How to Cope with Seasonal Depression

Am I the only one who feels like this winter has been so rough? And it’s not even because of the cold, per se. I don’t hate the cold, and if it snows, you’ll find me bundled up in my backyard kicking up fresh powder with my dogs – one of my ultimate happy places. But this winter hasn’t brought snow. The older I get, the more global warming has turned my town into less of a winter wonderland and more of a gray, damp mud pit. It’s dark, wet, and just cold enough to be uncomfortable, but not cold enough to snow. Without having snow to get me through, this is the first year where I’m noticing seasonal depression is getting to me.

I realize, however, that many folks have seasonal depression every year, regardless of whether it snows or not. The lack of sunlight leads to staying indoors more, which leads to a more sedentary lifestyle, which leads to less socialization, ALL of which contribute to depression. I know many of us are struggling this time of year, counting down the days until Spring and Summer. But no one wants to live like that – waiting for the days to pass so we can finally feel a sense of peace. There are so many ways to combat Seasonal Affective Disorder (a fancy term for seasonal depression or the winter blues), so let’s get into it!

Go outside! Yes, it’s cold. Yes, it’s unpleasant. But part of the reason seasonal depression hits us so hard is because we become deficient in Vitamin D due to the lack of sunlight. So bundle up and get outside for a walk, even if it’s just for ten minutes during your lunch break. The more sunshine you can get, the better off you’ll be. Even on a cloudy day, if you go out for a walk, you’re still absorbing some sunlight and doing your mental health a world of good.
Adjust your circadian rhythm to be more aligned with daylight. Your circadian rhythm is your body’s natural sleep/wake cycle. In the winter, it gets dark early at night. If you can get to bed earlier and wake up with the sun, you’ll increase your daily sunlight intake and decrease your risk of depression and Seasonal Affective Disorder.
Buy yourself some indoor plants. You don’t have to be a plant expert to be able to take care of indoor plants. Some plants, like succulents or snake plants, require minimal care, but the presence of them in your home has been shown to reduce stress, anxiety, and depression.
Use a sun lamp. Sun lamps (and light therapy in general) have been shown to help with Seasonal Affective Disorder. Sun lamps are designed to mimic sunlight and can often provide great relief if you’re suffering from the winter blues.
Plant daffodils and hyacinths in your yard if you can! These are some of my favorite plants! Not only do they come back year after year, but they begin growing from the ground between the months of January-February, right in the dead of winter. There is something so refreshing about going outside and seeing the daffodils and hyacinths grow taller with every passing day. They bloom very early, when it’s usually still cold out. The bright blooms are one of the biggest comforts for me when I’m struggling with depression.
Buy yourself flowers each week. Winter is damp, gray, and dreary, but having fresh blooms in the house during the winter usually brightens my mood instantly!

You might notice that these recommendations have a common theme: Connecting with nature. We don’t talk nearly enough about how medicinal nature is for your mental health. In the spring and summer months, we are usually outside much more and are therefore connecting with nature without even realizing it most of the time. In the winter, however, we have to be more intentional about connecting with our planet. I have been religiously using almost all of the above recommendations and have noticed major improvements in my seasonal depression. If you, like me, have been struggling with Seasonal Affective Disorder, I hope that these tips can help provide you with the relief that you deserve.

blog, Change, death, depression, domestic violence, Mental Health, self care, sexual abuse, shame, suicide, trauma

Poodle Science: Accepting Who We Are

Diet Culture

Did you know that the diet industry is a $70 billion, that’s billion with a B, industry? Did you also know that 95% of diets fail? I’ll let that sink in for a second!

People spend more than $70 billion in a year on a product that will fail more than 95% of the time! Would you buy a car that wouldn’t work 95% of the time, a house that had a 95% chance of collapsing into a pile of rubble, or buy clothes that had a 95% chance of falling apart on the first wear? Of course not! Yet that’s what millions of people in America do each and every single day when they go on a diet. They’ll spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on something that will ultimately fail them.

Poodle Science

When I begin treatment with clients who have an eating disorder, like Anorexia; Binge Eating Disorders; or Bulimia, one of things I introduce to clients is Poodle Science. I was introduced to this concept by Tianna Smith, a a wonderful dietitian based in California. For the non-dog lovers out there, a Bullmastiff is a HUGE dog that usually weighs 100 pounds or more while a Chihuahua is a small dog that usually weighs around 6-7 pounds. Because of genetics, it would not matter what kind of diet or exercise you did with a Bullmastiff, it would NEVER weigh anywhere close to the 6-7 pounds of Chihauhua. Not only that, that Bullmastiff would probably be pretty miserable from the lack of food and constant exercise. And yet, it would never come close to having the bodily figure of a Chihuahua.

