Practical tips to help you through another winter with SAD
The arrival of winter brings much joy for some, with cosy nights and Christmas among the pleasures to look forward to
Others find the colder, shorter days harder to deal with, which can manifest in Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), a condition sometimes known as ‘winter depression’.
A team from the University of Glasgow, working closely with people who are prone to the condition, has devised a collection of useful advice and practical steps to combat low feelings at this time of year.
Professor Hayden Lorimer explained more about the project on the Scotland Outdoors podcast.
“We are interested in people’s lived experience of Seasonal Affective Disorder, which is a condition that affects up to three percent of the UK population,” he says. “The further you go up the British Isles and the higher the latitude, more people than that are affected by this.
“[There] can be a whole range of different symptoms: it’s lowered mood; it can be a sense of social isolation; a lack of energy in wintertime; and just a feeling of everyday life being something of a challenge.”
Challenging the expectation of gloom
Professor Hester Parr, co-lead on the project, explains that the research drew on the experiences of people across the UK, then more specifically on a team of volunteers with SAD in Glasgow.
The academics, an artist, some experts in cognitive behavioural therapy and the volunteers then took part in creative workshops and activities indoors and outdoors during daylight.
Professor Parr says:
“The workshops have taught our participants, ourselves included, to get outside more, notice more about the light.
When we think about winter, we often think of it as a dark time and, for those who are on what you might call a SAD spectrum, then the anticipation of that is really psychologically difficult, and you go into winter expecting everything to be gloomy and grey and just something to get through.”
However, she says, a change of mindset could make a huge difference:
“Our programme encourages people to look again at winter, to kind of re-encounter it as physical reality and a psychological state, if you like.
We are looking for the light. We have light all of the time in winter, it’s not just dark.
It’s about training yourself to be out in light and to notice it and that does make a difference. It helps.”
The research has culminated in the production of a book, ‘Light is a Right: A Guide to Wintering Well‘, containing ideas and invitations to practise positive activities that could help re-set our relationship with winter.
A member of the wintering well participant group, Catherine, explains that one of these ideas is regular use of a ‘skyframe’ – a piece of card similar to a picture mount – to study the local environment and how it changes throughout the season.
She says:
“We take it up to the sky in no particular place and we’re noting, making observations about what we see and what we feel with what we see.
We’re trying to engage with the light and the surroundings and [trying] to find a positive notion about what we’re seeing, and bringing awareness to what we see as well.”
The study found numerous other small steps had positive benefits, explains Professor Lorimer.
“[Among] things we have suggested people might want to experiment with are writing a letter to winter itself, writing a letter to the season and venting…
“We’ve also suggested that people might want to think about making a winter room … just a little bit of interior redesign, not requiring a big budget but actually thinking about the use of reflective surfaces, mirrors [and] lighting. They can just shift the tone or the atmosphere of a room.”
Spending time outside is also important, he says.
“Another exercise invited people to step outside and make a wee winter place of their own where, just for a few minutes a day perhaps, maybe in the back garden, maybe in the local park, you find your own wee ‘sitooterie’ where you can just take in the light, take in the view.
“All of those are not rocket science, they’re just perfectly simple little exercises but individually and cumulatively you bring those together and they can have a really positive impact on the way people feel across wintertime.”
See more here bbc.co.uk
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Tom
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SAD like most of the other 300 mental illnesses is a concept of the mind. You are in a state of distress and blues because you think that way and you are unaware of your though leading you to be stressed. There may be physical causes but most of these are remedied with diet changes.
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Tom
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“unaware of your thoughts”
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Howdy
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“We are looking for the light. We have light all of the time in winter, it’s not just dark”
Really? How many people, or school children, wake up to the dark, go home in the dark.
If you get time to go out, it either rains, or too cold to do anything serious. Winter is the time of death for a reason. Thinking on the bright side won’t change that.
Like positive thinking, cognitive behavioural therapy is BS in my experience. It works for a few, but can not address the real challenges. Talking helps get things off one’s chest, maybe feeling better for a while, but it soon goes away, and I believe, helps lead to the phrase, “it’s all in your mind”.
The truth is much, much deeper.
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John V
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Blaming mental illness mostly on weather is rather hyperbolic. I’m from the upper Midwest and winter is not all darkness, snow, sleet, rain and doom and gloom. The most extreme weather is only around during a 6 or 8 week period. And, it’s not like it snows 60 days in a row.
People affected by winter must already have something going on mentally, and a bit of “darkness” triggers it so it is more prominent.
Do you know what is really depressing? Summer in the Southwest deserts. The sun wakes you up at 5 in the morning, the hellacious heat forces you to live in a cocoon of A/C all day, and, when you want to go outside at night to exercise or relax, it’s still 100°F at 11pm. And this goes on for 3 months.
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STJOHNOFGRAFTON
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Vitamin D3 + K2 + Mg should help alleviate symptoms of SAD. All safe, fairly cheap but certainly cheaper and more effective than subcontracting your immune system to Drs and trick cyclists.
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Lorraine
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I have suffered from SAD as far as I can remember back in childhood.
It has always been connected to light/dark cycles. I’m awake and energized at sunrise and at sunset I’m ready to sleep. Time of day has nothing to do with it.
I do use a light screen in the dead of winter it seems to make a difference.
It affects brain chemistry. I am able to simply give personal anecdotal evidence but I presume there might be a genetic connection as my father suffered from its effects but not my two brothers or my mother.
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