What is Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) & How It Shows Up
Every year around the same time, the days get shorter, and a lot of people start to notice they aren’t feeling like themselves. Their alarm goes off and getting up feels nearly impossible. Their morning coffee isn’t even hitting the same. The evening starts to show up before the workday is even over, and the dark outside makes the whole day feel like it slipped away. Everything is pretty much the same as it was a couple of months ago in your life…but something’s off. It keeps being off, and it seems to match up with the changing season more than with anything happening in the person's actual life.
There's a good chance you've heard of something called seasonal affective disorder, or SAD. The term gets used a lot starting around this time of year, and it can be helpful to have a clear understanding of what it actually is, because the way people throw it around can be misleading.
What SAD actually is, and what it isn't
Seasonal affective disorder isn't its own standalone condition the way a lot of people assume and talk about it. In the DSM-V (TR), the manual clinicians actually use to diagnose things, there's no separate entry called "seasonal affective disorder." What does exist on paper is Major Depressive Disorder with a seasonal pattern, and SAD is just the everyday label for that. So when someone says they have SAD, what they're really describing is a form of depression that shows up at the same time each year, usually in fall and winter, and lifts when the season turns.
The label gets stretched to cover a huge range of experiences. On one end you have genuine clinical depression that happens to be seasonal. The same kind of depression that makes it hard to work, hard to be around people, hard to get through a day. On the other end of the spectrum, you have what most people mean when they say they have SAD: a very real but less drastic dip in their mood and ability to function. Lower energy, a little more time spent under the blankets, maybe a few more delicious carbs than usual. People have given that a bit of a nickname as well, the winter blues. It's pretty common, usually short-lived, and for a lot of people it never becomes anything more than an annoyance, not something that’s “diagnosable.”
How intense or impactful what your experience is changes what you might need to do about it. A rough couple of weeks in January is not the same thing as four months of not being able to function, and treating them as identical does nobody any favors.
How it tends to show up
What makes the seasonal version sneaky is that it doesn’t really present itself as sadness. People expect depression to feel like crying or despair. This usually feels more like the volume got turned down on everything. Everything is less enjoyable, more of a slog, just generally more blah.
Some people don't feel the impact of the season as low mood at all. They feel it as a productivity problem. A task that used to take an hour eats the whole morning and they stay late to try to make up for time lost from having difficulty focusing. They decide they've gotten lazy or soft, not that the shorter days have anything to do with it. For someone who's spent their life being the dependable one, that's a hard thing to believe about yourself.
For the parent running the household, winter stacks the deck against them with less daylight and more to manage like holidays and school breaks and everyone home and restless. They're shorter with the kids than they want to be, and are dragging by mid-afternoon. They figure it's just the way things are during this time of year, and they keep going, because stopping isn't really an option with the other people that are counting on them.
The person who'd never in a hundred years call this a mental health thing just goes flat. They’re more irritable than usual, having a couple more drinks in the evening, answering "how are you" with "good, busy" and not meaning “good” at all. Ask them if they’re depressed and they'd laugh it off. But the shorter days have taken something out of them and the people who live with them can see it before they see it themselves.
Same season, three different stories. The common thread is that none of them are likely to connect the dots on their own, because the change is gradual and it wears the disguise of an ordinary bad stretch.
Why it happens at all
You don't need a full biology lesson, but a little bit helps it make sense. When there's less light, the body's internal clock gets thrown off. Light is one of the main signals that clock runs on, and when the body starts to get different signs, the timing of sleep and wakefulness can start to shift, sometimes dramatically. The chemistry that regulates mood and that regulates sleep both get knocked out of their usual pattern. That's why the typical seasonal pattern tends to feel physical: sleeping more but never feeling rested, wanting starchy comfort food, a feeling of heaviness that isn’t just emotional and may in fact be mostly physical.
It also tends to be worse the farther north you live, where winter days can become extraordinarily short. Some people may feel that they can just push through the change; but they should understand that it's a nervous system responding to a real change in the environment and not a willpower issue.
What actually helps
The good news is that the seasonal dip responds to a handful of ordinary things, and most of them are fairly accessible.
Light is the big one. Getting outside early in the day, even for ten minutes, even when it's gray, does more than people expect. Morning light in particular helps reset the clock better than just staying indoors and looking out a window. For some people a light therapy lamp, used in the morning, makes a noticeable difference, and it's a low-risk thing to try. Even sitting near a window while you work beats sitting in a windowless corner. If you want to try the light therapy lamp, check with your doctor to make sure there aren’t any reasons that it might negatively impact your medications or other health issues.
Movement can help a lot. A short walk can be wonderfully impactful. The point isn't to overhaul your fitness in the darkest month of the year, it's to give the body a bit more what it's missing and let it lift your mood a little in the process. Keeping some structure to sleep matters as well, since the whole problem started when time itself felt like it was changing. Going to bed and waking up around the same time gives it something steady to anchor onto.
Staying connected to people is something that’s overlooked when dealing with this. The pull of the season is toward the couch and away from other people. The withdrawal tends to make the dip worse rather than help it. You don't have to be social in a big way like going to a party. A standing coffee with a friend, a phone call you'd put off, is enough to keep you from disappearing into the dark half of the year.
Understanding what’s going on can be helpful too. When the person that feels like they’re running on empty at work realizes the season is having this impact and not their own inadequacy, the self-blame can ease up a lot. When the parent acknowledges it out loud instead of pushing through in silence, the people around them can actually help. Understanding what's happening doesn't fix it, but it can help to take away the extra weight of thinking something is wrong with you specifically.
When it's more than the blues
The coping steps above can be an excellent starting place for the milder end of what we’re talking about, the winter blues, and most of the time just some coping and connection is enough to get someone through it.
But if the low mood is deep, if it lasts most of the day for weeks, if it's making work or relationships genuinely hard, if the person can't enjoy anything or is pulling away from everyone or having thoughts that scare them, that's past the point where a light lamp and a morning walk are the answer. That's the seasonal pattern of depression in its fuller form, and it should be addressed the same way any depression would. There's no prize for waiting to see if it passes.
Most people who feel worse in winter are somewhere in the middle, and it can be hard to tell from the inside how serious it is. If you're not sure, that uncertainty is itself enough of a reason to talk to someone. The season will eventually turn as it always does. But nobody has to white-knuckle their way through the dark months just because the calendar says they should be fine.
Other Suggested Blog Posts: When "shoulds" lead to shame, Life's great why am I depressed, How therapy helps with depression
Written by Hunter Cook, MSML, LPC/MHSP (S), LPC, LCMHC
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