One fairly easy way to reduce Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) is to expose yourself to 30 to 45 minutes of sunlight early in the morning by taking a walk outside within an hour after you wake up; this has multiple other health benefits:
Getting a lot of sunlight in the morning is also a good way to reduce jetlag by resetting your circadian rhythm to be in sync with your new time zone.
If you live in a climate where you do not have access to sufficient sunlight, one possible alternative is to buy an LED corn bulb (don't use it too late at night, otherwise you won't be able to fall asleep):
If you live in North America, Japan, Korea, or Taiwan (120V AC), you want an E26 socket lamp, otherwise for 240V AC grids, you should consider E27 socket lamps.
In my experience those corn bulbs aren't... amazing. Probably much better off getting a "regular" LED bulb, those get stupendously bright these days. 1000 lumen bulbs are easy enough to find, and a couple of those in a room gets it nice and bright.
Family pressures is definitely an underscrutinised aspect of the end of year slowdown. There is a palpable societal and cultural prerogative that you make yourself not only available to but are expected to buy shit for people you may want nothing to do with—ever.
Particularly people who live shitty lifestyles who expect you to "come over" and stay with them and put up with their domestic insanity.
Obviously this doesn’t apply to kids who are stuck with their parents and some family dynamics are complicated and awkward but if you’re not dependent on your family for financial support or whatever then just don’t. Or if they don’t suck that bad then fearlessly set boundaries for your time and mental health. Once you’re an adult and your parents age the power dynamic in most families flips where they want your company way more than you want theirs.
Also found family is an absolute blessing around the holidays. I’m surrounded by people who love me more and less conditionally than my own family.
Don’t wait for society to deem it acceptable to ghost your terrible family, just do it. Be the change. You won’t be alone, trust me. You would be shocked at the number of nuclear families who cut out their extended family and have “family-friend Christmas” and even more than that cut out one of the sides.
Something that I think gets overlooked in term of mental health this time of year is the ways in which the changing season affects economics. I fully admit - I have zero data to share here to back up my point, and I hope someone out there has studied this - but it seems to me that:
-- There's a lot of seasonal work that depends on good weather: ag, construction, even real estate. Work slows or is physically harder in the cold and poor weather conditions, creating hardships.
-- There's tremendous social pressure to spend money, not only on xmas gifts, but also on charitable giving. There are a lot of different kinds of emotions people go through either because they can't afford to give or to spend and/or because they go overboard.
-- Because of the above issues, many people are trying to stretch their dollars this time of year. IE: got paid out for work they did through summer and fall, but now at a time everyone wants their dollars, they are trying to stretch them until the next round of work starts up after the new year (or even in the spring...)
-- With all of the various holidays this time of year, there are a lot of family and social demands on people. You might have to see that family member you don't like - twice even between Thanksgiving and the December holidays. Creates a lot of emotional turmoil and/ or time commitments that people don't have or don't prefer to have.
-- If you've been hard at work all year, there is a natural exhaustion that seems to come this time of year regardless.
I guess what I'm saying is... yeah, get those SAD lights, take your vitamin D, but also be aware that for many people there's a lot more going on than just not enough sunlight.
Apparently yes. Sorry, it's 4pm my time and spent most of my day with my best friends and their two year old, who is adorable, but loud. Brain fog is real.
Definitely is impossible for some parts of the world/schedules. 8 hours can be completely overlapped by a shift. One job I had I never saw sunlight during the week in winter.
I came across this a while back, and it seems like it might be worth a try:
“LED lighting is improving rapidly. You can install very bright lights for treating seasonal affective disorder (SAD) easily and inexpensively. Common sense says that will be more effective than commercial SAD lights that are much less bright. My experience confirms this.”
I have big LED panels in the basement, some behind curtains. This is my favourite room in the long dark winter. That and vitamin D helps. But is necessary to slow down a bit anyway
For me, powering up my vitamin D3 consumption eliminated most of the symptoms of SAD. I now cruise around 4000 IUs per day or so. Based on my reading, taking too much results in a return of the symptoms, and I have not reached that level, and feel no need to go higher.
Everyone has their own, unique body, best to be cautious and aware, if one experiments. Keep a journal or check in with a close confidant. This is generally less expensive in time and money than seeing my general practitioner.
Also, I live in the PNW of the United States, so those are the amounts of sunshine I work with.
This is exactly what I do as well. I am in midwest (UT and CO). 4000 IU per day keeps SAD away. Do the research to find out what works for you. I tried tanning but that was too much of a pain and really bad for the skin. Being outside worked as well. However, I am inside a ton. Vitamin D3 supplements fit the bill.
> My perfectionism isn’t just about doing things perfect. It’s an exceptionalism approach: I can do better, and the normal rules and limitations that apply to humans do not apply to me.
> The real issue is that if I can’t hit some pre-conceived level of commitment and results that my perfectionism convinces me that I can hit, I don’t put the effort it.
> The instant gratification serves another purpose though. It prevents me from slowing down.
Fighting this is key.
Even completely euthymic, this is still a battle, perhaps THE battle I would pick.
