Your Mind, Your Body

How to live a happier, healthier life.

Norman Rosenthal, MD, is best known as the psychiatrist and researcher who first described Seasonal Affective Disorder. See full bio

December 22, 2008, Depression

How Seasonal Are You?

Assessing and treating seasonality.

You should also suspect that your ability to function is slipping if you begin to fall behind with bills and other necessary chores. Marked seasonal changes in thinking and getting things done can result in chaos in the administrative areas of one's life, which further amplifies feelings of depression and hopelessness and often consumes the spring months with digging out from under the winter mess.

2. You experience significant feelings of depression. This includes the following:

Regularly feeling sad or having crying spells;
Feeling that life is not worthwhile or wishing you would not wake up in the morning;
Thinking negative thoughts about yourself - that you are a bad person, incompetent, unreliable, an impostor - which you would regard as inaccurate descriptions of yourself at other times of the year;
Feeling guilty much of the time;
Feeling pessimistic about the future.

3. Your physical functions are markedly disturbed during the winter. For example:

You require several more hours of sleep per day or have great difficulty waking up in the morning;
You would like to lie around for much of the day;
You feel you have no control over your eating and weight.

All of these symptoms are indications that you should have the situation checked out and treated, if necessary, by an appropriate professional.

Portions of this article were excerpted from Winter Blues: Everything you need to know to beat Seasonal Affective Disorder, by Norman E. Rosenthal, M.D. (Guilford Press, 2006). For those who want more information, you may find the rest of the book to be of interest.