Conquering the Winter Blues: Navigating Seasonal Affective Disorder Naturally

What happens when the winter blues go beyond just a passing feeling and start to affect your daily life? Join me, Dr. Enrico Dolcecore, as we explore Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), a condition that impacts countless individuals as the days grow shorter and colder. We'll uncover the science behind this mood disorder, focusing on the reduced sunlight exposure and hormonal changes, particularly in northern climates, that can lead to feelings of depression and lethargy. Discover practical solutions like UV lights, infrared therapy, and melatonin supplementation that have been shown to aid those grappling with SAD. Additionally, we'll discuss the specific challenges women face due to hormonal influences and how holiday stress and sugar-laden treats can exacerbate symptoms.

We also champion the power of natural remedies to uplift your spirits during the winter months. From the mood-boosting effects of regular exercise to the brain benefits of a nutritious diet packed with omega-3s, B vitamins, and antioxidants, we provide actionable advice to counteract SAD. By embracing mindful practices like journaling and spending more time outdoors, you can foster mental resilience and well-being. Remember, brighter days are literally ahead with daylight increasing post-December 21st. Whether you are experiencing SAD symptoms or supporting someone who is, our podcast offers a compassionate guide through the holiday season and beyond. Tune in to stay informed and inspired, as we promise to be your steady companion during these chilly months.

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Chapters

• 0:23 Understanding Seasonal Affective Disorder
• 8:21 Managing Seasonal Affective Disorder Naturally
• 14:04 Promoting Wellness During Holiday Season

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:23

Hey everyone, welcome to another podcast. I'm Dr Enrico Dolcecori, and this week we're going to be talking about seasonal affective disorder. It's that time of the year there's flu season, there's health season. You may or may not have heard of seasonal affective disorder, sad. And you may or may not have heard of seasonal affective disorder SAD. It's a rare one that's diagnosed and it's just more of those blanket diagnoses that sometimes are given to patients. It's one of those I don't like, but it is a real thing too, and we typically blame northern climates for this, with the change in temperature, the cooler temperature, the darker days. Down here closer to the equator, we're in Florida, we don't get much of that change. But yeah, the cooler temperature, the darker days Down here closer to the equator we're in Florida, we don't get much of that change. But yeah, the days do get shorter and it does get cooler, and these changes in climate can really affect your mood more than anything. So some things to think about. As winter comes along, if you notice mood swings, lethargy, being tired, increase in appetite, especially going for the carbohydrates and just withdrawing yourself from social activities, those are the blanket type symptoms of seasonal affective disorder. So if you've got any of those. You might want to listen up to this and some of the things that we can do for it.

Speaker 1: 1:41

It's a real thing. It's a change in the season. In America we have a whole holiday season around this as well, hence the Jingle Bell background music there. We have this holiday thing that comes and starts around, you know, halloween and what comes with all the holidays sugar, lots of sugar. Uh, we just, we just go crazy for sugar. I don't know what it is. We just dump it all on the holiday season, starts with a trick-or-treating, goes, goes through the holidays, goes through Thanksgiving, pumpkin pie, whipped cream, and right through until New Year's. I mean we even finish this off and rinse it down with glasses of champagne on New Year's Eve, right, so it just doesn't end. And that is probably the underlying reason for this. We try and eat healthy all year. We're doing all this stuff and then we get bombarded with this stuff. Plus it gets a little bit darker outside, plus stress builds up this time of year, both work-related stress I mean, most of you have deadlines by the end of the year because of the calendar year.

Speaker 1: 2:33

There's so many reasons for it, it makes perfect sense the seasonal affective disorder, and then in the new year things change. On December 21st, the days start to get longer. We're looking positive and things start to get longer. It's we're looking, you know, positive and and things start to turn around in the new year. But being in the dead of winter is darker. It is cooler. Things change, your activities may change. Maybe you're an outdoor person, now you're indoors.

Speaker 1: 2:58

So here's some things to understand about sad or seasonal affective disorder. It's a depression linked to seasonal changes. Really it's more of a mental diagnosis than anything else, aside as physiological or physical. But the cooler symptoms can trigger, you know, fatigue, mood changes, difficulty concentrating during work, during the day, reading, focusing, and these are all things because of just a malaise that happens in the background. It could be subconscious. You may not even know it's happening.

Speaker 1: 3:26

So the real culprit here is sunlight. It's just, sunlight keeps us invigorated. Sunlight keeps us attentive. Sunlight is just the general allure of being awake. It's just we're programmed this way. Most mammals are programmed this way. We sleep during the night and we wake when the sun rises. We're just. The circadian rhythm is designed around this. So sunlight can play such a great role during the winter months, especially if you're having any type of seasonal issues or seasonal affective disorders. So how do you incorporate sunlight when you know you're in Calgary, alberta, where it's negative 32? Tough to go outside and just peek out the window with one eye closed and just look at the sun.

