Feeling SAD?

These days, the weather is as pathetic as BC fans at Agganis. If you've been holed up in StuVi2 all winter long, there might be a reason for your sudden cases of the sads...

Visualize the scene: you drift back to consciousness from a solid night’s sleep and stretch luxuriously under layers of covers.

You smile to yourself as the events of the past few days filter through your mind: that internship you’ve been wanting for ages is finally yours, the guy with whom you’ve been shamelessly flirting for weeks called last night (just in time for Valentine’s Day, too!) and due to your industriousness during the week, you have a whole weekend of nothing but whatever you feel like doing just waiting for you to get out of bed and get started.

As you sit up and reach for your sweatpants, you freeze, mid-stretch. Snow swirls by the window under a grey sky, and judging by the appearance of the trees across the road, winds are averaging somewhere around 70 mph.

A feeling of dread inexplicably settles over you, and you slowly lay back down, pulling the covers back up.

Suddenly, you don’t even want to think about your internship. “I don’t know what possessed them to hire me,” you think. “I have nowhere near enough experience—I’m going to get fired on the first day.”

Meanwhile, another nasty little voice whispers, “He probably only called last night because everyone else he called before he tried me was busy.”

As you pull the covers all the way over your head and roll over to go back to sleep, you wonder for a split second what exactly happened here—two seconds ago, you were overjoyed; now you don’t even want to get out of bed.

The answer may very possibly lie with Seasonal Affective Disorder. Seasonal Affective Disorder, or SAD, is a form of depression that generally strikes during winter months (from September or October until April or May,) but in rare cases can also arise during summer months.

Symptoms include feeling sad or anxious, a loss of interest in things you usually enjoy, craving sugars or carbs, weight gain, increased amount of time spent sleeping, daytime fatigue, and social withdrawal.

According to WebMD.com, “anyone can get SAD, but it is more common in people who live in areas where winter days are very short or there are big changes in the amount of daylight in different seasons, people between the ages of 15 and 55, people who have a close relative with SAD, and women.”

The main difference between SAD and regular depression is SAD’s correlation with the changing seasons, a fact that often makes it hard to differentiate from normal depression.

Though it is not known for sure what causes SAD, it is believed that the lack of sunlight during winter months is a primary factor. Many experts believe that the lack of light disrupts the circadian rhythms of the body and that it may also decrease production of serotonin (a substance in the body that is increased by anti-depressants.)

However, light therapy has been shown to alleviate the symptoms of SAD and is the main treatment prescribed for sufferers of the disorder. According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), treatment using bright white fluorescent light equivalent to early morning full daylight for 20 to 60 minutes a day (depending on the intensity of the light) has been shown to reverse the winter depressive symptoms of SAD.

The lights are encased in a box with a diffusing lens, which is then placed on a tabletop stand that raises it to eye level. This arrangement “illuminates the bottom half of the retina, which is rich in photoreceptors that are thought to mediate the antidepressant response,” according to nami.org.

Studies have shown that between 50% and 80% of people who use light therapy experience almost complete remission of SAD symptoms.

So if you’ve been feeling a bit off-color in the recent months past, don’t fret—you are not by any means the only person with the winter blues, and if you find your symptoms are getting in the way of everyday life, treatment is available. And as always, the best treatment of all is perhaps the knowledge that spring is just around the corner...