What Is Seasonal Affective Disorder?

What Is Seasonal Affective Disorder?

Early on in my blogging adventure, I wrote a post about what Seasonal Affective Disorder is and my experience with this condition. You can read it here: “Why Am I S.A.D.?”

Seasonal Affective Disorder (often called S.A.D.) is a mood disorder that most often affects people during the fall and winter months when there is less sunlight. It can be mild, with a person feeling a little sad or down, but it also can be quite serious. About 5% of Americans experience this, but it hangs around for close to 40% of the year. That’s a long time to have the “winter blues”.

But SAD is not your typical winter blues. The symptoms are similar to depression and can be intense and overwhelming. It can completely interrupt your day and make it so you can’t even function like you normally would. The way you feel, think, and how you handle daily activities can really be affected. Does this sound like you? Read on to see if you identify with the physical symptoms.

What Are The Symptoms?

Everyone with SAD experiences it a little differently. You may have only one or two of these symptoms or maybe you can relate to all of them.

Is your energy zapped and you want to sleep a lot (kind of like hibernation), even when you go to bed early or sleep in? Fatigue, in my opinion, is the most common symptom. Right up there with it is weight gain. You may find that you’re craving carbs. (Great…like I need another excuse to eat bread, pasta, or desserts!)

You may be feeling sad and depressed, worthless or guilty, and agitated and irritable. Activities you love doing are suddenly no longer interesting and you would rather be alone. Concentration and focus may escape you and decision making is difficult. People who are deeply afftected even have thoughts of death or suicide. If this last one is you, please, please, shut down your computer right now and call your doctor!

Is there treatment for Seasonal Affective Disorder?

The good news is YES, there are ways to treat Seasonal Affective Disorder. Again, different things will work for different people, so consult your doctor for a SAD diagnosis and about what’s best for you. Talking with a therapist can help. Your doctor may prescribe an antidepressant.

What was recommended to me, and what I swear by, is Light Therapy. Again, though, consult your doctor.

What’s Light Therapy?

Light therapy is when you sit close to a “light box” or a “mood light” for a certain period of time each day. This is quite a bright light…10,000 lux (lux is the measurement of light intensity), which is just about 100 times brighter than ordinary indoor lighting. For comparison’s sake, being outside on a bright sunny day gives you about 50,000 lux.

What I found is that using the light is definitely therapy, meaning you can’t just do it once and expect to feel better. That used to upset me, but I’m just impatient and want things to work instantly. I learned that I had to be consistent. My favorite discovery is that I can also use that time to get some uniterrupted reading in. Introverts tend to LOVE reading!

While light therapy is absolutely not going to cure SAD, reports say that people have felt relief of their symptoms as early as 2-3 days of use.