The Seasons & Mental Health
An impromptu encouragement for World Mental Health Day
Maybe you’re aware by now but today—October 10th—is, arbitrarily, World Mental Health Day. I only ever remember this because it was first observed in 1992, just twenty-four hours after I was born. When I learned this I thought it was rather funny that World Mental Health Day and I were such close birthday companions. At the time, I was deeply depressed and living with crippling anxiety.
I had no plans to put out an essay today, and then I got to thinking how much seasonality has always influenced my mental health—long before I knew “mental health” was a term. And also that this made me feel crazy.1 It was isolating and confusing to feel that way, which only contributed to my difficulty.
And I don’t think this is often talked about.
So here’s what I have to say:
Seasons and seasonal shifts influence our bodies and brains. For myself, this has greatly impacted my mental health. I am—you are—a human being with a perceptive, responsive system. Being affected by the seasons is not something to feel bad about, just something to be aware of and proactive about. I’d wager it’s actually even a reasonable reaction to a living, shifting world.2
Perhaps I’ve come to this work of writing about cyclical living and the seasons because I’ve long been aware of the sway the seasons held over me. I have very clear memories of being a teenager, walking alone down a back road in my hometown, and realizing the changing light of October made me sad. Even whilst I found beauty in how it was golden, glittering and a different slant than a week before, it created a sharp prick of what I could only call “sadness” right in the center of my being.
I instantly hated the feeling and thought it was pretty dumb. What’s wrong with me? I wondered. It’s just fall. Get over it.
But I did not just get over it, nor was it even a new experience for me. I have it on good authority (from my mother) that I’ve long struggled with the turn of the seasons. Her memory is that I started showing signs of difficulty with this change around age six.
Coming into adulthood, I’ve gotten very thrown by seasonal changes all through the year and I’ve really beat myself up for this.
It’s not just the dip into the darker, colder months that’s gotten me. The first warm, bright day of spring when you can start to smell the gas greening again can bring about a wave of melancholy for me. The height of summer can inspire more symptoms of depression in me than the depths of winter.
Likely you’ve heard about Seasonal Affective Disorder, or (kind of annoying called) SAD. It’s a mental health classification in the DSM-V.3 It’s a mood disorder, and the idea is that people with otherwise “normal” mental health quality experience depressive symptoms at the same time each year. And I’ve always felt like it just didn’t quite cut it.
Personally, SAD didn’t quite speak to the depth and breath of my experience. Nor did the typical treatments make much of a positive impact. I tried a happy light or whatever they’re called, and I didn’t stick to using it long enough to find out if it worked. Since the diagnosis didn’t seem to fit quite right, I had little motivation to continue the treatment. (Plus, I was depressed.)
Besides, it didn’t seem like a special light was what I needed when a warm spring breeze made me dissociate or overwhelmed by existence.
I’ll admit: I don’t think a reaction to seasonal changes or a particular seasons is unreasonable. I think it makes loads of sense, and not just in the ways you might expect.
I’ve realized for myself that a lot of what affects me are the subtle somatic changes inherent in seasonal shifts. That is, what we’re experiencing through our senses—and therefore the information we’re getting about our environment—transforms.
We see the light shift, sometimes in ways that feel drastic. The days are suddenly longer or shorter; the shadows fall differently in the evening. Our quantity of blue light intake may change.
The scents around us could be different. Right now, in early autumn, I can smell the hints of decay as the living world tucks itself back in for winter. Within my home, there’s suddenly the scent of candles burning, food roasting, the heat kicking on for the first time.
We might be met by new sounds. The windows might be open or closed, lawn care season might be increase loud noises, or there could be more or less bird calls.
What we touch and feel changes too: thin fabrics on our skin at one part of the year, thicker and heavy fabrics at another. We sweat, or we shiver.
Even if you’re not a fervent observer of seasonal eating, what you eat likely changes seasonally and that changes processes in your body. This is the time of more soups, stews, and a natural gravitation to warm food over cold. Maybe you think “pumpkin spice season” is basic or just a symptom of late stage capitalism, but it means people are having more warming spices: cinnamon, ginger, cardamom. Herbalism ascribes specific abilities and energetics to these spices. At any rate, if our fuel changes we change.
Lastly, how we move our bodies is impacted by the seasons. More walking or running, or less. A shift in time spent outside. Changes in our gym habits, or exercise routines. Using different muscles for different seasonal tasks. This could change our water consumption and hydration.
And that is just what I’ve been able to come up with in a few minutes.
We are not impervious to these changes. We shouldn’t be! Our bodies are evolved to take in all this sensory information and figure out what needs to be done about it in order to keep us alive. Now, living in brightly lit houses with a well stocked grocery store nearby, the stakes are not as high as they once were several hundred years ago. We don’t need to fatten up for winter, or dramatically change our habits because of a lack of daylight. But the physiological responses to change are still in place because they’ve been with us for hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. They’re why, as a species, we’re still here.
Perhaps too, in this culture so far removed from the “natural” world—the world that made us—there are changes and adaptions we need to implement during a seasonal shift that are not part of our repertoire or awareness any longer. We haven’t got the tools in our toolkit, as it were.
Why would this not influence our mental health?
I’ve found more peace in these times of change since I’ve done three things. One, I realized I have trouble at the turn of the seasons and I accepted that. No need to fight it. Two, I’ve started observing the seasons more and worked live embodied within them. Three, I sought professional help for my underlying mental health struggles and tried various therapies and medications, both pharmaceutical and plant.
To you, reader, I mostly mean to say: if you experience difficulty with the seasons, be kind to yourself. And be aware. You aren’t alone. You aren’t unreasonable or unhinged if a certain season or shift creates unease or disruption in your body and mind. I’ve been there too.
While a reaction to the seasons changing might not be unreasonable, there is no reason to live with untreated mental illness.
If in this season—or any—you find you’re experiencing more or new symptoms, please seek out support. Even if you think it’s seasonally connected doesn’t mean you should wait for the season to be over. You deserve to live as comfortably as you can within your own mind right now. I know it can be hard to have the bandwidth for it, but I think brainstorming things that will help, reaching out to someone for support, identifying a medication or plant medicine that might ease symptoms, and/or making an appointment with a mental health practitioner is always worth it.
I hope you can find a way to live well in every season.
As always, I would love to hear from you: How do the seasons affect you?
Links
Seasonality of brain function: role in psychiatric disorders
Protecting Your Mental Wellbeing as the Seasons Change, from Mental Health First Aid
Nurtured by Nature, from the American Psychological Association
Depression and Its Links to Seasonal Changes
Seasonal Shifts and Sensitivity
Is there someone you think might be helped by this essay? Maybe it send it their way and tell them you care about them?
That is the word I would have used at the time. Now, not so much. But that’s the vocabulary I had for it in the past.
Let it be known that I say all of this not as a mental health practitioner of any kind, but as someone who has been clinically diagnosed with anxiety and depression and struggled my way through to a better place.
I say this to be very clear that it’s a human made classification that changes with new editions of the DSM. Our understanding of it is not fix or 100% decided.