My 4-Step Method for Making the Holidays Better

Does Christmas never live up to the version you remember from childhood? Or does it bring up painful memories that keep you stuck in the past? Or maybe you’re like I once was, feeling more like a curmudgeon than a bundle of holiday cheer. In this episode of Office Hours, I explain why the holidays so often surface disappointment, sadness, and annoyance, and what research on memory reveals about why this happens. I share ways to reframe difficult memories, and my Christmas protocol, designed to help quiet the noise, focus on what truly matters, and move through the season with more gratitude and peace. — Where to find Arthur Brooks: • Website: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://arthurbrooks.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://arthurbrooks.com/ • Newsletter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.arthurbrooks.com/newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.arthurbrooks.com/newsletter • X: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://x.com/arthurbrooks⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://x.com/arthurbrooks • Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/arthurcbrooks/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.instagram.com/arthurcbrooks/ • Facebook: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.facebook.com/ArthurBrooks/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.facebook.com/ArthurBrooks/ • YouTube: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGuyFRjJQFGCKzfHTBvWM6A⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGuyFRjJQFGCKzfHTBvWM6A • LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/arthur-c-brooks/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.linkedin.com/in/arthur-c-brooks/ • Email: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ mailto:[email protected] — Timestamps: (00:00) Intro (03:13) Three common holiday mood problems (04:10) Problem #1: Disappointment (13:12) Problem #2: Sadness (18:20) Problem #3: Annoyance (21:36) Christmas protocol step #1: Start before dawn (25:00) Christmas protocol step #2: Go for a walk (26:00) Christmas protocol step #3: Write a gratitude letter (26:39) Christmas protocol step #4: Give back (28:32) Q&A: How a sleep schedule affects happiness (30:21) Q&A: Dealing with burnout as a spiral career type (31:55) Q&A: How to make close friends later in life — Referenced: • The Happiness Scale: https://learn.arthurbrooks.com/the-happiness-scale • How to Build a Life: https://www.theatlantic.com/projects/how-build-life/ • Remembering the past to imagine the future: the prospective brain: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17700624/ • Is Nostalgia a Past or Future-Oriented Experience? Affective, Behavioral, Social Cognitive, and Neuroscientific Evidence: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7326063 • Perspectives on episodic-like and episodic memory: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23616754 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23616754/ • Episodic memory: from mind to brain: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11752477 • Not all emotions are created equal: The negativity bias in social-emotional development: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3652533 • Attributions, deception, and event-related potentials: an investigation of the self-serving bias: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18282197 • ... References continued at: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.arthurbrooks.com/office-hours⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.arthurbrooks.com/office-hours⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.theatlantic.com/projects/how-build-life/ — Production and marketing by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://penname.co/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://penname.co/⁠.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:29Arthur Brooks?

  Today's episode is the holiday blues. When you ask people in surveys, "What's the one emotion that best characterizes the holidays?" Most people give a positive word, you know, of feeling good about the relationships. For example, 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. You feel like a grouch and a Scrooge as a result of it, and you don't want to be that way. So I have a protocol to help you celebrate Christmas in a very joyful, interior way, such that you can be the person that you want to be on Christmas.

• 1:19Arthur Brooks?

  Hey, friends. Welcome to Office Hours. I'm Arthur Brooks. I'm your host, dedicated to helping you with a better life, full of more love and more happiness. That's what people tend to talk about this time of year, anyway, isn't it? Merry Christmas to those of you who celebrated. Happy holidays to all of you. This is the end of the year, which people are talking about how they can have better relationships, how they can have fun together. And everybody's in a mood, too, or at least they feel like they should be in a mood to be happier than they would be any other time of the year. Though for some of you... That's maybe not so easy. Today's episode is the holiday blues. It's the tough time that people have at Christmas

• 2:02Arthur Brooks?

  or the other end of the year holidays. And if that's you, what you can do about it. And if it's somebody that you love, how you can actually help them. That's what I want to talk about here today. Now, as always, please do feedback. I love hearing from all of you. It's very easy to reach me. The email address is [email protected]. Don't forget to leave a review of the episode so that we can get your opinion on this at Spotify or Apple. And subscribe to the platform of your choice. Also, leave comments. We love the comments. We read the comments. We react to the comments. Okay, so difficulty with the holidays that people actually feel. I see this all the time. I talk to people constantly who will confide in me that it's a hard time of year, not an easy time of year. That's what the holiday blues are actually all about. And you know, one of the things

