Instant Genius - How to beat the winter blues

Episode Date: November 18, 2024

As the nights draw in and the temperature drops, many of us find ourselves feeling a little less jolly and a bit more sluggish than usual. But for some of us these feelings can become so severe that they are classed as a form of depression known as seasonal affective disorder. This can have a significant impact on our daily habits, relationships and ability to perform at our best. In this episode, we catch up with the founder of The Sleep Scientist Dr Sophie Bostock. She tells us how exposure to daylight affects our mood, why it’s natural to want to hunker down during the colder, darker months and how going on a daily morning walk can help us all to lift our spirits. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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you'll hear world-leading scientists and experts talking about the most fascinating ideas in science and technology. today. I'm Jason Goodyear, commissioning editor at BBC Science Focus. As the nights draw in and the temperature drops, many of us find ourselves feeling a little less jolly and a bit more sluggish than usual. But for some of us, these feelings can become so severe that they're classed as a form of depression

known as seasonal, effective disorder. This can have a significant impact on our daily habits, our relationships, and ability to perform at our best. In this episode, we catch up with the founder of the sleep scientist, Dr. Sophie Bostock. She tells us how exposure to daylight affects our mood, why it's natural to want to hunker down during the colder, darker months and how going on a daily morning walk can help us all to lift our spirits.

Hi Sophie, welcome to the podcast. Thanks very much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. So today we're talking about SAD or seasonal, effective disorder. So what exactly is that? Well, I think a lot of us will recognise the feeling that it's coming towards winter and we're feeling a little bit miserable. And that feeling of misery can exist anywhere on a spectrum. And I think for probably more than half of the population,

we experience some kind of winter blues, and that might be a decrease in energy, some low mood, perhaps a tendency to eat more carbohydrates, and we feel a little bit less like socialising. But for most of us, that doesn't have a debilitating impact. we just notice a lowering of our normal va-av-a-voom. But for a proportion of the population, and depending on where you live,

might be anything from one to as much as 10% of the population, those symptoms can be really severe. They can really have an impact on daily life. They can interfere with your ability to work or your relationships. And when they reach that level, that sort of clinical level, that's what we call seasonal affective disorder. So you mentioned the word clinical, there. I mean, people will know about clinical depression, but is there any difference between the two?

Yeah, so seasonal affective disorder is usually termed as a subtype of major depressive disorder. So with exactly the sort of same level of severity, it's just it's something that naturally waxes and wanes with the seasons. So typically coming on in the autumn and winter months, as we experience the shorter days, particularly after the clock change. But the thing that defines it as seasonal affective disorder is that people typically get better in the spring and summer without necessarily having any treatment. And in order to be classified as suffering from sad, this actually has to happen for at least two years, year on year. Are some people more prone to seasonal effective disorder? Yeah, so it tends to affect women more than men, which is the same case for a lot of

mental health disorders. And estimates vary, but as many as four times more women will experience seasonal affective disorder than men, but of course many men will also experience these symptoms. And it seems to be a bit more common for younger age groups, those 18 to 30, often happens for the first time in your younger years and may resolve itself as you get older, but not for everybody. And there's some recent research in the last few years that suggests that those who experience ADHD ADHD may also be more prone to seasonal affective disorder. So as many as 28% in one study, of those who've been diagnosed with ADHD will experience seasonal affective disorder or winter depression. Does it vary between different countries? You know, for example, sun have darkness for a lot larger of the year.

Yeah, it definitely does seem to have an impact. So if you live near the equator and your days are pretty constant, there's a much lower incidence prevalence of a kind of winter depression. The seasons are much less marks. And in other countries, as you move further away from the equator, it seems to become more common. And there was one study in the US, for example, that showed that in Florida, which is much closer to the equator, the prevalence was only about 1%. But in New Hampshire, which is much further away, it was anything up to sort of 9 or 10%. So definitely as latitude changes, as we get further north, so even in the north of the UK, you might expect more people to experience these wintry symptoms. And I should say, Jason, there are also a small minority of people who experience the flip side of seasonal affective disorder. So they actually experience worse symptoms of mood in the summer months.

And that's much less usual, so probably less than 1%, something about 0.1%. But that does also seem to exist. So I'm very pale and don't like the sun very much. So I can understand that for sure. Doesn't that mean I can make vitamin D more easily, though? Yeah, and that's absolutely true. but in order to get enough vitamin D, perhaps we'll come on to that. You know, sunlight is one of those remarkable things

that has so many values for us in terms of health and well-being. And certainly one of the theories behind seasonal affective disorder is that we get less exposure to bright light. And bright light is what we really need to regulate our circadian rhythms or body clocks. So probably the prime theory behind SAD is that in the winter months, We have less natural light exposure and the intensity of the light goes down. And so our brains are getting less of this zeitgamer, this time giver, which helps to regulate our internal clocks.

