Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. Hi, I'm Dr. Priyanka Wally. And I'm Hari Kundabolu. It's a new year, and on the podcast Health Stuff, we're resetting the way we talk about our health. Which means being honest about what we know, what we don't know, and how messy it can all be. I like to sleep in late and sleep early. Is there a chronotype for that, or am I just depressed?
Health stuff is about learning, laughing, and feeling a little less alone. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast. And this January, we're going to go on the road to beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada, to cover the Consumer Electronics Show, tech's biggest conference.
Better Offline CES coverage won't be the usual rundown of the hottest gadgets or biggest trends, but an unvarnished look at what the tech industry plans to sell or do to you in 2025. I'll be joined by David Roth at Defector and the writer Edward Ongueso Jr.
With guest appearances from Behind the Bastards Robert Evans, It Could Happen Here's Gare Davis, and a few surprise guests throughout the show. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts from. Are you desperately hoping for change in 2026, but feeling stuck?
I'm Dr. Laurie Santos, and in a new year series of my show, The Happiness Lab, I'm going to look at the science of getting, well, unstuck. Unstuck at work, unstuck in your relationships, and even unstuck inside your mind. I am the absolute worst culprit when it comes to getting into these ruminative loops and just driving myself crazy.
Listen to The Happiness Lab on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your shows. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here, too, and it's a Stuff You Should Know hoedown to start the new year.
Chuck's still wearing his novelty 2026 glasses that he got, sponsored by Nivea, that I believe what you were saying was Ryan Seacrest himself handed them to you while you were at Times Square, right? No, not handed. He put them on my face with his hands. Whoa. Is it because you guys are co-workers? Yeah. Yeah, he's with iHeart, isn't he? Yeah, but I think like half of the U.S.
is a co-worker because he's got so many jobs. Yeah, you're probably right. Well, if you haven't guessed, listening audience, this is our first recording of the new year. Yes. I'm probably going to be a little rusty. Yeah. And can I just give a quick shout-out to a couple of things? Yeah, please do. Great.
Well, Josh knows all this stuff because we communicate outside of work, believe it or not, because we're fans. But I went to New York City. Emily and I do our little Broadway weekend in New York over Christmas every year. And this year, I just want to say thanks to a couple of people, most notably Natasha Hodgson of Operation Mincemeat fame. Mm-hmm.
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Chapter 2: What is seasonal affective disorder (SAD) and how is it different from winter blues?
Because she is in the show and put together the show and Stuff You Should Know. And she's been in magazines as people alerted us as giving Stuff You Should Know credit as our episode inspiring that show. And was kind enough to give us a couple of tickets to go see it. And it was fantastic. I highly recommend it. I know. I was loathe to miss it. That sucked. I wish you could have been there.
But it's, you know, it's still playing. So maybe you can check it out. Yeah, I was especially upset when you said that she came out into the audience in the middle of the show and gave you like a bouquet of roses. No, no, no. And the audience lifted you up on their shoulders. No, that didn't happen. Also, I went to Bar Centrale, as I like to do before Broadway. What is that?
Bar Centrale is where I go before Broadway shows. Well, what is it? It's a bar, but it's sort of a, I mean, you can just make reservations a week out. I think I've mentioned this before. It's sort of a secret place in that it doesn't have a sign or it's not widely publicized. But, you know, seven days out from when you want to go, you can call them up.
They specialize in getting people in and out of there pre and post-Broadway. And, you know, sometimes you can see Broadway performers there on the down low. Nice. I would have no idea that one could be sitting next to me and I wouldn't even know. Well, you might if it's a famous, you know, like Bryan Cranston was sitting there. He was? No, but he could be. Years ago I saw Dexter in there.
What's his name? Dexter's good enough. Yeah. This year I saw the lady from Lost, although I don't think she's on Broadway. She was in there. But all this to say big thanks to Jason, who helps take care of Bar Centrale and Joe's on Broadway. He came over on his night off just to say hi and was just a total sweetheart of a guy. What a trip.
And then finally, I want to thank Santa Claus in the Radio City Music Hall show. I surprised Emily by going to the Christmas show this year for the first time. Oh, cool. Yeah, I remember Santa rode in. Santa rode in, and although he was not in the performance we went to, Santa, Adam, was very kind to send a Christmas video to Ruby.
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Chapter 3: What are the symptoms of seasonal affective disorder?
Have you been to the show? No. I'm just some bumpkin who stays at home all the time, apparently. Yeah. Dude, you and me have to go to the Radio City Music or Christmas Spectacular. It is one of the delights of my life. The Rockettes was one of the most impressive, most amazing live shows of any kind I've ever seen. They were incredible. Wow. OK, I'll go. Yeah.
