Holiday Nostalgia Can Be Good for Your Mental Health {BETA}

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In today’s digest, we break down why seasonal routine shifts can affect heart rhythm, why timing has become a central focus in cardiometabolic health, and how nostalgia can act as an emotional stabilizer during the holidays. We also look at what chronic stress is doing beneath the surface, highlight an easy, grounded way to support immune balance, and close with Vital News updates that cut through the noise.

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The holidays tend to sneak up on the body.

It’s not one big thing; it’s a slow buildup: later nights, colder air, heavier meals, more drinks than usual, long to-do lists, and the quiet emotional weight that comes with the end of a year. Most of us feel it as fatigue or anxiety. For some, the heart feels it too.

Doctors have a name for what can happen during this stretch of the calendar: holiday heart syndrome. The temporary changes to our routines at this time of year can trigger heart rhythm issues, especially atrial fibrillation (AFib), even in people who don’t think of themselves as “heart patients.”

Alcohol is a major trigger. Not because you’re being reckless, but because even short-term increases—such as during holiday parties, celebratory dinners, or that extra glass poured generously—can disrupt the heart’s electrical system. When combined with dehydration, stress, and sleep disruption, the heart can become more reactive than usual.

Cold weather also plays a part. When the temperature drops, blood vessels constrict to retain heat. This is normal, but it also raises blood pressure and puts extra strain on the heart. Research indicates that heart attacks occur more frequently in the days after severe cold spells, especially when physical activity, such as shoveling snow, is involved.

None of this means the holidays are dangerous. It just means they’re different, and that difference is what the heart tends to notice.

If you have a history of heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, high cholesterol, AFib, or you’re managing medications that are easy to forget when routines change, this is a season to listen more closely to your body’s signals. Pay special attention to symptoms that are often easy to brush off: persistent chest discomfort, unusual shortness of breath, dizziness, or a heart that feels fast or irregular and doesn’t settle.

Related: Beware the Christmas coronary. How to spot signs of holiday heart trouble - from NPR.org

We talk a lot about what to eat, how to exercise, and how much sleep to get, but a new scientific statement from the American Heart Association says we’re missing a huge piece of the puzzle: timing.

According to the AHA’s first-ever guidance on circadian health, sleep, eating, physical activity, and light exposure play a significant role in heart health, blood sugar regulation, inflammation, and the risk of metabolic disease. In other words, your body is keeping score, but it’s also keeping time.

Researchers found that misaligned daily rhythms (think late nights, irregular meals, constant artificial light, and erratic schedules) can quietly increase the risk of conditions like diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease even when diet and exercise look “fine” on paper.

What helps instead is a boring, predictable rhythm:

None of this requires perfection, but chronic chaos does add up.

One expert summed it up simply: health isn’t just about what you do, it’s about when you do it. Your metabolism, hormones, and cardiovascular system all run on a clock, and they work best when that clock isn’t constantly being reset.

The quiet takeaway: you don’t need a biohacking routine. You need rhythm, regular meals, earlier nights, morning light, and probably a little less midnight scrolling.

Sometimes the most potent health upgrade isn’t adding something new, but rather letting your body keep the schedule it was designed for.

Somewhere between the cookie swaps, crowded calendars, and the pressure to make everything feel “special,” the holidays can start to feel… emotionally loud. Even the good moments carry weight. Grief sneaks in. Family dynamics resurface. The bar for joy feels oddly high.

That’s where nostalgia gets interesting.

We tend to dismiss it as rose-colored thinking, but psychologists now see nostalgia as something more beneficial: a stabilizing emotion that helps us feel grounded when things feel tender or overwhelming. Remembering familiar foods, old songs, shared traditions, or small moments from the past has been shown to ease anxiety, reduce loneliness, and strengthen our sense of belonging, not by pulling us backward, but by reminding us of who we are.

This matters during the holidays because we’re often asked to hold a lot at once. When emotions run high, nostalgia can act like an anchor. It reconnects us to moments where we felt safe, known, or connected, even if life looks very different now.

Importantly, this isn’t about dwelling on the past or wishing things were like they were “then.” The benefit comes from bringing parts of the past into the present. Making a dish that your family always ate. Playing a song you grew up with. Telling a story that’s been told a hundred times but still resonates. For teens and kids, these moments quietly reinforce family identity and emotional safety (even if the teens pretend not to care).

Researchers note that nostalgia works best when paired with gratitude rather than comparison. The goal isn’t things were better then, but this mattered and it still does. Sometimes the fastest way to feel steadier now is to remember what’s already held you.

A new analysis from evolutionary anthropologists Colin Shaw and Daniel Longman makes a striking point: our biology was built for a world that no longer exists, and modern life is stressing us in ways our bodies are not equipped to handle.

Throughout most of human history, stress occurred in brief bursts: avoid a threat, relax, then move on. Nowadays? The “threats” are relentless. Traffic, work pressure, constant notifications, sensory overload, artificial lighting, processed foods, microplastics—your nervous system perceives all of it as danger.

Because these stressors continue, your system never fully resets. Over time, this ongoing activation is associated with inflammation, hormonal imbalance, anxiety, sleep problems, fertility issues, and an increase in autoimmune conditions. Women may experience this mismatch more acutely because stress hormones interact closely with reproductive and metabolic systems.

The researchers argue that the modern world is changing much faster than human physiology can adapt. Fertility rates are dropping, inflammatory conditions are rising, and markers like sperm count have steadily decreased since the mid-20th century—changes too quick to be genetic. Environmental pressures are the likely drivers.

So what’s the solution?

Biology can’t keep up, but we can adjust the environment we put ourselves in each day by doing some, all, or one of the following: