By Luke Beaumont, First year, Psychology and Neuroscience
It happens every year in Bristol. You’re walking up St Michaels Hill dreading that 9am, and your Spotify shuffle suddenly drops ‘Do they know it’s Christmas’ by Band Aid. The suspenseful drums gives you a suspicious hit of motivation and suddenly you’re powering up that hill like a festive warrior. But later that dark afternoon, when you are sat in the ASS library cramming for the exam that is – for reasons the university refuses to explain – in Combe Dingle, Mariah Carey barges into your head with ‘All I want for Christmas is you’, and your will to live evaporates. So why does Christmas music affect you so much?
Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
Part of the chaos comes from the winter brain itself, when sunlight disappears serotonin levels drop. This does a double-whammy on your brain- not only does it trigger a drop in serotonin, it heightens emotional reactivity to cues like music. It disrupts your circadian rhythm, the internal clock which regulates sleep and energy. This weakens your mood regulation and increases your sensitivity to sound. Meanwhile, exam season sends cortisol rising and pushes the amygdala – the brain’s emotional alarm bell – into overdrive. That’s why hearing ‘Mistletoe’ by Justin Bieber will either push you into a crash-out or, if you’re feeling the Christmas cheer, give you that warm sensation in your heart. The winter brain doesn’t just hear the music; it feels it.
But how do you fix it? Study in lighter rooms and revise while the sun is still out. Light exposure resets your circadian rhythms, helping regulate serotonin and soften the emotional impacts, even promoting the warm feeling you get from a Christmas anthem.
Prediction Circuits
The next step to fully understanding your love-hate relationship with your Winter playlist is to do with prediction circuits. Our brains love predicting patterns and cognitive neuroscience tells us our brain is constantly looking for what comes next in a song. Christmas music is filled with familiar patterns, so each correct prediction gives the brain a small dopamine bump. This makes classic festive songs oddly satisfying. But once the brain stops getting this dopamine hit, the music becomes irritating. It’s like rewatching the ‘Polar Express’ with every one of your flat mates: charming at first, then you’d rather attend that 9am in Priory Road. To fix this, mix up what you listen to with a varied playlist. This interrupts your predictability cycle, so the song is out of your short term memory and dopamine can keep flowing without dipping into chaos.
Sensory Sensitivity
Individual sensory differences add another layer to this question. Some people have highly reactive auditory systems, meaning repetitive sounds affect them far more intensely. Recurring bells or overly cheery vocals in nearly every Christmas song can be overwhelming for those with anxiety or day-to-day stress because these individuals tend to experience higher sensory sensitivity. Research shows that individuals with autistic listening profiles feel physically uncomfortable with these overwhelming features. This explains why one person is oblivious to the Christmas song blaring in Sainsbury’s on Queens Avenue while another person has entered the fight or flight response. It’s not about being a Humbug, it’s about how individual differences can lead to sensory overload. For these individuals, I recommend making a new playlist and keeping it instrumental. When studying listen to the Bridgerton soundtrack or even an instrumental version of your favourite pop legend’s Christmas song. Doing this can help you feel the calm and peaceful side of Christmas, avoiding sensory overload mid exam season.
The Default Mode Network (DMN)
Christmas songs carry decades of emotional baggage. Christmas music activates the hippocampus (memory) and amygdala (emotion) together, reawakening years of festive autobiographical emotional memories. This is why certain songs can feel like immediate time travel: one verse of ‘She’s the brightest star’ and suddenly you’re a five-year old, dressed as an Angel in your school nativity. Whether this is a happy memory or slightly traumatic, depends on the emotional baggage attached.
The Default Mode Network (DMN) – the system behind daydreaming – is strongly activated when you hear familiar music. This is why someone humming your favourite Christmas song can lead you into daydreaming and miss four slides of your lecture. If the thought of the festive family get-together is your motivation this exam season, curate a personal playlist of your family’s festive go-tos. Positive nostalgia genuinely boosts emotional resilience, helping you cope with the academic stress we all go through.
Ear-worms and repetition
Christmas songs stick in your head because they are engineered to be repetitive - something the whole family can sing every year after your grandma has had slightly too many G and Ts. These Christmas melodies sneak into your phonological loop - the part of your short-term memory responsible for internal sound replay. Stress during exam-season activates this loop even more. In essence, your brain is actually wired to help you learn that flashcard definition in your head until it remembers it. This explains why festive ear worms hit hardest in exam season. Your brain will keep singing the same memorable, repetitive lyric over and over. The annual “Whamageddon” challenge proves how involuntary festive musical melodies are. The harder you attempt to avoid them, the more your brain serves them back to you. Research has shown that listening to a different, non-repetitive song all the way through can actually ‘overwrite’ an earworm – so alternating festive tracks with some new discoveries and your normal go-to playlist will help reset your phonological loop and put an end to your recurring earworms.
Your Christmas playlist doesn’t just force festive spirit onto you; it interacts with your deepest brain systems, triggering dopamine rewards, emotional amplifiers, sensory thresholds, autobiographical memories and involuntary recall loops. In winter, these systems are already strained by deadlines, darkness and social overload. Whether festive music feels cosy or chaotic reflects a personal combination of neurochemistry, mood and memories. No reaction is random; your biology determines your festivity.
So, whether you’re belting out your favourite Christmas anthem in Steam or turning your headphones to full-volume to block out a single ‘jingle bell’, your brain is doing exactly what science predicts. In exam season, festive playlists aren’t background noise - they’re seasonal exams, and your brain is sitting one right now.
Featured Image: Unsplash / Ingenious0range
