Nobody Has Seasonal Affective Disorder

Several billion years ago, a cosmic accident occurred that would eventually make some of us periodically unhappy. According to scientists, an gargantuan space object hit the earth during its formation, knocking it into a tilted, wobbly spin, which is the reason there’s a summer and a winter.

Under this strange condition, Earth’s creatures evolved and thrived. Eventually, some of them became philosophers and poets, who described this condition and its meaning to the rest of us. They noticed the way the sun’s arc changed throughout the year, and mused about the flamboyant moods and cycles of nature. They admired summer’s golden daffodils and shy sumacs, and lamented winter’s specter-grey frost and northward-thronging robins, probably unaware that the changing seasons aren’t some universal system of order, but a peculiar and convoluted local side-effect of two large rocks having collided long ago.

So we have a thing we call winter, whose days tend to be low in certain mood-improving qualities (light, warmth) and high in certain mood-diminishing qualities (cold, isolation). This sends many people into a compromised state for some of the year, until their part of the planet wobbles its way back around into the thicker light. So it goes.

Not everyone gets this thing we call Seasonal Affective Disorder. I think I do, but how would I know for sure? It could be that I dislike Christmas shopping so much that my mood withers every December, or that I go for fewer walks when sidewalks are icy, or that Terry’s Chocolate Orange inflames my frontal cortex. There are a thousand variables that could potentially tilt the mood equation towards bleaker feelings during this part of the year.

Given the uncertainty implied by that many variables, I looked up how a person is supposed to determine that their mood shift is because of SAD, and not, say, because they really miss Major League Baseball, or because they’re no longer getting certain phytochemicals from their backyard-grown kale, or anything else.

Apparently the litmus test for Seasonal Affective Disorder is that “your mood suffers along with the season change.” A doctor can try to rule out other, non-calendar-associated causes with tests, but there’s no way to test for SAD.

The more I read about it, the more I get the sense that SAD isn’t really a thing, it’s just a label to describe the tendency for some people to get depressed and anxious in winter, regardless of the (perhaps untraceable) particular factors behind it. Seemingly, SAD is just what you call it when nothing particularly explains your winter funk.

I can see why they would want to give a name to a fuzzy and general tendency like SAD, even if it isn’t a categorical, testable thing, like pregnancy or gangrene is a thing. If you have a name for a group of symptoms, some of the interventions that helped one person with those symptoms might be likely to help someone else.

So there’s definitely an upside to naming things like that. Without this idea of SAD, it might not have occurred to me that sunlight exposure is something I might want to seek on purpose, or that my winter funk might be a perspective shift driven by inner chemical influences, rather than life objectively getting worse.

The downside to naming this disorder, or naming anything really, is that it gives you a narrowed view of what it is and what should be done about it. There are three main treatment recommendations for SAD: light therapy, psychotherapy, and medication. So if I think of my problem as SAD, those are the things I should do. I bought a light box thing, I’ll go back to therapy if it gets really bad, and for now I’d rather avoid medication and its side effects. So I hope the light box thing works.

However — if I drop the whole Seasonal Affective Disorder idea, and think of my winter funk as a nameless, infinitely complex product of countless variables, which it undoubtedly is, my approach would be different.

I’d get some better inputs going on in many areas of life. I’d get more social activity for one thing, which admittedly has been lacking. I know I’ve been eating fewer vegetables since my local CSA program ended in October. It’s true that I’m not walking much, I’m leaving the house later in the day, and I’ve let random items pile up on my dresser. My winter coat is a bit ratty and I don’t feel great in it. I don’t even think I’m drinking enough water, which is perhaps the lowest-hanging fruit of all. And I need a haircut.

I’m pretty sure all of these things would help, and each could have knock-on effects that would also help. A haircut would absolutely improve my outlook, which would improve my interactions, which would improve my mood and lead to a greater variety of activity. Just what the doctor ordered, so to speak, at least. I don’t think a haircut is ever officially indicated for SAD.

Reality Doesn’t Care What You Call It

I wrote this post up to the above paragraph and then ended up not writing anything for about fifteen days. I just couldn’t get into the writing headspace, which happens, especially while in a general funk of some sort. In the meantime, on a hunch I filled an entire week with social plans, and did things with a bunch of different people.

The funk improved drastically over about two days. Seeing people seemed to trigger a flood of some missing enzyme into my bloodstream, and the cloud lifted. Does this mean I don’t have SAD? I have no idea. I’m not sure the same thing would always work. Maybe it will come back as soon as I eat a Terry’s Chocolate Orange, or make eye contact with an Elf on the Shelf.

Concepts can be useful, but they mainly restrict our view of what’s happening. When you tag something as X in the mind, you stop considering things that don’t apply to X. I guess this is what Don Miguel Ruiz means when he says words are magic spells.

After all, nothing really has a name. Names are crude, low-resolution add-ons that only exist on the level of human thought. Reality doesn’t care what you call it; it will remain its complex and ineffable self. It isn’t relevant to an alligator, a 250-million-year-old creature, that a subgroup of a subgroup of primates started verbally referring to them as “alligators” 500 years ago.

Concepts should be held loosely, because they’re nowhere near as complex as the reality they’re supposedly explaining. Not by many orders of magnitude. They have no truth value in themselves, they just point you to some possibilities, while simultaneously pointing you away from other possibilities.

Another relevant example: until about a year ago, I had always believed I was an “introvert,” because that’s what you’re supposed to call shy, reserved people who always want to go home. Because I accepted that descriptor, I tended to self-isolate when I felt bad, because that’s how my people re-energize themselves, as I understood it. It’s certainly what I felt like doing. Yet, despite my history of shyness, it turns out I’m more often re-energized by social activity, and drained by too much alone time, which is almost the definition of extrovert. I wish I had dropped the introvert label the moment I heard it.

Those kinds of concepts, which are generally accepted and traded in, are so crude and fuzzy that nobody should identify with them. Consider them, sure, but don’t think the reality to which they refer is made of categories like that. Nobody has Seasonal Affective Disorder. The term might point you to some things you should consider, but it is literally just a term, made up by some people so they could point to a vague shape they keep seeing in the murk. Just like “alligator.”

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Photos by Showkat Chowdhury, Freepik, Erin McKenna, and Kyaw Tun