And it's you know, you love you guys love your Christmas cheer. And it really you can't even the biggest grinchy curmudgeon wouldn't help but get in the mood even at the 10 a.m. show. But the Rockettes were amazing. And Santa said that he turned them on to our listener mail and the Rockettes episode. And some of the now current Rockettes are listening. Oh, cool. So a shout out to you, Rockettes.
Keep keep on kicking. Hello, Rockettes. We did a whole show on the Rockettes, didn't we? We did. Yeah. All right. That was amazing, Chuck. You were sick over the holidays, and it felt terrible. It really stunk. I got this cold that apparently there's like a two-week cold going around. Oh, no. That long? And it was just like every day I would add a new symptom.
And I could do stuff during the day, but I was just sick the whole time. Oh, dude. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. It was rough, yeah. So thanks for that. I appreciate it. But we still had a great Christmas. Momo knows how to open presents, so she opened presents on Christmas morning. She was so happy. Paws or teeth? Both. Okay. Yeah, she's a pro. She knows what she's doing.
She got some new rabbit treats, so she laid on her back and rolled on those, and she had a great Christmas morning. That's wonderful. It was a good Christmas after all.
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Chapter 4: How does SAD affect mood and behavior during winter?
We hung out with friends on Christmas Eve and our friends Laurel and Brayden and their kids, Elliot and Bear. I know those guys, right? Yeah, you do. You've met them plenty of times. So we got to hang out with little kids on Christmas Eve. And man, that will put you in the Christmas spirit when you don't have kids of your own. Yeah. How old are those kids? They're like eight and six, I think.
Oh, yeah. That's fun. So like prime age. Yeah. Right in the zone. Yeah. So thank you, though, for your sympathy over my sicknesses. Yeah. I felt bad. One thing I don't have, Chuck, which I am really happy I don't have because it's awful, is sad. No sads for you? I don't have sad. Do you have sad? No, I don't have sad. You know, we're talking about seasonal affective disorder.
And just right off the bat, we should point out, because I was about to say, occasionally I get the winter blues. This is not that. This is a real, it's legitimate depression and comorbid with stuff like bipolar disorder. And we're going to talk all about it. But it's not just, you know, I get a little blue in the winter sometimes when it's, you know, gloomy. No, but it's tied to that.
It's just it seems to be an extreme version of that. But you're right. It's not it's nothing light. It's classified, I believe, in the DSM as a major depressive disorder. Yeah. With a seasonal pattern. I think that's the clinical name for seasonal affective disorder. And there are people out there, I think something like 5% of people, I believe that's an American statistic. Yeah, that's America.
Get the like real deal seasonal affective disorder where they have major depressive symptoms during the winter months. Yeah. But something like 10% or maybe even higher than that in the United States, people get what's called subsyndromal seasonal affective disorder. So where you don't have it where it could be considered major depression, but it's definitely worse than the holiday blues.
And the weird thing about this, although it's not so weird once we explain it, it is seasonal. It's tied to winter. And it seems that they figure... Or summer, which that one's just mind-blowing to me. Yeah, we'll get into that. Yeah. It seems like they have it figured out. They have this, they have it explained. So this is one of my fave episodes where it's like, here's how the human body works.
Here's what's messed up with this when we're talking about this. Ta-da. I love episodes like that. Yeah, not a lot of mystery. Big thanks to Livia for getting the new year off to a great start with another banger.
Yeah, we should say that this is something that hasn't been officially, I mean, it's obviously been around since, you know, time began because, as we'll see, it's tied to seasons and especially light and how much light you're getting. So that's always been a thing. But it hasn't been officially diagnosed as a thing yet.
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Chapter 5: What are the possible causes of seasonal affective disorder?
For that long, it was in 1984 when there was a paper by researchers at the National Institutes of Health, particularly a guy named Norman Rosenthal, got together and they discussed these almost 30. I have a feeling one dropped out because there were 29 patients. Most of them had bipolar disorder and they all had what we now know is ASAD. Yeah.
That 30th one, when they, like, one week in, they're like, how do you feel? And they were like, fine. And they're like, you're cut. You can go home. Get out of here. Yeah. So, yeah, bipolar disorder, as we'll see, like really kind of ties into this. It seems to be like also seasonal in some weird way, too. But pretty quickly after that 1984 paper, the DSM went all in.
Three years later, the DSM-3R, as we all know, R stands for revised or rockin'. That came out in 1987, and it was, like, now it was a diagnosis. But it was used as a modifier, as we saw, a major depressive disorder with a seasonal pattern. So it wasn't its own thing. It was just a subtype, essentially, of an existing depressive disorder. That's kind of how they first had it. Yeah.
