OK, folks! Welcome to another grey and rainy down in Portland, Oregon. Now, very few of us really like wet, grey weather. It's not much fun to bike around in, and it kind of makes it hard to get out of bed in the morning. But for some of us, this kind of weather is actually more of a clinical condition, sometimes called (pretty hilariously) SAD, or Seasonal Affective Disorder. SAD represents, to me, the new frontier of medicine: the kind of daily ailment that has real impact on daily life but can be really hard for the medical establishment to wrap their fingers around and deal with. Which is not to say they don't take it seriously. The Mayo Clinic estimates 3 million people in the US have some form of diagnosable SAD. It's a tough thing to diagnose because it just basically presents as depression, but seasonal depression.
It's always dangerous to self-diagnose, but I'm pretty sure I have it. Apparently it's less common in men, but men have more severe symptoms. Yesterday, the sun was out and shining bright, and I definitely felt an incredible surge of energy and positivity. This morning the clouds closed back in, and it was honestly tough to get out of bed. The key thing to realize about SAD is that it's not just a mental disorder; it has physical causes. They think that the disruption to the circadian rhythms cause us to decrease our serotonin and maybe increase our melatonin levels. It makes some evolutionary sense: when it's cold and grey outside, it's probably a good time to hunker down and stay warm and safe. But that doesn't help it today's modern society, where you still have to go to work and, you know, get things done.
I've bought one of these portable SAD lamps. It does seem to help, although at the end of the day, I think the only cure is: find some sunshine!