And if we don't give the brain this strong message that it's daytime, then our internal rhythms, our body clocks can become disrupted and they stop speaking to each other as efficiently. And if your brain doesn't know when night or day is, then your circadian rhythms in metabolism, in mood, an alertness, in an immune function can just get a bit confused and that causes stress on the body. And we think that that is behind a lot of this mood disruption, this disruption to circadian rhythms. So you mentioned food. So personally, I was looking forward to the autumn in a way as it's stew time. So why do we crave heartier food over the colder months? It may well be that it springs back to our evolutionary past. And if you think about our hunter-gatherer

ancestors, as they looked towards the winter months, they knew that there was going to be less food outside, so they started to really consume a little bit more, perhaps put on a little bit more weight, which was going to see them through those difficult, cold winter months when they wouldn't be able to hunt as much. And so this may well be a natural seasonal adaptation that as it gets darker and colder, we feel like eating more. And a lot of people will have these carbohydrate cravings for higher energy-dense foods like stews and carbohydrates, which are going to allow you to put on more energy storage to see you through that winter period. Clearly these days, when you can go and buy energy-dense food at any time of year and probably

any time of day, this may not be an evolutionary adaptation that is serving us well in the modern world. How about our sleep? Depression is very closely linked to sleep, isn't it? Very much so. So sleep and mental health, very much interconnected. And this has a negative and a positive. You know, from a negative standpoint, if your sleep is disrupted, then your mental health is more vulnerable. We tend to see an increase in anxiety and depression. But from a positive perspective, it does mean that if you can improve sleep, then you can probably improve mental health as well. We've now got a lot of evidence that that's the case. In terms of seasonal affective disorder, it tends to be associated with something we call hypersomnia, an increased sleep drive. So people feel really sleepy. And we think some of that is down to potentially a dysregulation of the hormone melatonin. So under normal circumstances, melatonin is very sensitive to light and to our normal daily rhythm. So if you wake up at the same time every day and go to sleep at the same, same time every night, probably around two hours before your normal bedtime, the brain will start to secrete melatonin from the pineal gland, which is like our cue. It's like the loud speaker

that goes around the body and says, hey, get ready for sleep. And it makes us feel a little bit more drowsy. It's not a particularly strong hormone. I clarify that because if you are in kind of high alert mode, if you're very stressed, then it doesn't really matter how much melatonin is around. You're probably still going to manage to stay awake. So people often get confused with, oh, can't I just take more melatonin? It doesn't work like that. But providing that you are in a low light environment, the brain will start to produce melatonin. So this is where light sort of comes into play, because if you've got lots of bright lights, artificial lights in the evening, that can suppress the onset of melatonin. But in the winter months, where it gets darker earlier, you're probably

going to start to secrete melatonin. Perhaps you go to bed. But usually, we rely on bright light in the morning to help switch that melatonin signal off. But in the winter months, perhaps you're waking up when it's dark outside and you struggle to switch off that melatonin. So melatonin can hang around in the morning and make you feel drowsy. And this comes back to this disruption to circadian rhythms. We haven't got the right light cues to tell melatonin when to turn on and off. And so you can end up with just kind of more melatonin during the day, maybe not quite as much as at night so you can have disrupted sleep at night, and yet you feel quite fatigued during the day.

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Today, in partnership with French acoustic specialist's focal, name audio creates systems that deliver exceptional sound, and unforgettable listening experiences at home. for yourself at a focal powered by name boutique. Visit focal powered by name.com for more information. So let's talk about artificial light. Is living in cities, for example, affecting us? It may well affect our sleep. There's increasing evidence that artificial light at night, and they can map this, you know, with satellites which look at big conurbations, particularly in China, there's been a number of studies which have shown that in areas where you have more artificial light at night in cities,

People are having lighter sleep, and actually that's potentially interfering with their metabolism. So they've linked it to things like increased rates of diabetes, because if you're not getting restorative sleep at night, then one of the impacts is a disruption to the metabolism. In terms of whether it can affect seasonal affective disorder, I haven't seen that research, but it would be a great thing to look at. So is there anything we can do to tune ourselves into the seasons more? Well, I suppose you've got two ways of looking at. at this. One is to embrace the seasonal changes and say, hey, look, it's dark, it's cold, let's hunker down, let's enjoy the fact that we maybe have a little bit less energy and take rest. And there's a sort of an approach in particularly traditionally in Norway and some of those countries where it gets darker

earlier where they really embrace the winter months. They will still get active and get outdoors and maybe do more winter sports, but they'll also embrace the fact that it's nice to be inside when the lights are low and just rest a little bit more. But I think for a lot of us, that increased rest doesn't come naturally. And what we actually want to do is to energise ourselves, to do the things that we want to do during the summer and still be active in the winter.

