Well, hello there! It’s been a while since I’ve written. Why has it been a while? Well, Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) comes knocking on my door every year. Combined with a few difficult past and present situations over the past 5 months and I needed some time. I will admit that, because it’s been a while since I wrote, I almost thought about giving up on it. I don’t like to be inconsistent when I commit to something. The perfectionist and all-or-nothing thinking got me for a little while. I almost believed I shouldn’t write at all if I couldn't write consistently. But goodness, if we let that type of thinking be in control, then where would any of us be with any dream or goal? I will not let “stinkin’ thinking” call the shots, even if I can’t be as consistent as I hoped. Sometimes expectations are outdated or don’t work in a particular season. Assess, adapt, and overcome! So here I am!
First, I’d like to share a little bit about Seasonal Affective Disorder, and then in a later post, I’ll talk more about “stinkin’ thinkin’.”
Seasonal Affective Disorder, also known as “SAD” (what a fitting acronym) is a type of depression that comes and goes with the seasons. The severity of it can vary. It's officially recognized in the DSM-5 (the mental health diagnostic book) as a category of mood disorders. People with SAD experience symptoms of depression that generally begin in the fall. The “winter blues” - low energy, low enjoyment, and low motivation continue through the winter months. These symptoms start to lift in the spring.
I first became aware of my seasonal mood shifts 12 or 13 years ago, when I lived in sunny Florida. Whether I was in the mild Florida winters or, for the past 10 years, in the Oklahoma winters, SAD continued to come knocking on my door. After paying close attention to this every year, and others giving me their observations, I realized it wasn’t just SAD, but it always brought some unwanted “guests” along with it. These “guests” were anniversary events/memories of two particularly hard situations in my life. SAD and these “guests” communicated their arrival at the annual winter gathering in subtle ways: less energy, less motivation, a narrower range of feelings, more of a desire to hang out by myself, more random thoughts and feelings about those two hard situations, and being more sensitive to things that reminded me of those two events. For many, many years, I beat myself up for these feelings. I was a psychologist, after all. “I shouldn’t be feeling this way.” “I should be able to pull myself together.” “Why does this happen every year?” As you can see from the introductory statement, my efforts have not successfully eliminated this annual gathering of SAD and guests, so fighting against them was not a productive strategy. I had a lot of evidence to tell me I needed to approach this differently.
Over the years, I have learned to expect and embrace this annual gathering of SAD and guests. That’s not to say that I love this season. I don’t love it, BUT I have learned to work with it, and that has made this time easier and more fruitful than being self-critical or pretending it doesn’t happen. What does that look like for me? It has become a time of going inward with God - doing a lot of meditative prayer, listening, reflecting, and identifying what God is saying to me and where I need to grow to learn more about who He intended me to be. It becomes a time of asking the “what if” questions and actually answering them, so they have less power over what I do and don’t do. By the time I come to the spring season, I am feeling more aware and determined to take some action…to use the SAD time so that it counts for something and can be a productive journey. It’s taken me many years to come to the place of allowing myself permission to just “be” during this time of SAD….to just roll with it and then pick back up (going back to stinkin’ thinkin’). Since I have approached SAD and guests in this way, I have (dare I say it??), found that it’s not so bad, it’s less severe, and it has become a time where I allow myself to “rest and digest.” And there is always beauty waiting for me on the other side.
When you find yourself in a season, or a cycle, that’s hard, look back on how you cope with it. If you look at that evidence, does the evidence tell you that your strategies are working? Do you have outdated expectations or coping strategies that need to be assessed and adapted?
Let me ask you, if you gave yourself permission for something in this season or these cycles, what would you give yourself permission to feel, think, or do? What would giving yourself permission mean for you? What would it look like to work with these times, and what might come of that?
