The thread in MPSIMS about SAD reminded me that I’d been thinking about asking a question: is there an opposite to SAD?
Personally, I prefer grey skies and short days, especially with snow coming down. That’s my perfect type of weather. A perfect day is when it’s grey and it’s difficult to tell when the horizon changes to the grey-purple sky, and then it’s all dark by 4.30 pm.
What bothers me, especially in January, are bright afternoons. I literally get anxious when I’m out and about on those types of days in January and February, after the grey days of November and December. I gradually get over the anxiety from bright days by April.
Is this sort of reaction to bright days common, as SAD seems to be for some?
Poking around on Google, it looks like it doesn’t have a widely accepted name like SAD does. Some call it summer depression. Others call it reverse-SAD or summer-SAD. The Mayo Clinic just lumps both under SAD - after all, the S in SAD is for seasonal, not summer. The Mayo Clinic’s web site does list symptoms specific to fall-winter SAD and symptoms specific to spring-summer SAD.
One of the pages I looked at said that it occurs at roughly 1/10th the frequency of SAD, so not as common, but then not completely rare either.
Endless days of brilliant sun and heat depress me. The glare makes my head ache. The heat makes me feel sick, and I stay indoors all day to escape it. I can’t sleep in the heat without air conditioning. Then the huge electric bill depresses me even more!
I’m far happier in the winter when it’s cold and damp and gray.
My people were Norwegian, so I want to think that that has something to do with it.
I don’t know. My daughter, now 31 years old, truly believes she belongs in Seattle. Not because she knows anything about how nice Seattle is or isn’t. She just knows that it rains there all the time, and she desires that. She’s a southern California girl. Sunshine and moovee stars. She just wants it to rain.
Depends on whose summer. We were in Manitou Springs, on the edge of the Front Range, where it was in the upper 80s and not too bad. The next day, we headed east and had to stop for gas at, like, Quinter, about 60 miles into Kansas. I got out of the air-conditioned car and, wham, I could not breathe. I mean, it was some three thousand feet lower, so there was plenty more oxygen, but it was all hiding behind water molecules in the air. Summer tends to be far more tolerable west of the Great Plains.
Tell her to try Eureka. They have seriously depressing weather. We were there in the middle of July and it got up to a blistering 65°. That is, after the fog burned off, around 4:30 in the afternoon. Seattle gets actual summer, and even the Oregon coast gets warmer than Eureka. And besides, the PNW is already over-saturated with Californians.
Happened again this weekend. Sunday morning and early afternoon, it was heavily overcast, looked like it could snow a fair bit, skies were purple grey. Clan Piper went out for a walk, threw snowballs, built snow forts. Just a great morning.
Then all afternoon I started feeling antsy and anxious. Good mood was gone and I was worried. Not about anything in particular.
Looked out the window behind me and realized the weather had changed. It was now a bright, bright day, with the sun shining in off the banks of snow, straight into my room. Weird and depressing.
Light levels affect how “down” or “up” your body, brain and mind are. While the “down” is pretty simple in making for low mood and energy, the “up” has at least 2 possible channels: Good mood/energy or threat/aggression. In your case, it gets channeled into an amorphous impression of a threat in the form of anxiety. The light causes too much gain (and thereby self-noise) in the threat perception circuits of your brain.
I opened this thread sort of expecting it to be looking for an ‘opposite’ in the sense of uplifted state in winter, rather than depressed state in summer.
The Norwegians do seem to have a term for that - koselig.
(I don’t want to downplay the involuntary, chemical side to SAD of course - maybe it’s truer to say that *koselig *is a cultural remedy for SAD)
… and I always wonder what good clothing for a blizzard is.
I could just as well ask about good clothing for a hurricane or thunderstorm, I suppose, but this is about winter, so I’ll ask about blizzards: What is good clothing for zero-visibility blowing snow creating drifts taller than you are? Because if there’s a magic parka which will ensure I can always see through whiteout conditions, I’d like to know about it.
Of course, where I live now, blizzards aren’t really a concern. Neither are serious thunderstorms, though they do happen. And I know what good clothing for fire season includes: A respirator, googles, and, if you get too far into it, a mylar blanket and an emergency beacon.