Speaker 1: 4:09

So getting sunlight can come in different ways. You can use direct uv. You can get uv light for your home, buy these on amazon, have a blue light or purple light right there that you shine, or sit beside watch tv for 15 minutes shining on you. You can do that. Be careful with direct uv in your eyes. You can go to sun tanning beds. This is not recommended by dermatologists, of course, because the risk of skin cancers can increase with that, so please be careful with that. But that has been shown to change mood. Or you can use something even safer on the red light spectrum. You can use infrared to red light, low-level red light therapy. Those are all lights that work and train the brain to feel calm, so it can help with a lot of the affective disorders that come through that.

Speaker 1: 4:56

We can also try melatonin during winter months to help fortify sleep patterns and contribute to helping with the depression a little bit as well if we're feeling depressed during these times and all of those symptoms that I had listed prior of fatigue, melancholy and this type of thing are all depressive symptoms. So it doesn't mean that you are depressed, it just means that we're leaning towards that. We could do some things to invigorate our soul a little bit there. Those things can help. So, um, people who are at risk are again people north. The colder it is, the harder it is to get outside.

Speaker 1: 5:32

For some reason, women are more at risk of sad because of hormonal changes as well, and these descriptions that we're talking about sunlight all affect a hormonal cascade in the body as well. That is why we get mood alterations from either lack of sunlight or low. Sunlight is because sunlight synthesizes in our skin and converts from D1, d2, d3 into the bloodstream by melanocytes in our skin. That's the trigger to the cascade of this hormonal thing. Then, as vitamin D is synthesized and is made in the body from that converted to D3, it spurs more hormonal activity, good hormonal activity in the body. It gives us energy, moves testosterone, reduces estrogen, does all these things. So when this stuff goes down, typically women have a higher result or a higher reflection to estrogen. That's what ends up happening. Men do too. We just don't go up and down like a roller coaster as much as women do. So this could be the hidden link between why women are more affected by season changes than men. So that's there too. And individuals with a family history of depression definitely fall into this category, because this can just set them off into depression.

Speaker 1: 6:55

It's cold, it's dark, and those are things to look into. So sunlight therapy, or light therapy in general, is something to look into. We brought in low-level red light therapy in our office two years ago. It is such a great. I use it once a week. I should use it more, since I own the thing, but I use it once a week. I should use it more, since I own the thing, but I use it once a week.

Speaker 1: 7:14

I've noticed so many great benefits from low-level light therapy. One is just my skin feels healthier. It just does In the summer when I go to the beach I don't redden or burn Typically 20 minutes out in that sunlight. You know, in the middle of July on the beach, I will get red shoulders, or even with sunscreen, my shoulders will get a little bit red. I the beach, I would get red shoulders, or even with sunscreen, my shoulders would get a little bit red. I got no burns this year at all, but I also respect the sun when I'm out there. I'm out there for three hours straight with no sunscreen so, but my normal living changed. I didn't get any redness, got no sunburns this year. Very cool, and I looked into it and it is the red light. Long-term usage of red light gives your skin more resistance to burning, so that's fantastic there too. So that's one way to get it.

Speaker 1: 7:58

Especially for all of you listening up, north Michigan, canada, north Dakota, washington, I mean, if you're listening there, get your hands on some red light. Find a gym or spa or chiropractic office that has this. Sign up for their monthly membership. They're usually fairly cheap. You have direct access to the red light. Go in it. Even a infrared sauna can mimic light therapy as well, so that's fantastic too.

Speaker 1: 8:21

Exercise has been shown as the number two actually the number one outside of light therapy, to boost the benefits of what we talk about. Exercise quite a bit hormones, hormones. So when we get all those feel-good from exercise, they counteract the negative trends and they actually suppress the negative trends of negative hormone results from mood disorders as well. So that's great. Nutrition, and we talk about this on, I think, every single podcast. Nutrition plays such a big role, especially in the winter One, I think, to counteract all the sugar, we have to minimize the sugar intake.

Speaker 1: 8:57

We want to minimize, even eliminate sugar intake all the time. Sugar is the most addictive substance. Created Sugar is not what it used to be. Back then, in order to get your hands on sugar, you'd have to eat fruit, or you'd have to dry fruit and get the tart dried fruit or make it into jam or jelly the old fashioned way. To get more concentration of sugar in a lower density. So grapes you'd have to ferment grapes and get wine. That's how you got sweet things. I remember my grandma baking things figs, plums, dried plums these are the things you added to the baking to make it sweeter. There was no white sugar that you just put into stuff Honey, maple syrup. This is how you kind of got that high concentration of sugar or syrups that we know of today.

