Winter Affects Your Mental Health, Did You Know?

Three years ago, at 22, when I moved to the UK for my masters, I experienced something very unique. As my first term (which started in September) progressed, the days dwindled. By the end of November, the sun would set in the North-East town of Newcastle at 3 pm and I would head out to class at 5 pm in the pitch-dark, the frigid cold making me put on more layers than I could count. A Creative Writing major, I read the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath and scribbled furiously on my professor’s writing prompts with the picturesque countryside playing no part in the process. I was a morning person who loved long, sunny days and had started on a course (eons away from anyone I knew and loved) which only had evening classes, commencing alongside the infamous English winter.

It snowed outside my dorm room window as I broke up with my long-distance boyfriend. I was frustrated, homesick and terribly sad for reasons I couldn’t quite articulate. It was ironic that I had shut myself down, depriving myself of any vocabulary to articulate it. Looking back, the deplorable state of my mental health boils down to one thing – Seasonal Affective Disorder (quite aptly abbreviated as SAD) which is a “mood disorder characterised by depression that occurs at the same time every year”. To give you an idea about how widespread this condition is – it affects 10 million people in India, every year according to recent research conducted by Apollo Hospitals.  

It was almost like a Eureka moment when I discovered it a couple of months ago, while watching this particular episode from the show Broad City, where one of the lead characters, Illana resorts to her “SAD lamp” (but also her Happy lamp because it uplifts her mood) to keep her from spiralling down bouts of depression – “that I and others like me experience every winter, all winter… and sometimes fall. And like the end of summer too… it just chews us up and spits us out.”

Seasonal Affective Disorder occurs in climates or seasons when there is less sunshine and its symptoms include fatigue, lethargy, depression, hopelessness, social withdrawal and can also lead to an increase in consumption of carbohydrates, thereby making you gain weight. I am already an introvert, so this just makes me retreat into a shell where I am unable to make any effort towards even meeting my friends and loved ones. Talking about being in a personal hell.  

The main reasoning doctors give is that a lack of sunlight keeps the hypothalamus (in the brain) from working properly, which results in the excess production of melatonin which one feels sleepy. It also lowers the secretion of serotonin, a hormone that affects your mood, appetite and sleep; this hormone is in fact related to feelings of depression. Our body’s internal clock (circadian rhythm) uses sunlight to time many important functions, like the time we wake up, so a lowering of light levels can also lead to SAD.

Treatments for SAD can include getting as much access to sunlight as possible, exercising daily and trying to manage your stress levels as much as possible. Going for a counselling session and having a healthy and balanced diet can also be of help.

In researching for this story I have realised that no matter how dejected and worse off I feel during the Winter months, help is always around the corner. So, I just take one day and a time and trudge on because the sweltering Summer season will be here anytime soon.