• 2:46Arthur Brooks?

  that when you talk to mental health professionals is that traffic in and out of therapist's office and psychiatrist's office tends to be higher during the holidays and not lower. And if this were a uniformly happy thing, then this would be, you know, Christmas time would be the ultimate antidepressant. But in point of fact, it's not. It actually pushes a lot of people in the other direction. And when you ask people in surveys, you know, what's the one emotion that best characterizes the holidays? Most people give a positive word, you know, of about feeling good, about, you know, the relationships, for example, 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,

• 3:29Arthur Brooks?

  which is annoyance, disappointment, and sadness. So I want to talk a little bit, if that's you or somebody that you know, what you can do about it, how to understand why the holidays are so hard for some people and what you can do if that's afflicting you. Now, I find in my research and what I see in the work that other social scientists do, is there 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. You know, some bad things that actually happened in the past and that taint it right now. And so, so therefore that's sadness. That sadness that overtakes.

• 4:13Arthur Brooks?

  And the last is, is feeling just really overwhelmed and annoyed. At, you know, 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, in the CVS and, and, you know, and hum along and yeah. And so that, those are the three reasons that, that those three big words keep showing up again and again and again, which is annoyance, disappointment and sadness. And I want to take them one by one, starting with disappointment, understanding, you know, what actually is going on, why people feel disappointed, what you can do about it. To understand disappointment, and for that matter sadness, coming from trauma of, of holidays past, we need to understand the structure of human memory. And this is a super interesting area of neuroscience.

• 4:57Arthur Brooks?

  People who study memories in the brain. Now to begin with, there's two kinds of memories that, that we have as Homo sapiens. We have semantic memories and episodic memories. Semantic memories are general. They're, they're, they're knowledge that you gain and keep about certain things. So a semantic memory of Christmas would be, it's a certain time at the end of the year, in late December, and when it's usually cold and when people get together and they have a really nice time and give each other presents. You know what Christmas is. Your knowledge of what Christmas is, is a semantic memory. Now, not only Homo sapiens have semantic memories, your dog has a semantic memory. It knows where its food dish is. That's a semantic memory. It's just a knowledge about something. Then there's episodic memories, and this is a lot more human.

• 5:42Arthur Brooks?

  This is the photo album in your head. This is the video library that's in your head of things that have happened that you recorded and that you remember, specific things that you remember. And for Christmas, this would be that time that, that, you know, you got nothing but underwear from your family, that Christmas, or that Christmas when Uncle Fred. You know, got really drunk and barfed in the front yard and beat up the neighbor and got arrested. Or it's, you know, it's a memory of a Christmas past is an episodic memory. Those two things actually work together. Why? Because episodic memories and the way that they, we maintain them and the way they get corrupted more than a second is what affects semantic memory. So your impression of Christmas

• 6:26Arthur Brooks?

  might actually be a product, your impression, your knowledge about Christmas is affected by all the memories that you have about specific Christmases in the past. You get the point that I'm trying to make, obviously. Now, to begin with, your episodic memories, that library, that video library, it's quite inaccurate. And there's a ton of research on this, that what you remember about Christmases in the past actually didn't happen. And it sort of happened, it was truthy, but it's not really what happened quite accurately. And there's a ton of research on how episodic memory gets corrupted. For example, there's a number of studies that ask, what happened on a particular date? So I could ask you, what happened on nine 11? I mean, not what happened historically, but what happened in your life?

• 7:11Arthur Brooks?

  What was going on in your life at nine 11? What did you see? How did you experience the news of the terrorist bombings on nine 11? And, and what you say is most likely not going to be very accurate. So people will say, I saw this, I did this, I talked to this person. And if you really do have accurate records of what happened that day, you'll find that it diverges quite a lot. And people are shocked when they see that their accounts of a particular date differ so much from really happened on that date. And they say, that's, people will often think that the historical record is wrong, that their, that their memories are right, but it's not true. It's not the case. There's a whole bunch of reasons that your memory actually changes.

