Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
I got in the water in the very early morning before the sun had risen and the water was pitch black. I started swimming and I felt the water hollowing out around me and felt like something really big was swimming below.
I'm Phoebe Judge and this is Love, a show about the surprising things that love can make us do. More than 100 episodes available now on This Is Love.
Does less daylight get you down?
It just gets really, really dark, and it can get really depressing. I should be in a bikini on a beach with a mojito in hand somewhere.
Yep, it's that time of year. Here in D.C., it's dark, the snow on the ground is dirty, and this cold weather will not let up.
It feels so... I feel like I get more irritable and generally feel like there's a gray cloud weighing on me. I tend to spend a lot more time alone and lose interest in being social and going out with friends. I don't mind the cold, actually. It's just it's the darkness and the dampness that are really tough to deal with.
When it gets dark at like 4 p.m., like you don't really want to then like go to the gym. The winter and the weather is telling you like it's time to go to bed now because you have to get up early and soak up all of the daylight hours that you can.
A lot of us feel this way. A poll from the American Psychiatric Association found that nearly half of Americans say their mood takes a dip in the winter. And 5% experience a really acute version of this, seasonal affective disorder.
It was a little difficult at first to differentiate because I have clinical depression and generalized anxiety disorder. So my moods were a little bit low, just... Compared to the next person, I've noticed more than other times of the year a real lack of motivation to do things, even indoor things.
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Chapter 2: What causes the winter blues and how do they affect us?
It's just a question of how many and how bad, how interfering are the symptoms. Seasonal affective disorder is the extreme end where it's clinical depression in certain seasons. Folks who have the winter blues have some of the symptoms, but not a clinical depression tied to the seasons.
And then there's the rest of us at a high latitude that have a few symptoms, like maybe we're a little bit more fatigued, our appetite changes with a preference towards carbohydrate-rich foods, we're moving a little bit slower, maybe socializing a little bit less, but not having significant symptoms that interfere with our life.
So the reason most of us can confer around the water cooler at work and talk about seasonal affective disorder is as something we can relate to. People have some symptoms. It's just a question of how many and how bad.
What's happening in our brains when the days get shorter?
So when the days are shorter, specifically when the sun is rising later in the winter months, our circadian clock is affected by that, by the long nights that we have in the wintertime.
Late lies the wintry sun abed. A frosty, fiery, sleepy head blinks but an hour or two, and then a blood-red orange sets again.
The circadian clock is the part of our brain that regulates our daily rhythms and things like alertness and our sleep rhythms so that when we have a longer night, the circadian clock gets kind of out of sync with the light-dark cycle and can make us feel kind of sloggy, especially in the morning when the alarm is going off and it's hard to get out of bed.
Before the stars have left the skies, at morning in the dark I rise, and shivering in my nakedness, by the cold candle bathe and dress. Robert Louis Stevenson, Wintertime.
It's because the brain is saying, wait a minute, it's still dark out. It's still time to be asleep. What is this? You want me to get up and get going now? It's a bit confused, this time of year. Temperature does play a smaller contribution.
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Chapter 3: When do winter blues transition into seasonal affective disorder?
It can have some side effects, usually mild things like eye strain, headaches, feeling a little bit wired up. Hmm. However, it can have some more serious side effects, things like an increase in thoughts about suicide, the possibility of a dangerously elevated mood state called mania or hypomania.
So these are among the reasons why it's important to do light therapy, at least when getting started under the supervision. of a mental health provider who can watch out for those side effects, help you address them and also get the dose just right. Because light therapy is not a one size fits all. There's no generic prescription.
You mentioned how antidepressant medications can help, just like when you're treating depression year-round. There's also cognitive behavioral talk therapy, which you've actually adapted specifically for seasonal affective disorder.
Tell me about that. If we break down the term cognitive behavioral therapy, we have cognitive. So we focus on thought patterns in CBT. We actually have people write them down, record their thoughts when they're feeling sad. And then they bring those data into session. And we ask a lot of questions like, what's the evidence for that thought? Is there any other way to see it to
Try to gently reframe some of those negative thoughts so that they're not wreaking as much havoc on mood. And in seasonal affective disorder, we see a lot of negative thoughts like, I hate winter.
Winter is awful.
I can't function at all during the winter months. And we can work on those kinds of thoughts using CBT as well. And then, of course, there's the B, the behavior and cognitive behavioral therapy. In winter depression, we see a lot of kind of passive behavior, people ruminating a lot, spending a lot of time on the couch, passively watching television.
