Everyone feels sad, irritable, or tired at times termed to depression. Many people experience difficulty sleeping when they’re under stress. These are normal reactions to life stressors that typically pass within a few days.
Major depressive disorder is different. Though insomnia and fatigue are often the presenting complaints, people with depression experience depressed mood or loss of interest in normal daily activities for weeks at a time.
As the days get shorter and the weather colder, it’s hard to stay engaged in our normal interests. Everything from happy hour to hitting the gym starts to feel like a whole lot more work. And the couch? Well, that starts to look a whole lot more inviting.
It’s not just the cold weather sapping your mood. The lack of interest you feel during these coming months might actually be a symptom of something very real going on inside.
It’s called seasonal affective disorder, or SAD, and it’s a type of depression marked by the change of seasons and triggered by the decrease in daylight, explains David A. Greuner, M.D., a cardiovascular surgeon at NYC Surgical Associates, who frequently deals with patients with both heart disease and depression in his practice.
Experts aren’t exactly sure what causes seasonal affective disorder, but it might have to do with changes in your circadian rhythm—or your sleep-wake cycle—a drop of serotonin in your brain, an increase in levels of the hormone melatonin, or a lack of vitamin D, known as the sunshine vitamin. People with a family history of SAD, a history of another form of depression, and those living farthest from the equator seem to be at highest risk.
While there’s nothing you can do to make the days grow longer—except, of course, wait eagerly for spring—there are some things that can make the transition a little more painless.
“If you have struggled with SAD in the past, now is a good time to reinforce healthy habits and consciously prepare for the darker months ahead,” says Dr. Greuner.
Here 6 things you can do to make SAD suck just a little less:
1. SUNSHINE:
It’s not just your imagination: You really do feel better when the sun is shining.
According to a study on more than 16,00 adults, sunshine was the number one environmental factor linked to mental health. As the amount of sunshine a day increased with the season, mental health distress decreased.
2. EXERCISE:
Exercising is one of the most beneficial things you can do to keep your energy up and mood stable, and has been proven to have positive impact on those suffering from SAD. In fact, one week of cycling for an hour a day reduce SAD symptoms just as well as bright light therapy—more on that later—did, a study from Russia found.
3. GET A LIGHT BOX TREATMENT:
Light therapy can also be a great tool to help manage SAD. Light boxes can be purchased everywhere from Amazon—for instance, the Verilux HappyLight Liberty—to your local drugstore.
According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), most lightboxes filter out the harmful UV rays—which play a role in skin cancer development—and provide exposure of about 10,000 lux of cool-white light. That’s about 20 times more than the light you’d generally find indoors. Most people do this for 20 to 60 minutes per day.
4. EAT THE RIGHT STUFF:
You can get vitamin D from the sun, but too much of unprotected exposure can be harmful to your skin. That’s why the American Academy of Dermatology recommends you get your D from your diet.
One reason D is protective? It’s possible that vitamin D can help reduce inflammation, which has been linked as a possible contributor to depression.
5. GET ENOUGH SLEEP:
Regular sleep helps keep you on track and your mood balanced. In fact, people who struggle with insomnia and get less than the recommended amount of sleep a night are twice as likely to be depressed as people who sleep normally, a 2015 study in the Journal of Sleep Research found.
Short sleep with insomnia symptoms may trigger over-activity in your hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis, which is responsible for your stress response. This hyperactivity also has been linked to depression, the researchers say.
6. STICK TO A SCHEDULE:
Stick to your regular daily schedule, stay active and keep sleep-wake times as consistent as possible. Don’t feel too bad if you do take a day off from the gym or hit the snooze button to linger in bed a bit more the day after the change– just be sure to get back to your regular routine as soon as possible.
“It can take time for our bodies to adjust to the darker days but most people will eventually adapt to the new season,” says Dr. Greuner.