At SYTI counseling, when we work with our clients in therapy, we talk to them about Poodle Science because the same concept applies to humans. We have a biological blueprint based on our genetics that determines the shape and size of our body. Some people will naturally be 100 pounds while others will naturally be 150 pounds or more. Like the Bullmastiff and the Chihuahua, it’s an impossible fight for a 150-pound person to try and get down to 100 pounds. All you will do is fail, be miserable, and in some cases do incredible harm to your body. By accepting your biological blueprint, you are going to lead a happier and healthier life. So, the next time you see or hear diet culture in the media, brush it aside and be proud of the beautiful body you have!

blog, depression, Mental Health, self care, shame, trauma

Chameleon

I really wish that we were talking about Pascal, the chameleon from Rapunzel. He is one of my favorite Disney characters! Has anybody ever discovered a stuffed animal Pascal? I’ve looked high and low but cannot find one anywhere! So if you know where I can buy one, please let me know. Clearly it’s a very urgent matter!

But I digress. What I really want to talk about today are the human versions of chameleons – those whose thoughts, beliefs, and opinions can change depending on their environment. Pete Walker, author of Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving, first coined the term “fawning” as a trauma response. Fawning is essentially described as being a chronic people pleaser. Some trauma survivors will engage in fawning, or people pleasing, as a way to diffuse tension if they feel unsafe or uncomfortable. But what I don’t think many people know is that fawning extends beyond saying “yes” to everything and everyone’s requests. People pleasers are also the kind of folks mentioned above – the ones who tend to have different beliefs or different personalities depending on who they are around.

For example, someone who is fawning could look like your friend that tells you all the time she is a Democrat, but in a room full of Republicans she will quickly turn into one of the most passionate Republicans the world has ever seen. Someone who is fawning might also look like that cousin of yours who complains constantly about how much she hates this one person in her friend group, but the second she hangs out with that person she acts like the two of them are best friends.

As a whole, the public generally doesn’t take kindly to people who behave like this. It creates a sense of mistrust and frustration among people when they see that somebody acts one way one minute, and is completely different the next minute.

Now I am not saying that every single person who engages in these types of behaviors is fawning, because that simply isn’t the case. But what I am trying to say is that sometimes people aren’t trying to copy others and sometimes people aren’t changing their beliefs and values out of a desperation to fit in. What this behavior actually could be is fawning, or in other words, a type of trauma response.

I myself can be like this when I feel threatened in some ways. Recently, I found myself in a situation that felt tense, uncomfortable, and downright awkward. The people around me were in a heated discussion about something that I actually found offensive. On a good day, or even a so-so day, I might have chimed in and dared to have an opposing viewpoint. But on this day in particular, I was already having such a bad day, and between the topic of conversation and the harsh tone of everyone’s voices, I was triggered beyond belief. I did the only thing I could do to try to get the conversation to come to a close: I simply agreed with them. Yep, against everything I believe in, I became the person that I thought that they wanted me to be and I agreed with what they were saying, even though, if you were to ask me to speak on that same subject any other day of the week, I would have given you a completely different opinion.

I didn’t agree with them because I had an overwhelming desire to fit in, and I didn’t pacify them by siding with their beliefs because I wanted to make friends with them. It was more so that I felt emotionally unsafe, and feeling that way put me in such a high state of emotional distress that I said whatever I could to get myself away from the situation. Fawning, like fight or freeze or flight or any of the other trauma responses, is a survival tactic. I wasn’t able to fight or flee the situation, so I became a chameleon and I blended in with my surroundings in the best way that I knew how.

Millions of folks do this. I’ve watched it time and time again, and while a younger version of me might get annoyed and accuse that person of not being genuine, the person I am today realizes that so many people engage in fawning because they have found themselves in situations that trigger their previous traumas.

While I have come a very long way in my PTSD recovery, I was reminded by this event that there is more work to be done. Even though I am tempted to sit in a pit of shame and self-loathing, I’m refusing to do so because my brain did whatever it could to keep me safe in the moment, and that is no reason to feel ashamed. So here I sit, pouring vulnerability onto the page in the hopes that I can educate other people on this type of trauma response, as I think it is often misunderstood and creates a lot of tension in relationships.

To those of you who have never engaged in fawning and don’t quite get it, please be patient with us.

And to those of us who struggle with fawning, let us try to have more compassion for ourselves. We have brilliant minds, built for survival. And although fawning doesn’t always serve us well, it did keep us safe and alive for many years. We are all a work in progress, but please oh please, don’t forget to love yourself throughout the journey just as much as you’ll love yourself once you’ve arrived at your destination.

blog, depression, Mental Health, OCD, trauma

“I’m So OCD About It.”

**Trigger Warning**

I am quite guilty about having talked like this in the past: “I’m so OCD about it.” About what? How clean I like my house to be, how I organize my closet, etc. I can even recount many times at the gym where I would be in the middle of a fitness class – God forbid the instructor accidentally lost her place and we ended up doing 11 kettlebell swings with the right hand and 10 kettlebell swings with the left hand. I’d be the first to say out loud: “Oh my gosh, we’re uneven, we have to do one more one this side – I’m so OCD about it!”

A lot of us do this, but as I got older and started becoming more seasoned as a therapist, I realized how wrong those comments were. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) can be a crippling mental health disorder in which we find ourselves having to act on certain impulses in order to quiet the thoughts in our head that just won’t seem to stop.

Yes, people can develop OCD symptoms around cleanliness, disorganization, and numbers, like I mentioned above, but the obsessive thoughts can also be much more than that. You see, when I would make those comments like the ones I mentioned above, I would laugh, my friends would laugh, and we would go about our day. But the truth is, I was joking about an issue that runs so much deeper and is more serious than most folks know. While many of us joke about having OCD, the truest form of the disorder is brutal.

Of all of the things I have battled throughout my life, the one I talk about the least is my OCD, mostly because I know that my OCD is a result of my trauma and in treating the trauma, I am also treating the OCD.

But truth be told, OCD is an absolute beast, one that lives with you, follows you everywhere you go, and keeps you from sleeping at night. It’s the worst friend you’ve ever had, but cannot seem to get rid of. It’s counting how many times you chew your food before you swallow, it’s making sure you step on the scale 3 times just to make sure the scale is right. It’s this irresistible compulsion to say your prayers exactly the same way every night, fearing that something bad will happen to you if you don’t.

This elusive beast comes in many forms, and what I named above are only a few symptoms that people with OCD may struggle with. Looking back on my childhood, I know that my OCD began as early as 3rd grade, where I remember washing my hands so much and for so long that my skin would bleed. As I got older, my obsessions then became about people breaking into our home. I would have to check the doors at night, dis-arm the alarm that my mom already armed, check to ensure the garage door was shut, and then re-arm the alarm. After about 3-4 rounds of doing this each night, only then could I be assured that the doors were truly locked and the alarm was truly set.

And have I mentioned intrusive thoughts? I could write an entire blog post on intrusive thoughts so I won’t dive too deeply into this, but they often couple with OCD. For example, if you’ve ever been driving your car on a highway and suddenly thought to yourself: “What if the car next to me runs me off the road and I crash into a tree and die?”, this is an intrusive thought. Or maybe worse, you’ve even pictured the entire event taking place in your head. This is also an intrusive thought, and you are not alone if you have them.

Often times we develop compulsions to quell our obsessive and intrusive thoughts. Some examples include:

-Driving to work: Did I check the stove to make sure the gas isn’t on? (after having checked it 20 times before leaving) Am I sure my dogs are safely in their crates? What if there is a fire and my house burns down?

-Driving home from work: Did I really blow that candle out in my office or did I just imagine it? Let me turn around, I have to check, I can’t be responsible for burning down the building. *drives back to office, confirms that the candle is blown out, starts driving home again* Okay but what if I imagined that? Did I really blow out that candle? *Gets home from work 45-60 min later than expected because I have to act on my compulsions*

It’s terrible. It’s exhausting. This is the case for so many folks with OCD. It’s not just about wanting your house to be neat and orderly. It’s about needing to do certain things to avoid horrible things from happening and to quiet the brain.

I understand things so much differently now. I used to have the attitude of “I’m not changing the way I speak just to save other’s feelings” but the older I get, the more I realize how much of an impact words have on myself and others (I am a therapist, after all!). Intent does not equal impact – and even if I was just joking all those times when I said “I am so OCD about it”, I realize that it is nothing to joke about.

1. If you have been diagnosed with OCD, know you’re not alone and there is no shame in sharing the thoughts and compulsions you are having. In fact, speaking them out loud takes the power away from them.

2. If you have never been diagnosed with OCD, but resonate with some of what I’m saying in this post, please reach out for help. You don’t have to live like this forever and managing the symptoms truly does get much easier.

3. If you have no experience battling OCD, but often say phrases like “I’m really OCD about it”, maybe consider trying to change your words. What else could you say instead? “It makes me feel frazzled and disorganized when my house is a mess” or “I prefer my closet to be organized by color because it makes me happy” are just a few examples. The beautiful thing about language is that there are millions of ways to say something without using words that might minimize the beast that is OCD.

To learn more about obsessive compulsive disorder, please visit https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/obsessive-compulsive-disorder-ocd/index.shtml

*All information about OCD is derived from my training as a clinician. No articles or websites were used to create this post.*