health

Shorter days affect your mood: How to avoid the winter blues

15 Comments
By Lina Begdache

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Actually I can get more sun during the winter than the summer. If you go out in the summer, you will be cooked. At least in the winter, you don some heavy threads and you can spend time outside. I'm planning on having some BBQ in the back yard on the milder winter days.

4 ( +4 / -0 )

I think part of the 'winter blues' could also be to excessive Christmas shopping rushes. In North America there's Thanksgiving and then Christmas is coming and we have this image of a 'happy family' where everything falls into place. Yet for many people that's a myth. Anything can happen. People want to go home or go visit a relative or loved one and airports get jammed up due to weather (and you have to race like hell to get the time off and everything reserved), bad weather delays everything, and so on and so on....

Everybody wants to have the season turn out perfect, we have this pressure to 'get it right' and we put it on ourselves. Then comes New Year celebrations and then.......

You have the rest of winter to mentally 'crash' and you can guess the rest.

3 ( +3 / -0 )

I think mood swings due to seasonal daylight fluctuations are influenced by genetics. We have some Scandinavian DNA, and I love long nights. I also love long days, and have no trouble sleeping in either daytime or nighttime. My theory is that people in the far north have adapted to long swings in daytime and nighttime hours.

2 ( +4 / -2 )

Born in a tropical country I have lived in eastern Canada for three quaters of my life. From my first experience of winter, I have been in love with winter. Winter is my favourite season and I absolutely hate summer. I ride my bicycle 365 days each year. On getting up in the morning and before going to bed, I melt 6 trays of ice cubes in a large salad bowl of water and, after scrubbing my entire body with a dry Salux nylon towel made in Japan I throw two salad bowls of freezing waterover my head and body giving me feelings of extacy best described as cold orgasms then, with Wolfgang my pet dog I ride to the park perform a slow exercise with an oak pole. In the evening I also throw the two salad bowls of water over my head before going to bed. I sleep like a baby. At the end of January, 2030, I shall be receiving a letter from Canada's Governor General congratulating me for having reached my first birthday with three figures.

1 ( +3 / -2 )

How to avoid the winter blues.....Listen to 'classical music' instead.

0 ( +1 / -1 )

Virusrex

i wish you’d follow the science rather than some guy on YouTube or social media.

Vitamin D is related o the Winter Blues and has been studied.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9539254/

-1 ( +3 / -4 )

falseflagsteveDec. 9  10:43 pm JST

Vitamin D is related o the Winter Blues and has been studied.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9539254/

Excellent point.

As your medical research source notes:

Results on a self-report measure showed that vitamin D3 significantly enhanced positive affect and there was some evidence of a reduction in negative affect

The article we as non-medical professionals are commenting on here is the opinion of only 1 health professional.

But since the article clearly talks about mood it is surprising Vitamin D is not mentioned.

-1 ( +2 / -3 )

Do you have a scientific study concluding that less than forty people is not proof of efficacy? Otherwise, thst isn not an opinion based in science and just represents your personal bias,

The scientific consensus is the one that has not arrived at the conclusion that vitamin D is an efficient way to improve the mood, it is not my claim that a single study of few participants is not enough evidence to modify this consensus, the fact that no institution of science (nor the expert on this article) say this is a proven treatment for this specific problem is the argument.

You can disprove it by bringing references where this recommendation is given and supported by scientific references, if not that means you are accepting this is not enough evidence for the claim. Even the authors of that report say the same thing by making it clear that their results only support better studies to confirm this possibility. What data do you have to disprove the own authors of the study?

 is not surprising if you don't read the article

And what makes you think this? nothing in the comment is based on not reading the article. The "proven relationship" is a claim that has not been proved, specially by a single exploratory and small study about it. For that you would require references where institutions include this in their recommendations.

Do you have these references? because your appeal to yourself as an authority would not be enough.

-1 ( +0 / -1 )

Vitamin D is related o the Winter Blues and has been studied.

A study in less than forty people is not proof of efficacy, it is as much an indication that this could merit further study, and the lack of corroboration in 20 years is a heavy indication that publication bias have left results of a relatively easy replication unpublished because of negative results.

This article is talking about things proved beyond any doubt to be effective, vitamin D is not one of them.

The article we as non-medical professionals are commenting on here is the opinion of only 1 health professional.

If you make an appeal to your own, personal, lack of knowledge in the topic (obviously not knowing what other people are, or know apart from yourself) then you are recognizing you can't disqualify the opinion of the professional that wrote the article, you appeal disproves your claim.

So no, it is not surprising that an article talking about proven measures for mood improvement during winter do not talk about vitamin D or any of the other dozens of things that may or not help but that have not been proved to do so.

-2 ( +0 / -2 )

'Mood' is a psychological thing. There are no studies, to my knowledge, that say otherwise. Get your brain in order. That means control it. Buddha said the same thing, but in other words. Get a life, people! It starts with your attitude, helped by a decent diet and exercise, and some good friends. Otherwise, run off to the woods and lay down to die.

-2 ( +0 / -2 )

I'm incredibly surprised vitamin D wasn't mentioned, especially as it helps protect against covid:

The article clearly talks about mood not general health, vitamin D or covid are not related to what is discussed by a nutritional neuroscientists, which explain why they are not mentioned.

-3 ( +4 / -7 )

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