And, you know, because it's seasonal, the most common kind of sad that we think about, like we mentioned, it is very serious thing. And it starts off in the fall, maybe early winter. And it kind of depends on where you are, as we'll see, although not always intuitively. There's a third act reveal that might surprise some people. It generally subsides in the spring.
But I did mention that that odd spring and summer variety that is hasn't been studied much. It's very, very limited. About point five percent of the population has this opposite pattern. But it is a diagnosable mood disruption. It just happens in the spring and summer variety.
And it's tied more to sort of like oppressive heat and maybe unsurprisingly, some of the things they recommend for that, which again, we're going to cover a little more later is stuff like maybe stay inside, dim the lights, that kind of thing.
Yeah, and the thing that gets me about the summer version, that much rarer one, is that the symptoms are almost, in some cases, opposite the symptoms of winter. So usually when you first start getting sad, it's around young adulthood, ages 18 to 30, I think. And most people who get it, get it most years, but you don't necessarily have it every year.
Women are four times likelier than men to have it. And if you have an existing mood disorder, you're much likelier to suffer from seasonal affective disorder because it's almost like it takes your existing mood disorder, say bipolar 2, and just builds on it. There's an extra like environmental punch to it that really kind of kicks it into high gear.
Yeah, and that four times more common in women, that's really substantial. And we'll get into that. It seems to be tied to estrogen, but we'll dig into that a little bit more in a bit. But having family members, they think there's some genetic component to it.
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Chapter 6: How do serotonin and melatonin levels relate to SAD?
I mean, most people can kind of come up with this idea of like what depression symptoms seem like, but there's specific ones that emerge with seasonal affective disorder.
Yeah, I think, you know, generally what you'll see, like with most depression, listlessness, obviously sadness, interest in activities that you might normally like, you don't like as much, you may have a hard time concentrating, suicidal thoughts, if it gets really bad, hopelessness, maybe guilt sometimes, and then some physical symptoms like just a weight, like in your limbs sometimes.
Yeah, like a lethargy, a fatigue. And those, yeah, that's kind of common among depression in general, but Wintersad has some extra symptoms like oversleeping or just sleeping too much or more than you normally would, craving carbs, overeating, weight gain, and then that fatigue, the low energy and tiredness. And all of those things, too, create like a feedback loop
Where, you know, if you're depressed and you start gaining weight and that kind of thing bothers you, you're going to be even more depressed because you just started gaining weight. In which case, if you're an emotional eater, you might go eat more carbs and gain more weight. And, you know, it just kind of goes on.
So that's one of the difficult things about it is it's not just like I'm depressed. Right. It's I'm depressed and now everything is set up because of this winter season for me to just keep getting more and more depressed while winter's going on. Yeah.
And if you're sitting there thinking like, oh, man, like in the wintertime, I tend to sleep later and I tend to eat and maybe drink a little more and gain some weight and I'm a little more tired. Those are also that's why sad is such a sort of a unique thing, because that also just describes a lot of people in the winter. But there is a difference.
And, you know, we're going to be pointing out those differences. You mentioned summer was unusual because the summer sads because it's very much opposite. And that goes for the symptoms as well, because instead of sleeping in, you might have trouble sleeping. Instead of eating too much, you might have a low appetite. You might lose weight. You might be anxious and agitated and irritable.
Headaches is another one for summer sad. Yeah, it's like winter said you go inward and are kind of closed off. And with summer said you go outward, but it's not in any like that doesn't mean you're just more sociable. It means like you're more aggro potentially than you would be with like winter said. So, yeah, it is. They're just kind of opposites.
And yet they tie into, like you were saying, how people already are. Like you go out more in the summertime. You stay in more in the wintertime. So what seems to be the case with seasonal affective disorder is that it is a hyper or hypo version of a normal human biological imperative that we have learned as a society to try to ignore.
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Chapter 7: What treatments are effective for seasonal affective disorder?
And then the fourth one, if you feel hopeless or suicidal, for sure. And I think as far as diagnosis goes, you have to I think it has to be for at least two years in a row, even though you did say you don't necessarily have it all years. You at least have to have it two years in a row at some point. Yeah.
And because it is essentially, if you look at the winter SAD and summer SAD, they're basically two ends of a spectrum, mania and depression. Like people with bipolar II are definitely more susceptible to SAD and they might experience both types of seasonal. Although again, just statistically speaking, they're much more likely to just experience the winter SAD. Yeah. Yeah, for sure.