• 7:51Arthur Brooks?

  And this is why you can't rely on, on, on memories from decades ago of witnesses to a particular crime. That's the reason that it's unreliable evidence, you know, people's memories from a long time ago. The hippocampus of the brain where episodic memories are stored, that's kind of like the library where the volumes are being inserted, experiences that we have and. The passage of time goes in and kinda, it moves all the books around. Any episodic memory that you have of a particular event, Christmas 1988, for example, is actually a bunch of little memories of little episodes that are stored in different places. And those files get corrupted and they get crosswired and they get influenced by what other people tell you. I mean, you can induce an episodic memory in a person by telling

• 8:36Arthur Brooks?

  them over and over and over again when they're a kid about something that happened before they had memories that they would retain. They say, "When you were one, this happened. When you were one, this happened." And by the time that the kid is five or six years old, they have a memory of when they were one. Well, it's not. It's a false memory. And that's the same thing for any of us. When people keep telling us a narrative about something that was not accurate, it will become the narrative because it will corrupt the episodic memory in the hippocampus of our brains. That happens all the time. The second thing is that we have a natural tendency to remember the past as better than it was. And there's a reason for that. That's called fading affect bias. We, in real time, for things that are happening right now, we have a negativity bias. We tend to see the negative

• 9:21Arthur Brooks?

  sides a lot more strongly than the positive sides because negative emotions keep you alive and positive emotions are nice to have. And so you're paying a lot more attention to the negative. That's just part of what it means to be a surviving, thriving member of the Homo sapiens. But when the thing has passed, you can edit out a lot of the negativity that didn't actually lead to problems. And what you remember are the things that were beneficial to you, the things that actually profited you, which tends to be the more positive side of things. And so you edit your own memories to get rid of the stuff that you don't need and keep the things that you still do use. I'll give you an example of fading affect bias. I've been on campuses my whole life. And I've witnessed a lot of reunions. Now, I know from being a faculty member on campus

• 10:05Arthur Brooks?

  that the first semester, the first year for people going to college is super hard. They're calling home, "I'm so lonely. Come pick me up. I don't have any friends. I just failed an exam. Life sucks."

• 10:17Arthur Brooks?

  But when they get together for the reunions 10 and 20 and 30 years later with the people they met during the first semester of their first year of college, it's all like, it was so great. It was the best time of our lives. It was so wonderful. If only life could still be like that. What's the difference? And the answer is, the fading affect bias is a process of editing their own hippocampus, their own set of episodic memories, getting rid of the current misery that they had, and keeping the knowledge about their friends, which is almost all positive. That's how it works. It's what they learned and what they benefited from is the remaining memory. And so the result of this, all of this altogether, is that we tend to have episodic memories of Christmases in the past as better than they actually were.

• 11:02Arthur Brooks?

  Because you don't remember the conflict around the table. You don't remember the fact that, you know, Aunt Marge got a fish bone stuck in her throat and it was scary. And you don't remember that Uncle Fred actually got in a fight with a neighbor. Or if you do, it actually seems funny to you because it turned out okay in the end. And it was pretty unpleasant at that particular time when, you know, you got into a shouting match with somebody, but it turned out to be okay. And so you edited that out. You edited out the part that made you want to cry on that particular day. And the result is your library of Christmas days in the past is a library of lovely memories. It's kind of snapshots. It's Polaroids. It's Christmas cards.

• 11:45Arthur Brooks?

  It's, those are a good representation of your edited episodic memory of Christmases past. What are you comparing those to? You're comparing those two Christmases right now, this Christmas, when you're sitting around with your family. And guess what? It's an actually accurate experience of human life, which is a bunch of good and a bunch of bad, all happening at the same time. A combination, a tossed salad of positive and negative emotions being experienced in real time in the limbic system of your brain. And you're doing a cost benefit analysis of the experience that's quite accurate right now and comparing it to one that's quite inaccurate from before. And the conclusion you come to is, Christmases were a lot better in the old days. This is why people always say the old days were better, as a matter of fact.

