Fortune Magazine says watching holiday movies is good for your health. Therapist Courtney Cope tells Better Help. “Holiday movies make us happy for the same reason that watching any favorite movie makes us happy—the ritual, routine and familiarity of it. We typically watch the same Christmas movies every year and that gives a sense of order and calm to an often unpredictable world. When it comes to those cheesy holiday movies we love to watch, we know they are always going to work out in the most positive way and have a happy ending. It’s a nice vacation from reality for our brains where we can suspend belief and imagine a world where the good guy always wins, families always resolve their differences, the main character always finds true love and there’s always enough money for the most magical and extravagant dream christmas gift or trip for the whole family!''
Cope adds; ''Because of all of these positive things going on when we watch Christmas movies, our brains release dopamine, which is associated with pleasure and reward in our brains, while watching these films. These movies are giving us what we want: easy solutions to some of life’s most challenging problems in an expedited timeline—something that can be completely unrealistic in real life. But we don’t care how cheesy they are, the dopamine is doing the hard work to make us feel like we are having a great time. We are feeling pleasure and the reward center of our brain is being lit up and that is good enough to keep us entertained and engaged as audience members.”