So instead of doing that, which we know only feeds the depression, we try to get people to identify things that they can do in the winter that will bring a sense of joy and doing some of those things instead of going into what I call hibernation mode. Seeing people as a big part of the behavioral side of CBT, getting people engaged with their social networks,
so that they're seeing people and their social activities look more like they do in the summertime than going into this passive hibernation-like state that we know only makes the depression worse.
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Chapter 4: What are the symptoms of seasonal affective disorder?
So the darkness and the cold is seen as a time of year to be cozy, to slow down, to rest. The winter light is really seen as sluggish. special and magical and beautiful, which the winter light there is very special and unique. But really, they tend to orient towards the things that they like about the season instead of just sort of seeing it as a time of year to endure.
Yeah, you know, I've seen pictures of that time of year in Norway. And even though the sun doesn't rise, it's like this gorgeous, like, blue light. What was it like to experience that?
It is so magical. So the polar night, right, is this time of year where the sun doesn't rise directly above the horizon. And when you hear that the sun doesn't rise for two months, maybe like me, you're picturing total pitch blackness. But that's not what they get in Tromso. So first of all, they get a few hours of what's known as civil twilight each day.
So this is the same as that time right before the sun rises or just after it sets when the sun is still below the horizon. And so you have the sky that's pink and purple and deeply blue and yellow, you're getting these magnificent sunrise and sunset colors.
But instead of getting them for 15 or 20 or 30 minutes like we do in most places on Earth, you can get them for two or three or four hours as the sun is skirting below the horizon for a couple of hours each winter day. And then before and after that period, you have the blue hours. You look outside and it's somewhere between like a navy, a royal or a pale blue, depending on what time of day.
And it's really like something I have not experienced anywhere else on earth. And I think that people in Tromso really revel in and appreciate this extra special light that they get during the darkest days of the year. Winter in Tromso is uniquely magical, right? So you usually have a lot of snow so you can ski and snowshoe and snowmobile.
It's one of the best places in the world to see the Northern Lights. So you have the Aurora Borealis often dancing in the sky. The winter is the time of year that the whales come to the nearby fjords to feed. So you have whales. So there's all these things that, you know, it's giving Disney's Frozen, right? It's giving Anna and Elsa, right? It's extremely magical. But that said...
It still is a nighttime level of darkness for about 18 hours a day, right? It still is cold and blustery and wet and snowy. And so I think that the magic helps people there tap into the possibilities of winter. And I think this adapting to the winter really helps people enjoy it.
Yeah, it's like you can't just stay inside for that long of a time. You have to keep living. Why is getting out, even in bad weather, so important?
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Chapter 5: How does our brain respond to shorter days in winter?
Every animal slows down in the winter one way or another. And so I think it's very natural to feel more tired in the winter, to feel that call to slow down. But we have... deluded ourselves into thinking that we can and should be growing and producing more and more without breaks year round. And I think that there is a lot to be gained from instead embracing personal or natural seasons for
And rest and downtime and rejuvenation and recovery.
If someone wanted to adopt a more Nordic way of thinking about, you know, the seasons, what's a small ritual that they can borrow to start finding that beauty in the dark right now?
Big light off. So I live by big light off. So no overhead lights, just small lights, preferably candles, but also lamps. And this is something you'll see throughout the Nordics, right? If you go to some of the darkest places on earth, in Copenhagen, in Reykjavik, in Iceland... In the darkest times of year, you will not see homes that are brightly lit with every light on inside the house.
Instead, you will see homes that are lit with soft, glowing candles and lamps. And you know, it's kind of cliche winter advice, right? So if you wanna enjoy winter more, light a candle and then all your problems will go away. You'll be happy, like just light a candle. And obviously that's not exactly right.
But there is something to intentionally embracing the darkness that transforms something that feels like a burden into this opportunity for this cozy, moody, peaceful, restful lighting that will allow you to have a cozy evening, will help you sleep better, and will help you enjoy and embrace the winter.
That's it for this week. We have a show coming up about credit cards. How have they helped you? Has the debt held you back? Messed with your relationships? Give us a call at 1-800-618-8545 or email askvox at vox.com. And if you're a regular listener of this podcast, you can help us by becoming a Vox member. Members get a ton of cool perks, like listening to this episode ad-free.
Go to vox.com slash members to learn more. This episode was produced by Hadi Malwagdi and Avishai Artsy. Avishai also helped edit the show alongside Ginny Lawton. Fact-checking by Melissa Hirsch and engineering by David Tadashore. Our executive producer is Miranda Kennedy. I'm your host, Jonquan Hill. Thank you so much for listening. I'll talk to you soon. Bye!
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