Hallucinate Your Way Through the Holidays with Caffeine and Stress

The holidays are pretty stressful for a lot of people, what with the traveling and the buying of gifts for little cousins and parents that don't like anything and all of the needing to be happy all the time because it's the holidays and you're celebrating various things, or possibly nothing. (Which is stressful too, arguably more so.)

So you're just a basket of nerves, and making the situation all the more, uh, interesting is that some recent research suggests that your stress-hell makes you more likely to hallucinate.

Maybe you've heard of the "White Christmas" hallucination tests before. They've been going on since Barber and Calverey’s landmark 1964 study examining the degree of clarity with which participants in a silent room could imagine the Bing Crosby song in their head. It helped establish a standard for "normal hallucinations," i.e. that one might hallucinate and not be mentally ill. A 2000 study by Harald Merckelbach and Vincent van de Ven added an additional element: participants were given, instead of silence, white noise. They were asked to press a button if they were able to hear the song "White Christmas" within the noise. But the song was never actually played. Despite that, a significant number of participants pushed the button, suggesting a hallucinatory experience.

The Merckelbach study was interested in figuring out if "fantasy-prone" participants were more likely to experience the hallucination than other, more boring people (my term). And indeed, they were to a significant degree. The newish (2011) coffee study looked at both stress and coffee and their relationship to the same white noise Bing Crosby situation. Both high levels of stress and drinking five or more cups of coffee per day (both self-reported) were found to induce the "White Christmas" hallucination. (Note also that coffee is a significant factor in creating stress.)

The 2011 stress study was done by La Trobe University’s Professor Simon Crowe, who explains:

There is a link between high levels of stress and psychosis, and caffeine was found to correlate with hallucination proneness. The combination of caffeine and stress affect the likelihood of an individual experiencing a psychosis-like symptom. … The results also support both the diathesis-stress model and the continuum theory of schizophrenia in that stress plays a role in the symptoms of schizophrenia and that everyone, to some degree, can experience these symptoms. This was demonstrated by a significant effect of stress on the occurrence of hallucinatory experiences, or hearing the song.

If you're on the other side of the holiday mental wreckage coin, depression, then fear not: hallucinations are even more related, at least in severe cases. Also: I can't find any studies out there on the psychological effects of hearing "White Christmas" over and over again for a month and a half--or however long the holiday season is now--on stress and depression. But one can imagine what a horrible feedback loop that would be.

Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.