Beating the winter blues
Dark afternoons and cold mornings. Snow and rain fall relentlessly and the cup of hot chocolate or coffee in your hand is the only thing keeping you moving as you trudge to class. An incessant amount of homework. Take-out containers and cups piling up on your nightstand. Endless failed dates and mornings you chose to sleep in instead of going to the gym. A hopeless feeling that creeps in and won’t let go. It happens at the end of every fall semester. It’s seasonal depression.
The Mayo Clinic reported 44% of college students exhibit symptoms of seasonal affective disorder or seasonal depression, and 4 in 5 of those are women. The average onset range is 20-30 years old.
Mental health professionals on campus are a resource to reach out to if you, like countless fellow students, feel you’re drowning in assignments, exams, last-minute study sessions and never-ending to-do lists.
Monique Frazier, a staff psychologist in the USU Counseling and Psychological Center, identified seasonal depression as feeling depressed during the day, losing interest in activities, experiencing changes in appetite or weight, trouble sleeping and feeling hopeless.
“Seasonal depression has symptoms similar to regular depression, but it is more common to see a subset of symptoms with seasonal depression that include sleeping more than usual, weight gain, craving carbs, feeling groggy and sluggish,” Frazier said. “There’s a heaviness to it, like you’re dragging yourself around. There’s a physical nature to it, a physical feeling of heaviness. It can be hard to get up and get going.”
Frazier said the main goal of the CAPS office is to assist students statewide with their mental health through group, individual and crisis therapy. The office also does outreach to the USU community across all campuses on a variety of mental health topics.
“We went to keep Aggie students mentally well,” Frazier said.
There are two avenues they use to combat seasonal depression, she said.
“Biological and psychological,” Frazier said. “Under the biological category, the first line of evidence based treatment for seasonal affective disorder is bright light therapy.”
These lights can be found anywhere online or in stores, and depending on sleep habits and style, it is recommended that most people use bright light therapy in the morning. The light should be set up approximately 18 inches from the face for 15-20 mins.
“What happens with the bright light — when the light from the sun or from bright light therapy hits cells on the back of your retinas — it flips this switch on for the brain to start producing serotonin,” she said. “So, that’s the mechanism of the action for getting serotonin, which is a chemical associated with our mood.”
According to information provided by the CAPS office from “The Depression Cure” by Stephen Ilardi, the light of a bright sunny day is 100 times brighter than indoor lighting and even being outside on an overcast day is 3 times brighter than standard indoor lighting.
Frazier recommended consulting a doctor before using bright light therapy.
“The other biological piece that I look at in patients is their vitamin D, because we get some vitamin D from what we eat, but when the sun hits large patches of our skin, it converts sunlight to vitamin D,” Frazier said. “So in the winter, when we have next to no skin showing, the sun doesn’t convert as much vitamin D for us. So oftentimes, starting in October, we’ll start to see those levels get lower and lower. When vitamin D levels get too low, it mimics completely the symptoms of depression. I would call it fatigue-based depression.”
Consult with a doctor for proper dosage recommendations for vitamin D as well. “Psychologically, with it being darker outside, we want to hunker down and stay in,” Frazier said. “We tend to isolate more, and we tend to have less social interaction and that can feed depression. There’s also just the association we have with winter. It’s easy to have a bad attitude about winter, but if we think negatively about it, then it’s very likely we’re not going to be as happy in the winter.”
Frazier recommended bundling up and getting outside, no matter what. Her advice was to make commitments to get outside and be active.
A free workshop on seasonal affective disorder will be held through CAPS in January 2023. Information can be found on their website, https://www.usu.edu/aggiewellness/mental-health in the next few weeks.
Students can call and request a single therapy session or consultation through the website as well.