So the question becomes, how can we perhaps overcome these seasonal changes? so that we still achieve the things that we want to do and we still have sufficient energy and positive mood. And one of the best ways to do that is to try and actually use artificial light to perhaps overcome the deficits that we are experiencing in the environment. So artificial light therapy with light boxes

and artificial lamps, seasonal effect of the lamps, which have high intensity lights, can be used to just give your brain that morning cue that it might be missing out on. So if you have one of these sad lamps, which typically emits about 10,000 lux, that's what we tend to use from a therapeutic perspective. And to put that into perspective, so lux is a measure of light intensity. And 10,000 lux is what you'd get if you went outside on a kind of cloudy day. So if you went outside on a really sunny day in the midsummer, you might get anything from 50 to 100,000 lux. So 10,000 luxes is bright,

but it's not sort of full-on light exposure. But it's much brighter than you typically get from an artificial light. So if you're in an office right now, you're probably under something like 300 to 500 luck. So it is brighter than that. So one of these lamps or light boxes, you can put it on your breakfast table in the morning and you want to sit pretty close to it. There are instructions with every lamp, but probably anything from kind of 30 to 50 centimetres. And you sit with that for about 30 minutes in the morning. And it can provide this cue that resets your circadian rhythm. So bright light lands on receptors in the back of the eye,

which are called intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells, a very special kind of light cell, different to the rods and cones that you might have heard about that are kind of image forming. And that sends a message to this master clock in the brain, another long word, but I love it, super chiasmatic nucleus or the S-C-N, which is like your master clock. And that sends a message to the rest of the body that it's daytime. And there have been studies which you've found that these light boxes, this kind of light therapy, can be as effective as antidepressants,

if not more so. So what it tends to do is reduce the symptoms. They haven't really found anything that prevents seasonal effective disorder entirely, but it does seem to be. to lead to recovery. And in some cases, within a couple of days, you know, three days of light therapy, if you're going to respond to it, you'll probably start to feel better quite quickly. So what about the colour of light? Does that have an effect? Yeah, well, we know that these photosensitive cells in the eye are particularly sensitive to light in the blue end of this visible spectrum. And everybody's kind of heard, oh, are we supposed to avoid blue light? Well, that's kind of what we want before bed. But actually in the daytime,

we want blue light. We want to send this signal to the brain via these special cells that it's daytime. So blue light is good for you during the day. You don't want exclusively blue light, and some people find that actually it tends to give them a few more headaches, but most artificial light is really weak in the blue end of the visible spectrum. So that's another reason to go outside. What you want is this broad spectrum light, not just one particular wavelength. So I've seen a lot of people, wearing these red-tinted glasses? I mean, do they work? So probably what you're seeing is people wearing blue-light blocking glasses, I suspect.

So this is something which has become a popular idea for people who use screens a lot. And I've not really seen much evidence that it has an advantage during the day, but in the last couple of hours before bed, when your brain is normally producing melatonin, there is some evidence that wearing blue-light blockers or having special filters on your screen that will rule out the blue wavelength light might to help promote the onset of melatonin, which in theory should be beneficial for sleep. It doesn't seem to have a huge impact on sleep, but it does seem to help protect your melatonin rhythms. So let's have a look at some other things that we can do to help. So people say taking up a

creative hobby can help, for example. Yeah, I think the idea here is that just not giving up on everything. Although your brain might be telling you, rest, do nothing, if we simply do nothing, it might feel good for a little while, but actually we're not experiencing any of the benefits of the kind of activities that make us feel good. So learning new skills, social interaction is a big one. We tend to have this tendency in the context of seasonal affective disorder of kind of going into ourselves and isolating ourselves and social contact. But social interaction is one of the great things that can help to protect our mental health and social support. So we kind of want to coax ourselves gently into doing the things that we maybe don't feel like doing, in small

doses at least. So contrary to what you said earlier about younger people, I mean, I got it for the first time last year and I'm 44. Oh gosh, yeah. Well, it can certainly have affect you at any age. I think statistically maybe you'd expect younger people to get it more often. But I think that ties into the fact that younger people and also those with ADHD, and I mentioned that they're potentially at more risk, tend to have what we call a delayed body clock. So this, we all have our own internal timing. And I guess the average might be to wake up between maybe 7 and 8 p.m. and go to bed between, say, 10 and 11 p.m. That seems to be around about average. and there'll be people who have more of an early bird rhythm, or we call it chronotype.