Speaker 1: 9:48

The new stuff that we've created is just candy on overload. It's just sugar on overload. The concentration like high fructose corn syrup. Whatever devil developed that stuff has ruined the health of generations of people. High fructose corn syrup has such a high concentration of sugar in it that you would never be able to consume that in a day, yet alone in a spoonful or in cookies that you would eat. So we've never been exposed to this much sugar, and what it does is it just wreaks havoc on the brain and the endocrine system. That's why. So the rule is eliminate it, eliminate it. It's so good though, isn't that sugar so great? I love sugar, everyone loves sugar. Don't admit it. You love sugar, everyone loves sugar, but we have to minimize it. We have to minimize it or get it from as good sources as we can. Cane sugar, like I said, honey, maple syrup just from organic, natural sources, is the best, once you get into the synthetic syrups that we put on pancakes.

Speaker 1: 10:51

Let's talk about breakfast for a second. This is insane the American breakfast, and you're not going to put yeast in it. So you're going to make it flat and you're going to pretend and you're going to call it a pancake and you're going to say this is great for breakfast. So you're literally eating cake. That's what you're doing. I mean, let's make cake. We're going to make cake, we're going to flip it, we're going to pour it, put it on a plate. We're going to take syrup. You guys call it syrup. At least in Canada we use maple syrup. Take the syrup. Now you're going to pour syrup on top of this. So you got sugar, you made sugar, you're putting high concentrated sugar on top of sugar and then you pop a strawberry on there, a couple of blueberries, and you're like oh look, healthy breakfast. It's insane, it's maddening.

Speaker 1: 11:39

If you don't see this, if you don't see what they've done to make these normal, it's crazy. It's like selling crack to children. It's literally like if somebody stopped your children on the street and gave them a white bag. So here, kid, give me some money for that. You would lose your mind, wouldn't you Like? This would just be frowned upon. But pancake breakfasts are perfectly fine, it's just okay. That's my tangent for this podcast. Anyways, nutrition, be careful with the sugar.

Speaker 1: 12:07

We need to add things that are rich in omega-3s, b vitamins and antioxidants. During the winter months, we want to be a little bit more thoughtful when it comes to antioxidants. During these months, they offset the dark days, they offset endocrine changes or hormonal changes in the body. Antioxidants keep our hormones working well, because free radicals really like to cause havoc to our hormone systems, especially estrogen, progesterone, testosterone. They like to really mix and mingle with all those and that's what can give us those mood swings and lethargy, fatigue. Then we want to follow mindful practices.

Speaker 1: 12:44

This is being mindful, just listening to this podcast and saying, oh yeah, you know, I am feeling a little tired. You know it is the change of weather, it is the cooler temperatures. It is just being mindful, journaling how you feel and just making time to spend more time outdoors if you can. So once the temperature and the forecast starts to warm up and you see, oh, you know, friday is going to be warmer making time say I'm going to go, spend two hours outside and go do something. Go for a walk, take the dog out longer, take the dogs to the dog park, do something outside which keeps you outside a little bit longer. Maybe, you know, undo the first two buttons on your jacket so you're open and exposed to more direct sunlight, and that's just great little tips to help you with that.

Speaker 1: 13:28

And then professional help. You know, if you feel like this is a little bit more than seasonal affective disorder and you feel like it is tipping onto, you know, depression, definitely seek out some mental health help. You know psychiatrists, psychologists, mental health counselors. They are. I'm a I'm big fans of all of them. They're here to help you. They're here to help you talk through things. Things don't have to end up with medications for sure, so SAD is completely manageable.

Speaker 1: 13:49

This is, and you know, this podcast. I hope. If it reaches you and you're like man, that's perfect. It's good to know that I'm feeling a little bit down and it's for a reason. I'm just going to watch my sugar intake and make sure I get a good night's sleep and just get outside on the warmer days. I think this podcast was a home run.

Speaker 1: 14:04

For those of you. If you've seen other people, your family members, feeling lethargic or tired, give them this podcast or share this information with them. Tell them, hey, you know what? Or just get some more time outside for them, do it for them and get them out there. You'll help them out quite a bit. And, like I said, december 21st, the days start to get longer. So things to look forward to this time of the year I'm thankful for all the listeners. Have a fantastic holiday season. We're going to keep dropping the podcasts every week Christmas Eve, new Year's Eve, they're all out. They're going to be out there so you can keep listening. Have a happy and healthy holiday season. Stay well, take care of yourselves and see you next week.