• 12:30Arthur Brooks?

  But holidays in particular seem like they were more fun. They were more warm. They were more wonderful. They were sweeter.

• 12:38Speaker 02

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• 13:07Arthur Brooks?

  But that's not true, actually. And it's very helpful for you to understand what I'm talking about right now. It's very important, not that, I don't want to ruin your memories of, you know, 1978. But I want you to be accurate about them. And to say, look, I remember these really good things, but I know there were some things that weren't so good too. And what I'm experiencing right now is what I'm going to remember later, probably, mostly in terms of the nice things that are happening right now. That you shouldn't go through life being disappointed because the current seems worse than the past. You should go through life with a body of knowledge about the way that memory actually works. This is how knowledge is power. This is the science actually gives you power.

• 13:48Arthur Brooks?

  And then you can chuckle to yourself, I'm going to edit out all the bad parts of this day. And, and you know, all the bad parts of this day, they were happening back in the old days too. And it's actually okay. It won't solve the problem entirely, but I guarantee you, this has really helped me a lot. That you, you will realize that it may feel like the present ever lives up to the past, but in play of fact, the present does live up to the past. Here's the second problem, which is, is sadness. And sadness around the holidays is often based on trauma. You know, I'm not, you know, a super, super believer that all of our, um, our destiny is based on childhood trauma. I'm not of that school. And, and I'm out of that school because I don't think the research actually supports it. Everybody has some trauma in their lives, some people a lot more than others, but most people actually have tremendous post-traumatic growth.

• 14:33Arthur Brooks?

  And, and that's an important thing to keep in mind. But, but there are experiences, particularly around the holidays, that can really stick with you because of the salience of the holiday itself. And give you a sad reminiscence. You can't get beyond it with fading affect bias because there, there just weren't good parts about it. That are the only parts that can remain. If there's nothing good about it, you're not going to remember any good parts. You're gonna remember like every Christmas, you know, I talk to people who say the only thing I remember about Christmas is my mom, you know, locked in a room saying, "I hate Christmas," or something, you know, "Mom, I was crying," or "Dad, I was drinking too much," or just again and again and again. And that builds an authentically bad library in your brain.

• 15:17Arthur Brooks?

  The episodic memory is stocked, and what that does is that that then affects the semantic memory. The knowledge, the overall knowledge of the holiday is built on this big library of really, really negative events over and over again. And thus, you have a conclusion. The conclusion, semantically, is "Christmas sucks." "Christmas is sadness." "Christmas is a burden." That can be a big problem for people, because what that does is it biases you toward having that exact same experience, or, God forbid, it makes it so that you'll never actually go out there and experience Christmas anymore. You'll avoid it. You'll have avoidant behavior of the holiday. The way to deal with that is not just knowledge. And knowledge helps, but it's actually, there's better things that you can do than just knowledge.

• 16:03Arthur Brooks?

  And that's actually editing your memories. Editing your memories, and you can absolutely do this, and there's a ton of research on this, and I'm gonna put in some things into the show notes from articles that are written about this in The Atlantic and elsewhere, about how to edit your own memories. And here's a couple of examples of this. You can edit your memory of something that was really kind of sad and traumatic as actually being funny. And I learned this from, you know, one of the guests on the show, and a great friend of mine, Rainn Wilson. He was on a few months ago. And, you know, Rainn had a really hard childhood. He's talked about this a lot, talked about this publicly. You know, his family broke up, his mom left the family when he was two. And holidays were hard and sad, as you can imagine. But he noticed something when he was a kid, that when he was feeling especially depressed and sad,

• 16:47Arthur Brooks?

  that if he said something funny, which he was good at, I mean, Rainn Wilson is super funny, that everybody laughed and he felt better. And this is an idea that you can actually take. Be Rainn Wilson. If you have bad memories, think about those memories not as sad, but actually as funny. That's why professional comedians, they're often very screwed up. They often have a very bad past. What they do full time is they joke around a lot about how screwed up their childhoods were. You ever notice this? What are they doing? They're doing memory editing right there. Not to say that the bad thing didn't happen. No, no, no, you're not gonna, you know, burn the books in your episodic library. What they're doing is they're looking at these things. They're turning it over in their minds to realize how unbelievably funny these things are.