Just wanna say thanks for posting this. I relate tremendously. The poem is also nice. I'd say I'm in act III. I know this happens to me in winter, and I've taken strategies to mitigate it, including a light therapy pad (this really helped) as well as medication. Even so, I do need to slow down and to live with that. But again, thanks for posting, it helps to know that it's not just me :)
As someone living in Sweden, for me getting as much sunlight as possible and taking 5000 IU vitamin D per day is pretty good at staving off the bad aspects of winter. Some short meditation sessions here and there gives me the clarity to avoid too much internet time wasting
Got some snow up in western WA - something about looking out back at the snow-covered WA trees and hills makes me completely lose interest in my job. I get a giant urge to just .. fuck off. It's magical.
YMMV but I've had limited benefits from taking vitamin D over winter personally, at least from a mental health perspective. Slowing down and trying to reduce the self-induced mental pressure addresses the cause for me.
> trying to reduce the self-induced mental pressure
That's like trying to stop breathing for me. Getting out and exercising when I least feel like it is the only thing that has helped me. But clearing that hurdle isn't always easy.
It doesn't seem to matter here in Victoria, Canada. Morning walks are a thing I adopted in the last year and it has been transformative for my general mood and energy.
I walk before dawn quite often, and while I don't get a lot of light (especially on those days with low, thick, dark clouds), the simple act of moving, breathing fresh air, having routine, etc... It seems to make a tremendous difference.
Some sources claim the lack of light isn't too problematic, but that aiming to get 15m or so (even if it's very overcast) around 7:30am in mid-winter could be totally sufficient to stabilize your circadian rhythm and help mitigate SAD.
This has been my experience so far this winter, but I'm only one person, I've completely changed my diet, I'm exercising more, etc. I can't narrow down exactly what helped. I can say that when I didn't change the other variables, morning walks were making a significant difference.
I'll also admit that the option to do this is a luxury in a sense. A couple years ago my youngest would have been waking too early for this to be possible, and before that for a long time his brothers were much the same. Parents of young ones will often struggle to maintain this kind of rhythm. It's worth aspiring to though, though. When mine get up early I just bring them with me, but they're old enough to walk and all of that at this point.
Hm, not sure how effective it would be in ‘worse’ climates. I’ve found it to be helpful on grey days as well.
I also use a Lumenator (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hC2NFsuf5anuGadFm/how-to-bui...) which I think of as icing on the cake. Perhaps ‘cure’ is too strong a word, but it’s been the most effective thing other than leaving the hemisphere for someplace sunnier which was my previous approach.
It's worth noting (or maybe it isn't) that there there is scant evidence for SAD.
The confirmation bias is strong here maybe in me and others, the solutions are all dripping in snake oil.
It's really quite bizarre but amount of cold and darkness doesn't correlate well with low mood. Frankly I've not seen anyways provide an reasonable explanation for it.
People self-report feeling "down" in various ways in the winter months. The experience is happening to them regardless of whether we know the causes or solutions. Perhaps there are in fact many different things that are manifesting in similar ways. Dismissing the experiential phenomenon doesn't get us any closer to figuring that out.
Yes this is the biggest misconception about depression.
The idea that it is synonymous with feeling "down" and more or less depression is just how "down" you feel.
Depression is much more than just that feeling. And not all unpleasant feelings are pathological.
So the question becomes, why is it in modern times people no long feel able to say "I feel down" or "I don't like winter". Instead they need to wrap it in a medical term that appears unsupported by evidence.
I don't know about confirmation bias but I've realized as a kid that November and February has always been bad for me. I think that was way before I heard of SAD, although I could of course have internalized something I had heard and forgotten the details.
Anyway, given that placebos work very well on mood, I'm happy to read about possible solutions (as long as they're not harmful) even if they would have no observable effect in a double-blind :)
Psychologists, the least scientific form of scientists, use the term ‘disorder’ far too liberally if you ask me. The term has implications for how people view others with these diagnosis and how those people view themselves.
The term is borrows credibility from other parts of medicine. The term gives the impression of a ‘disease’, which a) we tend to think of as physiological and b) something foreign and unwanted in our body, and c) not normal. I have ADHD but none of the above describe my mental state when I’m off my medication.
I see the term ‘disorder’ in psychology
often used to the effect of ‘basis for a prescription’. I’ll take the medication, improve my life, and leave the stigma of being ‘diseased’ behind.
- https://selecthealth.org/blog/2020/07/7-health-benefits-of-s...
Getting a lot of sunlight in the morning is also a good way to reduce jetlag by resetting your circadian rhythm to be in sync with your new time zone.
If you live in a climate where you do not have access to sufficient sunlight, one possible alternative is to buy an LED corn bulb (don't use it too late at night, otherwise you won't be able to fall asleep):
- https://blog.plover.com/tech/corn-bulbs.html
- https://meaningness.com/sad-light-lumens
- https://www.benkuhn.net/lux/
You can buy these fairly inexpensively from retailers like AliExpress if you are ok with waiting a month for shipping from China: https://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?SearchText=corn+bulb
If you live in North America, Japan, Korea, or Taiwan (120V AC), you want an E26 socket lamp, otherwise for 240V AC grids, you should consider E27 socket lamps.