Nov. 22, 2024 – On Dec. 9, 1965, a TV holiday special called A Charlie Brown Christmas made its debut on CBS and introduced the world to a mental health topic that rarely if ever got discussed between therapists and their patients.
“I think there must be something wrong with me, Linus,” Charlie admitted to his friend. “Christmas is coming, but I’m not happy. I don’t feel the way I’m supposed to feel.”
It wasn’t just holiday blues that were giving Charlie Brown a sense of vague melancholy. The animated kid may have had what we now describe as seasonal affective disorder, or SAD, a form of clinical depression that usually strikes during the darker, colder winter months. At least 11 million people in the U. S. alone struggle with SAD, though the actual number could be far higher because it’s so infrequently diagnosed or treated.
A compelling study published earlier this year in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science was described by one of its co-authors as a “call to arms,” encouraging professional peers to dig deeper into the influence of seasons on human psychology. The study cast a broad net across research over the last few decades to find out “what’s out there, and what do we actually know,” said the co-author, Michael Varnum, PhD, an associate professor of psychology at the relatively warm and sunny Arizona State University. “We found some stuff that was really surprising.”
He and his colleagues – Ian Hohm and Mark Schaller of the University of British Columbia, and Alexandra Wormley of Arizona State – uncovered studies showing that the seasons could be affecting everything from our attention and memory to our willingness to be selfless, and even our color preferences. But the existing research just scratches the surface, Varnum said. His hope is that psychologists finally start “taking more serious interest” in what he calls seasonal psychology, or how seasons influence our mood and behavior.
From Folk Myth to Serious Disorder
In my childhood, during the ’70s and ’80s, seasonal depression was largely considered a folk myth, as realistic as the drawings in A Charlie Brown Christmas. I’m convinced my father suffered from it. We lived in northern Michigan, where the winters were long and gloomy. Every December, just like clockwork, my father’s mood would plummet. He would spend days in bed, telling us only that he felt “sad for no particular reason.”
When he tried talking about it with his doctor or therapist, they always told him the same thing. “It’s in your head,” they said. “If you were really depressed, it wouldn’t disappear during the summer. Nobody likes the cold or dark, but you can’t wallow in self-pity.”
They sent my father on his way with a prescription for valium and advice to “look on the bright side.” At age 60 – ironically, on the 35th anniversary of A Charlie Brown Christmas – he died of a massive heart attack. I can’t say if the two things are related. But every December when the winter takes hold and I watch A Charlie Brown Christmas again, I think about him, and his seasonal blues that nobody took seriously.
Varnum takes it all seriously. “Seasons are this ubiquitous part of life,” he said. “We talk about them, we have lay intuitions and ideas about them. But it seemed not a big area of focus in psychology.” Sometimes, he said, “we get these blinders on as scientists. It’s like we take our normal human being hat off when we get to the university or the lab. And the stuff we experience, it’s like we forget it exists or that it’s worthy of study. But maybe these shifts in climate and weather and sunlight are actually having some interesting and profound effects on the ways we think and act and feel.”
The term seasonal affective disorder is relatively new. It was first coined in a 1984 paper by psychiatrist Norman E. Rosenthal and his co-researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, MD, who wrote that the condition was generally marked “by hypersomnia, overeating, and carbohydrate craving.”
Attempts to explain SAD have sometimes felt like researchers are throwing darts in the dark. There have been studies suggesting women or people with neurotic personalities are more likely to get it, and that winter makes us more likely to consume porn. A 2011 study from Cornell University analyzed hundreds of tweets from 84 countries and found that social media users picked less positive words during winter months. There’s even been some research, like this 2016 study from Auburn University, that suggests seasonal depression doesn’t exist at all.
That kind of dismissal has “devalued the condition in science circles,” said Hester Parr, PhD, who studies mental health and SAD as a researcher at the University of Glasgow (winter solstice sunset: 3:44 p.m.). “It explains why general practitioners won’t use the term.”
But that tide has been shifting, said Brian O’Shea, PhD, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Nottingham who recently co-authored a study investigating how moral values often change with the seasons. Analyzing responses from more than 230,000 Americans over a decade, they found that values like group cohesion and conformity tend to be stronger during the autumn and spring months. “Psychology is a relatively young field,” O’Shea said. “Researchers are more motivated to test whether seasonal impacts on human behaviors are simply folk myths or valuable cultural wisdom.”
Just as important as the research is how we treat these seasonal shifts in mood. My father, who died in the late ’90s, never got much treatment for his seasonal depression beyond pills and pep talks. Some researchers have suggested that the reduced light during winter months interferes with the body’s “circadian rhythm” and that light therapy, which mimics the sun with artificial lights, might be able to reverse it. But there’s mounting evidence that this isn’t true, from ’90s research showing that SAD happens more often on the East Coast of the United States than in Iceland – where there are only five hours of sunlight during December – and a critical 2019 study that argued light therapy’s effectiveness is “limited” at best.
Ten years ago, health psychologist Kari Leibowitz discovered the tenuous connection between sunlight and SAD during a yearlong stay in Tromsø, Norway, a city that sees no sun whatsoever during the “polar night” between mid-November and mid-January. Coming from New Jersey, her hometown, and Stanford, California, where she got her psychology PhD at Stanford University, the total darkness was a culture shock for Leibowitz.
Even more shocking to her were the almost nonexistent rates of SAD. “The people there are very well adapted to the winter,” she said. “Rather than seeing winter cold and darkness as depressing, they tend to have what I call a positive wintertime mindset.”