• 17:33Arthur Brooks?

  And they're super funny. You know, you make fun of the fact that mom would, you know, run to her room and slam the door and the, I hate Christmas. You can make it into a pretty good joke, actually. I mean, can you? I don't know, it seems funny to me right now. I don't know why. Anyway, so reframing is really important thing. Another reframing technique that works incredibly well for editing your memories is asking this. Not what did I suffer, but what did I learn? What, not what did I suffer, like how bad that was, but what did I learn as a result of that? And, and what did I learn that was wrong that I needed to unlearn? But thinking of it as this experience and growth. Cause suffering is an experience in growth. Suffering is your teacher.

• 18:16Arthur Brooks?

  I've talked about this on the show a bunch of times and, and no doubt we'll talk about it more. So how not are your, is your current suffering your teacher? But how is your past suffering your teacher? What can you learn more of and what did you learn more of as a result of having these relatively negative experiences? If you reframe sadness as humor and suffering as, as your teacher, as your opportunity to learn and grow, you're really gonna start seeing these things in a different way. Why? Because you're, you're gonna be much more willing, this editing of your memory, this reinterpretation, this reframing of negative memories to actually participate in something like this and not feel like you're bound to the past.

• 18:58Arthur Brooks?

  You're not strapped to the mast of, of all these negative memories per se. That's how trauma cannot, and sadness is not determinative of the experience that you should have going forward, which is really important. Okay, that's, that's disappointment and sadness. Now let's talk about annoyance, which is usually based on overwhelm. And

• 19:20Arthur Brooks?

  I'm guilty of this. I'm guilty of this. I mean, it's a, you know, and part of it is just because, you know, I was a classical musician for such a long time that, you know, I, I, and I played so many Christmas concerts in my life. My twenties were built on Christmas concerts and it's the same thing. Their holiday family tradition would be going to a church and listening to musicians playing the same old, you know, really terrible Christmas carols, like, I don't know, the 12 days of Christmas and, and it's like, ah, just, just make, please make it stop. Do anything to make it. I'll, I'll pay any amount of money to make it actually make it stop. Um, some are beautiful, but I mean, you, when you play them enough times, you become really contemptuous of that. And, and

• 20:00Arthur Brooks?

  so hearing that and, and just the crass consumerism, it's just so gross and troublesome for a lot of people. And that's always been me, you know? I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna lie about it. You know, I've got some sadness, you know, I've got some, not that much disappointment, I got a little bit of sadness for some things and, you know, when I was a kid, but you know, it's no problem, no problem. I can get beyond it. But the overwhelm of it really, really bugs me. And I mean, to the extent that before I actually was studying anything about behavior and, and so therefore I was not managing my own behavior very well. When my kids were little, uh, Esther, my wife, you know, she, she's always been, had a great attitude about Christmas and she never had a Christmas tree growing up because she grew up in Spain. They have a pasebra, which is the, the

• 20:42Arthur Brooks?

  nativity scene, the creche, and that's what they do for Christmas. And so when she came to the States, she had the Christmas tree. She said, all this is awesome. And it was a new thing for her when she was in her late twenties is when that started. And so she's all about it. Didn't have any baggage about this stuff at all. She thought it was super cool. So we have a lavish tree and, and decorations. And, and it always kind of bugged me and I didn't want to, I didn't want to decorate the tree and she didn't know why. And so one, once on the 27th of December, she had to do something with the kids and she went out and I'm like, you know what? Christmas is over. And I took down the tree on, on, and I put the tree out by the curb and, and I put away all the Christmas decorations. 27th of

• 21:24Arthur Brooks?

