Moods can change with the seasons—often quite dramatically—but these changes also have meaning
Winter in New York City is not fun for anyone. You bundle up and hunker down. The sun flees behind a layer of clouds, confined to only eight hours in the sky—the same eight hours you might be at your office or otherwise too busy to enjoy the winter’s limited sunlight. During this time of year, some people experience increased feelings of depression, social withdrawal, and decreased energy levels. Psychiatrists posit this is due to changes in our circadian rhythm, reduced levels of serotonin, and increased levels of melatonin that come with less exposure to sunlight. This is what mental health professionals often refer to as seasonal depression or seasonal affective disorder (SAD).
In many ways, it’s easier to write off feelings of depression or sadness in the winter as something as straightforward as a lack of exposure to sunlight. To be clear, a lack of sunlight does have a real impact on well-being. It can be hard to keep up with the demands of a busy life and modern world when your body is telling you to hibernate and store energy. I’m an advocate of making sure you get outside when the sun is out (even on those 20-degree days) and even upping your dose of antidepressants if need be.
However, much is lost when you do these things in the service of brushing the winter blues off as a passing season with nothing more to tell you. Maybe it’s not seasonal depression. Maybe it’s a season of your life where you have enough space and time to work through your sadness and actually do something about it.
As life gets quieter in the winter, listen to what the winter blues are trying to tell you
January, February, and March—the months after the holiday rush—are a time when most people’s lives get quieter. They are quiet for just long enough for sadness over a loss, loneliness, or any other challenge life throws at you to finally pipe up and take the stage. In winter, parts of yourself that were more buried under distracting stimuli poke out their heads and beg you to reckon with them.
Depression—or chronic feelings of sadness—often has a root cause: a thing or things that are well worth being sad about, a thing or things you never got to fully grieve, or even deep-rooted self-esteem issues that emerge with more force after being shuffled away by the rush of the summer and fall. Instead of spending your February sitting in front of a “happy light,” it can be helpful to delve into what your sadness is trying to tell you. Maybe there is an unmet need in your life that you need to figure out how to meet. Maybe you feel socially isolated and need to invest time and energy to build a community.
Sadness is a healthy and productive (if painful) part of being human
Sadness is a normal and healthy, if painful and at times even debilitating, part of being human. The reality is there are things in the world and in your life worth being sad about. Sadness is also productive in that it is a process with an end goal. That isn’t to write off individuals' struggle with deep depression as something “normal” that they must learn to “live with," but rather to offer that once you connect your suffering to the source, that suffering might be in service of something: healing. The end goal of sadness is to integrate and make sense of the thing causing you pain so that you can have more peace and life with less pain—or at least, can live in a way that isn’t using so much energy constantly trying to deny the pain. You mistreat these feelings (and yourself) when you don’t allow yourself to be sad in whatever way and for as long as you need.
Instead of brushing off the feelings of sadness, give space to that sadness—feel it, acknowledge it, grieve it, and sit with it. In doing so, you are honoring and validating those painful realities that you live with. So much psychic dysfunction comes from denying things that deeply harm(ed) and upset you.
So how do you give space to sadness?
Giving space to sadness can look different for everyone, whether making art that represents and honors the feeling, crying, yelling, or simply sitting on the couch and allowing your body to feel the sensation of sadness for as long as it stays present. Coming to therapy every week and spending time talking about and feeling those feelings is a good way to give space to sadness. Throughout your normal day, you often have to push your own feelings aside to meet a deadline or take care of a loved one. In therapy, you invite these feelings in without hurrying them away. Doing this with a therapist can also make it easier to stay present with these feelings as there is another person present to hold the feeling with you.
When you honor and make space for the truth of your feelings like sadness, you start the essential process of integrating them and hopefully, working through them toward more health. If you sit with and give space to sadness this winter, maybe next winter your sadness won’t be quite so intense—and maybe some of it will be more healed, integrated, and accepted.