To test this theory, she questioned Tromsø residents about their feelings on winter, asking them to rate their agreement with statements like “I love the coziness of the winter months” and “Winter is boring.” As she outlined in her new book, How to Winter: Harness Your Mindset to Thrive on Cold, Dark, or Difficult Days, the more that people think about winter not as a depressing challenge but as an exciting and even beautiful season to be appreciated on its own terms, the more likely they are to have high levels of life satisfaction and overall mental health.
Leibowitz discovered that positive winter attitudes just increased with higher latitudes. The less sunlight and warm weather, the more likely people were to be optimistic. Residents of Svalbard, Norway (at the 74th parallel north) had fewer symptoms of seasonal depression, despite a polar night that lasted 84 days, than residents of Tromsø (69th parallel north), with 61 days of polar night. And their secret isn’t more lamps or antidepressants.
Rather than obsessing over the negatives of winter, they “focused on the opportunities the season provides,” said Leibowitz. “For rest and coziness, and for skiing and hiking in the mountains, among other things. When the winter is so long and so dark, you have no choice but to find ways to adapt to the season and embrace the darkness.”
Hester Parr at the University of Glasgow suggests this may be key in why Americans struggle with seasonal depression while other countries, with far more oppressive winters, find ways to embrace it. “The important question is how we respond culturally to SAD,” she said.
Learning How to ‘Winter Well’
In 2022, Parr and her fellow academics from Glasgow and Edinburgh sought to test responses to shorter days with a project called “Living with SAD.” Rather than looking for conventional medical treatments to combat SAD, they developed a series of free Wintering Well workshops – which included not just the researchers but also poet-artist Alec Finlay and cognitive behavioral therapy experts – designed to give people opportunities to discuss their seasonal depression with others who have the same winter challenges, as well as take part in outdoor activities.
“It gave me something to look forward to, and a reason to get over the threshold, out into the world and off the sofa,” said one of the people who took part, identified in an October 2023 news release as Catherine from Glasgow. Catherine shared how she learned winter survival tools like “the practice of ‘noticing,’ taking photographs, (and) engaging in the outdoors in a childlike and experimental way.”
Hester said it’s all about “finding a new routine that gets you outside.” But just as important, it’s about reframing the way we think about being outside during the dark winter months. For non-Scotland residents, Living with SAD has developed a free online library of resources and creative prompts. These include activities like writing letters to winter, and “sky-framing,” an exercise in looking for details and color in a cold winter sky with fresh eyes – and an online course for those struggling with SAD.
Leibowitz agrees that the biggest step in overcoming SAD might just be mustering the courage (or more importantly, the enthusiasm) to leave the house. In Tromsø, bad weather doesn’t stop anyone from socializing outdoors. “Some of this is the infrastructure,” she said. “It’s easy to get around even on snowy days when roads are cleared; affordable and accessible woolen undergarments make it easier to be outside and enjoy the cold; a wealth of winter festivals and activities give you plenty to do during winter in Tromsø.”
But even when the culture works against you – when people aren’t actively encouraged to get out and embrace the cold, dark days – it’s still possible to reset your own mindset. Leibowitz recalls meeting people in Tromsø who would light candles during lunch breaks at the university, and talk excitedly about the beauty of the polar night. “All of these things taught me how to embrace the season and find the beauty, joy, and fun in it,” she said. “It came naturally in Tromsø, but they gave me the tools to embrace winter deliberately in the places I’ve lived since leaving Norway.”
Embracing Hibernation
For some, finding peace with SAD might mean not forcing themselves to go outside, but redefining their behavior during the winter months. As some researchers have noted, seasonal affective disorder has more than a few parallels to hibernation. For many animals – salmon, wolves, bears – seasonal patterns are part of their biology. These patterns impact mating, migration, and physiological changes. “It turns out, if you’re talking about people, that’s probably pretty important too,” said Varnum.
In other words, we don’t look at hibernating bears and think, “They get super depressed and antisocial during the winter.” So why are humans held to a different standard? “I think a lot of this comes from misguided ideas that we should have the same level of energy, motivation, and productivity year-round,” Leibowitz said. “Despite the fact that every other living thing on earth, plant or animal, changes its behavior and rests more in winter.”
Some of the behaviors that have long been diagnosed as symptoms of seasonal depression – slowing down, sleeping more than usual, spending entire afternoons burrowing into warm blankets – might be the very things that, for some people, ease their SAD.
The future of seasonal depression research may not unlock any silver bullets for treatment. It may be as simple as realizing, as Varnum notes, that “at certain times of year, we’re going to feel a bit more anxious and depressed.” But that’s still a huge leap forward from how SAD has traditionally been treated. (When Lucy Van Pelt first offered “Psychiatric Help 5¢” to a depressed Charlie Brown, her advice was “Snap out of it!” And in A Charlie Brown Christmas, she told him she understood his “getting depressed and all that,” because she never gets what she really wants for Christmas: “Real estate.”)
I can’t help but wonder if my dad would have been less paralyzed with “winter blues” if a therapist had told him, “Of course you want to stay home and lie in bed all day. It’s freezing and dark outside. Give yourself that luxury of not being OK once in a while. But then find a reason to go outside anyway, and let your mind get blown by how breathtakingly beautiful winter can be.”
That might’ve made all the difference, said Varnum. If those grappling with SAD were told that “there’s an external cause for what’s going on here,” he said. “And it isn’t just that life is terrible and everything’s crashing down on you, but part of what you’re feeling has to do with how your body is reacting to the seasons,” we could help millions improve their mental health.