  December, that's not what you're supposed to do. I mean, 12 days of Christmas means 12 days starting on Christmas Day. And she comes home, it's like, So where's the treat? It's like out by the curve. It's awesome. It's over. It's over. We had now we have 363 days until the next thing time I have to go through this annoyance. And man, it was it was not a great day in our family because the kids are crying and she's really mad. And I'm like, yeah, I guess that wasn't a great thing for me to do. But it was really a reflection of my petulance, of my annoyance of of not really enjoying that. And and so I started to think about what could I actually do to celebrate this in a different way? And now as a behavioral scientist, I've talked to a lot of people who actually experienced this. And and I have a protocol that I want to share with you for those of you who find Christmas overwhelming

• 22:09Arthur Brooks?

  and and really unbelievably irritating because of the way that it's and you feel like you feel like a grouch and a and a Scrooge as a result of it, and you don't want to be that way. So I have a protocol to help you celebrate Christmas in a in a very joyful interior way, such that you can be the person that you want to be on Christmas. Okay, here's here's how it works. Now it starts with the this Christmas protocol that I really, really like now today. It's really, by the way, folks, this has really changed my life. I'm a lot easier to live with on the holidays as a result of this one. This starts with the work of a Christmas writer. He's actually a fourth century Archbishop of Constantinople in in the early Christian church

• 22:52Arthur Brooks?

  named Gregory of Nazanzius in 380 after the death of Christ. And he wrote this about Christmas. Let us not adorn our porches, nor arrange dances, nor decorate the streets, nor make tabernacles for the belly of what belongs to devastatory. In other words, don't eat more on Christmas, eat less. Don't decorate your house more, decorate it less. And that you're like, what a killjoy. Thanks, Saint Greg. Thanks for the being a killjoy, but that's not what he meant at all. He actually wasn't against overt revelry. What he was about was that revelry should be based on interior worship and peace.

• 23:32Arthur Brooks?

  Now, based on that, this is what this super early morning Christmas protocol is about that I practice and I recommend to you. This has been still life changing for me. What I do now to make sure that I have Christmas properly understood in my heart, and I'm actually able to have a few good laughs and a good time without being a jerk about it. As I start my Christmas now, um, before dawn. You know, I don't sleep in on Christmas. And, and again, you know, when my kids were little, my kids are all grown up now. And I live with my grandchildren now, so it's kind of the same thing. But when my kids were little, they would be up, you know, getting up at 6:30 in the morning or something, wanting to open Christmas presents. That's actually later now than what I do all by myself. Which is I get up before dawn, 4:30, 5 o'clock in the morning.

• 24:17Arthur Brooks?

  And I use that time to remember what I, as a Christian person, believe about Christmas. Which is this, this is the beginning of a celebration of the divine miracle of God becoming human, which is this touching of the metaphysical with the physical. This is this incredible miracle in the Christian religion. And contemplating the metaphysics of actually what's going on here. And then considering, given the fact that this calls into question all the silliness of worldly attachments. Not to be condemnatory of the worldly things that are going to happen on this day, but, but to think critically about my own worldly attachments. So I sit in prayer and, and I ask for grace and, uh, wisdom

• 25:01Arthur Brooks?

  about my own monomaniacs for success or admiration or money, about my own animal cravings expressed in the way that I will consume and not just being critical of what other people consume. About the way that I spend my time as opposed to being judgmental about the way that other people spend their time. About the hunger for attention that I have from other people. I think about my own frailty in the context of what the Christmas miracle really is, according to Christian belief, which is that God taking on the frailty of a person. I mean, not all of the human frailty, not sin, but, but the, the troubles of the world.

• 25:42Arthur Brooks?

  Uh, this is radical solidarity and radical solidarity with me means recognizing my own frailties. And doing so in the cool and peace of Christmas Day before dawn. That's how I start. The second part of the protocol is I go for a walk, um, before the sun comes up. And, and those of you who have followed my morning protocols, that was a, that episode of morning protocols got more than a million downloads. Um, so I know that a lot of people really like that. That really started with the Brahman Mahurtha, which in Sanskrit is the Creator's time. And one of the things that I make a point of doing and I recommend to a lot of people is getting out without devices in the cold, in the dark, and going for a walk. I can walk. I'm fully alive as a human person.

• 26:28Arthur Brooks?