And if you do see a professional, they're probably going to ask you a lot of questions. You might even fill out an official questionnaire. There's no like blood test or brain scan or anything like like, you know, other types of depression. That's the case as well. But you might get they might rule things out.
They might do like a thyroid screening or, you know, some other things just to make sure it's not something like physical going on. Right. So that's sad, everybody. And I think we should talk about where this whole thing comes from, they think, after a break. Chuck, our first break of 2026. Let's make it a big one. You still got it. You still got it. All right.
Lately, I've been learning some stuff about insomnia or alumina. How about the one on borderline depression? That one before, but it was so nice. I learned it twice. Everybody listen up. Oh, it's Charles and Joshua. It's Charles. It's Charles. Hi, I'm Dr. Priyanka Wally. And I'm Hari Kundabolu. It's a new year, and on the podcast Health Stuff, we're resetting the way we talk about our health.
Which means being honest about what we know, what we don't know, and how messy it can all be. I like to sleep in late and sleep early. Is there a chronotype for that, or am I just depressed? We talk to experts who share real experiences and insight. You just really need to find where it is that you can have an impact in your own life and just start doing that.
We break down the topics you want to know more about. Sleep, stress, mental health, and how the world around us affects our overall health. We talk about all the ways to keep your body and mind, inside and out, healthy. We human beings, all we want is connection. We just want to connect with each other. Health stuff is about learning, laughing, and feeling a little less alone.
Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You know, we always say new year, new me, but real change starts on the inside. It starts with giving your mind and your spirit the same attention you give your goals. Hey, everybody, it's Michelle Williams, host of Checking In on the Black Effect Podcast Network.
And on my podcast, we talk mental health, healing, growth and everything you need to step into your next season whole and empowered. New year, real you. Listen to Checking In with Michelle Williams from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Are you desperately hoping for change in 2026, but feeling stuck?
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Chapter 8: How can light therapy help with SAD symptoms?
I don't know if you ever played that game. Oh my gosh, yes. You take the car along and you try and get money and you try and get degrees and you try and get to the end where either you have a mansion or a ranch or a shack. And once you get to retirement, you're done. What about the whole path along the way? So join me to get unstuck in 2026.
Listen to The Happiness Lab on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your shows. All right. So kind of like we were talking, it's kind of hard to diagnose this as far as when you should go to a doctor because a lot of people are just like this in the winter. And you're also sort of fighting.
I think you kind of hinted at it like a natural human intuition in a lot of ways, because if you go back in time. to the time where Tuk-Tuk was roaming the earth, in the winter, they slowed down and they conserved energy because food wasn't around and it was cold. So they bunkered down and there are some interesting theories around that, right?
Yeah, they think it's possible that Neanderthals had like a real type of hibernation period in the winter. Not, you know, like a bear necessarily, but something more pronounced than humans. And that interbreeding with Neanderthals may have produced seasonal affective disorder in some people. Yeah. Which is pretty cool. Like when Homo sapiens started hugging and kissing Neanderthals? That's right.
Like in, what was it? Quest for Fire. Oh, man. There was some real realizations in that movie. It was a, I mean, what an interesting movie, though, you know? Yeah. Ron Perlman. Yeah. He really, he's a good caveman. By the way, a minute ago, did I say Bunker Down? Mm-hmm. I meant to say hunkered down. Is bunkered down even a thing? I feel like it should be more than hunkered down.
It makes more sense. Okay. I didn't even know. I heard you and made, like, I grasped that you said bunkered down. Right. But it's so natural that it didn't even seem wrong. Yeah. And our Georgia Bulldogs, what they say for them is hunker down, you hairy dogs. I'm going to start saying bunker down and everyone's just going to think I'm like a CIA plant or something. Right. A narc. Yeah.
Oh, I can't talk about the dogs right now. I know. Very disappointing. What a heartbreaker. Yeah. Okay. So you said something like that people back in Tuk-Tuk's age definitely slow down in the wintertime, right? Yeah. Your body just changes. And that's still the case with humans. We have not evolved out of that. There's been studies.
There was a 2015 study that found that the Simane in Bolivia and the San people in Namibia who are in no way, shape, or form related, one's in South America, one's in Africa, they both sleep longer in the winter and less in the summer. And you might say, like, well, duh, we all do that. That's exactly the point. There's some sort of biological mechanism.
There's some sort of, like I said, imperative where you, without... Conscious thought. And kind of without a choice, you slow down in the wintertime and you speed up more in the summertime. That's just what our bodies do. And because of this natural thing, it can go haywire, just like any other natural thing in humans. And when it does, that produces seasonal affective disorder.
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