happy and thinking about Christmas, I may remember the time when my parents, my sister and I, and all our families crowded into a cold beach house for Christmas. That is one of my favorite Christmases. If I am sad, I may remember my last visit to see my dad just before he died, which just happened to be a few weeks before Christmas. That wasn't such a good year.

So my mood directs how I see the world and guides what I remember. The spiral is that what we see and remember modifies our mood as well. If I see the fun aspects of the snow, I can get excited about tromping around and even enjoy shoveling the driveway. When I remember that big family Christmas, I look forward to preparing the special sweet potatoes for this year's meal.

If I think about the annoying aspects of driving in the snow, I can become grumpier than the Grinch. When I remember losing my dad, I really feel the melancholy expressed in the lonely Christmas songs.

The spiral continues. The mood generated by what I see and remember, drives what I see and remember next, which pushes my mood further in the same direction, which directs additional perceptions and memories, and so on. Mood and memory become a spiral. The upward spiral during the holidays can be wonderful. I can spend days humming Christmas carols and shaking presents. The downward spiral can be miserable. I know I will remember and miss my father during this season.

I don't know any magical methods for avoiding negative emotion and memory spirals, particularly not in the more serious case of clinical depression. For myself, I keep two things in mind when trying to limit my own negative mood-memory spirals. First, I don't try to completely avoid the negative memories. I know I will remember losing my father. I let those memories play out. If I try to stop myself from thinking about those events, those memories may, counter-intuitively, intrude into my thoughts more often (I'll write more on this topic in another post). Second, the only escape I know is to see and remember the positive. So while I know I will remember my dad, I will try to remember the great holidays with him as well. While I know the weather will occasionally be wintry, I will try to see the beauty in the season. How we see and remember, is not completely determined by our mood - we can choose to focus on different aspects of the world and our memories. Beauty really is in the eye of the beholder. I can choose to see and remember the joy of the season. Happy Holidays.