  And allowing myself to think and being grateful for the gift that's my life, that I'm evidence of which is that I'm walking around. And fusing the physical with the metaphysical, you know, my prayer with actually my ambulation with my walking and directing my contemplation, not just inward to myself, but outward. My gratitude toward, you know, the universe that I'm experiencing, going for a walk. The third thing that I do is I get home and I like to share the feelings that I have or the feelings, the cognitions that I'm experiencing in these first two steps with other people. And so what I do is I'll often write a gratitude letter or two. Send it to my wife, of course, who's my spiritual guide.

• 27:11Arthur Brooks?

  To other people around me, I'll offer up prayers of gratitude for people all around me. It's still, it's still quiet. Nobody's up yet. And this is, I'm sharing gifts of gratitude that go beyond socks and scented candles. These are the things that really matter. This is my heart. I accompany each one of my gifts of gratitude with a silent wish that each person's life journey be a transcendent one and they get, they become closer to the divine. And last but not least, I think about what I can do to give to others as opposed to taking. See, the problem with a lot of the abundance is this idea, me, me, me, what I'm gonna eat, what I'm gonna get, what I'm gonna experience, right?

• 27:52Arthur Brooks?

  But to think amid the day's abundance about the poorest of the poor and my connection to all of mankind. In Christianity and so many other traditions, there's some version of what in the Christian gospel is Matthew 25:40, "As you did for the least of these, my brothers and sisters, you did for me." And to think, what does that mean today? What does that actually mean today? What can I do to join people in divine love? People at the margins of society, people who need me, people that I can actually serve. What can I do more of today and thinking about the kind of service that would actually be really useful, really, really helpful? Those are the four steps that I do. And I'm telling you, by the time everybody else is up. Good Christmas, it really is. It's a Christmas that I, kind of no matter what happens this day,

• 28:35Arthur Brooks?

  it's one that I'm gonna remember even without fading affect bias. As one that's, in my view, it's what it's supposed to be. If you're not a Christian or not even a believer, this is something that you can use in some part of your life as well. To make a day that might be a taxing day, might be a hard day, might be a day that you're not looking forward to into a really good day with that protocol or your version thereof. So these are the three ways that I deal with the, with the, what the research suggests are the three reasons that people have the holiday blues. They feel disappointed, they feel sad, they feel annoyed. Those are the three ways to fix those problems. Whether it's on Christmas Day or your birthday or any other day. Well, this isn't a real long episode, but still let's do a few.

• 29:19Arthur Brooks?

  Let's make it a tiny bit longer with some audience questions. We've got some good ones and then we'll finish up. It's time for you to go eat your Christmas turkey. Ferry Kemperman writes to me on email. Thanks Ferry. How does a fixed sleep schedule influence your mood and happiness throughout the working day? Does this have to do with the alignment of your circadian rhythm? And I take this to mean that there's energy that kind of goes up and down over the course of the day? And whether or not sleep schedules affect that? And the answer is of course, yes. The truth of the matter is that when your energy, when your sleep, when your fitness and when your diet are on point, you should have pretty even energy throughout the day.

• 30:02Arthur Brooks?

  You're, I mean, you're gonna have, you're gonna have ebbs and flows, but, but, and ups and downs. But you should have relatively even energy. If you have radically uneven energy, it's, it's evidence that there's something you actually need to change. So you might be sleep deprived. If you're sleep deprived, then there are gonna be times during the day when you're gonna wanna feel like you're falling asleep. Which is why when you go to the doctor to see if your sleep patterns are right, they'll say, do you fall asleep during meetings? Do you feel like you're gonna fall asleep when you're driving? And the answer should be no to all of that. And even if you're getting six and a half hours of sleep at night, which is my average is six and a half hours. I'm not a great sleeper. I'm never sleepy over the course of the day in no small part because six and a half hours is okay. But also because of the way that what I consume, most notably my carbohydrates and my caffeine.

• 30:46Arthur Brooks?

  Are consumed in such a way that they actually don't give me energy spikes. They have relatively even energy. So go back to the morning protocols and a couple of the other earlier shows on how to time your caffeine, notably not taking your caffeine too early, using it to focus as opposed to waking up, making sure you're not having a huge bowl of carbohydrate first thing in the morning, et cetera, et cetera. So you can even out your energy and it's not going to be a question of you having weird circadian rhythms. It really is a question of having your diet and exercise and fitness on point. Here's an anonymous email question. I love this question. I'm a 40 something. I'm assuming he's talking about his age. I'm a 40 something orthopedic surgeon at the top of my game. Good for you. Love it.

• 31:30Arthur Brooks?

  I love taking care of my patients and getting great results and I'm a spiral career type. And if those of you who watched the four types of careers, that was a popular episode. Go back and watch it. A spiral career is somebody who reinvents her or himself every seven to 12 years. He says, I'm a spiral career type and I'm getting bored. I've always wanted to write and teach. My question is, how do I walk away from the patients who rely on me or a generous salary for my wife and kids to take care of them? How do I do that when I know that I'm burning out on being a doctor and I think I want to do something else? Yeah, I get it. I mean, life is complicated. It's not just as simple as saying, yeah, I'm spiraling out. Bye, honey. I've decided to become a history teacher, even though you put me all the way through

• 32:15Arthur Brooks?

  medical school, got a big mortgage and private school tuitions, et cetera. Usually this means for spirals who have certain constraints is staging your spirals. That means not doing everything all at once. It means actually structuring what you would consider to be your leisure, AKA your unpaid activity, not as chilling, but is actually doing the thing that you actually want such that at the season of your life where it can become more of your job, you can walk into it. And so think about staging and using the 16 hours a day when you're not in the sack in really, really creative ways. That's what I recommend on that. And if you want more suggestions on that, write back and I'll give you some stuff to read. Last but not least, we got another anonymous one by email.

• 32:57Arthur Brooks?

  I'm single, retired and female, only child, never married, distant cousins are my only relatives. I make friends easily, but find many of them have moved or now we're older and we're dying. How do I actually get more love in my life? Because in the seven steps or the seven secrets to happiness in old age, the, the most important one was number seven, which is love. And love for most people comes from close friendships and/or a close marriage. And what she's telling me here is that she's never married, she doesn't have that one, and that her close friendships are hard to maintain because of the mobility of other people and circumstances in her life. The question is, how do I find high level happiness again later in life? Is it impossible? The answer, no, it's not impossible.

• 33:40Arthur Brooks?

  But the question, but the key thing is you have, you can't let friendship find you. You gotta do the work is what it comes down to. The best way to actually make close friends later in life circulates around common values and interests. Generally speaking, that's in religious communities or intellectual communities or communities of particular hobbies and interests. I'm most interested in things that are, that are based on deep metaphysical values. So if you're religious, do get more involved in your religious community. That's the best way that you're actually going to find people, real friends, that can overlap with you. And with that kind of commonality, you can develop friendship in hyperspeed. The second thing is intellectual communities. If you're not a religious person around big ideas. And that's why people later in life are so interested in like book clubs.

• 34:25Arthur Brooks?

  And you know, in their thirties, like don't, book clubs, terrible. No, I don't want that. And sixty, they're like, I think I want a book club. What they really want is not a book club. What they really want is friendship. And they want to find people who think that, you know, the Brothers Karamazov is interesting like they do. Because that's an area of overlap that, that is a shorthand for all kinds of things. It can be an area of common values. So that's what I, that's what I suggest. We're done. Time for the Christmas turkey. Let me know your thoughts. [email protected], that's how you reach me. Or you can leave comments on any of the platforms where you're watching this. We're, we're looking at those. Like and subscribe. Please subscribe, hit the subscribe button anywhere where you consume this podcast, on Spotify, YouTube and Apple, so that you can get the podcast automatically and you won't forget on some beautiful Monday coming up.

• 35:10Arthur Brooks?

  But also because it helps the algorithm find us. And so more people will watch this show and listen to this show. Follow me on Instagram, on LinkedIn, on the other platforms. You'll find original content that you're not going to see here or other places. And order the books that are coming out. The Happiness Files came out last August and next March, The Meaning of Your Life comes out. Lots to read. Please stay in touch. I hope you have a lovely holiday, however you choose to celebrate it. Lift other people up and bring them together. The happiness that we talk about in this show might be the, might be the great gift that you bring to other people this year. Enjoy your holiday and I'll see you next week.

• 35:52Speaker 03

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