So an internal drive to get up a little bit earlier, but there'll be also those who have a late chronotype. And this seems to be partly genetically determined, but it can also be reinforced with our behaviours. So a lot of young people, teenagers, young adults, will have a delayed chronotype. And it's interesting that it sounds like, Jason, you might also be in this bucket of delayed chronotype nighthouse. I'm afraid so. Yeah. Yeah. So this might be partly genetic, but it's also a lot due to behavior. So if you find yourself often going to bed late, perhaps having the lights on late at night, that light late at night can actually delay your chronotype. Then you end up going to bed later and waking up later, that'll just reinforce

this delayed pattern. So for teenagers, it's particularly, tough because they naturally want to go to bed later, but very often they have to wake up early for school. So they're actually waking up at odds with their body clock. So waking up for a teenager at 7am actually feels like they're waking up at 4 a.m. It really feels like an assault on their senses. So that can be really tough for night owls. But then when you bring winter into the picture, they're not getting that bright morning light and they're just seeing sort of darkness at night and then they're really relying on artificial light cues. And if they haven't got enough of that, then they will tend to have these more disrupted patterns. They're potentially

not getting enough light to support their mood neurotransmitters like serotonin, which is one of the precursors of melatonin. So that can lead to low mood and also disrupted melatonin. So it just exaggerates the things that we've just been talking about. So we've talked about melatonin quite a lot. I mean, does that help with seasonal effective disorder? It's not clear that it's a helpful approach for seasonal affective disorder. So what melatonin does, it helps to regulate your circadian rhythm. So it's not a strong sedative. It doesn't necessarily help you sleep through the night, but it will help with the onset of sleep.

So a lot of people find that as they get older, the level of melatonin that you produce naturally will decrease. So in this country in the UK, it's available on prescription for people over the age of 55. But it's not usually used for younger people, just simply because the evidence isn't that good that it's going to help them, unless they have some kind of circadian rhythm disorder. So delayed sleep phase is an example of that, where it's a sort of exaggerated night owl chronotype. If they're really finding that they can't fall asleep before one or even three o'clock in the morning, Melatonin can help if you take it a bit earlier in the evening to bring your circadian rhythm forward. So melatonin definitely helpful for resetting the body clock and regulating the body clock.

As far as I know, it hasn't been found to be helpful for seasonal affective disorder, but actually there is some evidence that it can help people with ADHD to regulate their sleep and to bring their circadian rhythms into check, which can also help with their symptoms. How about something we can buy in the supermarket then? Vitamin D tablets. Yeah, so vitamin D is something that we need light in order to produce in our bodies. It's an interesting one because a lot of us, some studies suggest that 50% of us may become vitamin D deficient during the winter months and that can be linked to depression as well as

a number of other conditions. So if you're feeling really sluggish and you're not getting it outside an awful lot, that is definitely something to look at. But studies which have tried to use vitamin D supplementation of a seasonal effective disorder haven't shown a strong impact. So I think vitamin D supplementation is a good idea for some people who are perhaps not getting enough outdoor light, but it doesn't seem to be the answer for sad. So it's worth the try then. It won't do you any harm. Absolutely. Just going to the toilet.

Exactly. You'll excrete it one way or the other. How about things like journaling? Yeah, so there are all sorts of tools that we can use from. a more cognitive or behavioral perspective. And we often bunch them together and call them CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy or psychotherapy. And there's certainly some evidence that this can be helpful for all types of depression, including seasonal effective disorder. A lot of it honestly comes down to personal preference. Like a lot of people, I think, can get a lot of benefit from light therapy, but they might want to try CBT as well. And the reason that I say that is that

CBT tends to have long-term impacts because what it's doing is it's training you, teaching you to deal with unhelpful thoughts and behaviour patterns which can keep the depression more entrenched. So journaling, I would say, is very much part of that toolkit of CBT techniques. I often use it with people who are struggling with sleep and who are struggling with ruminative thought patterns. And by that, I mean those negative, will not switch off, racing mind kind of thoughts. So one exercise that can be really helpful for people, if we can call it worry time. It's literally finding a time of day, setting a clock for 15 minutes, getting your journal out, and just writing, what are those things that are on your mind? And if it's a sleep problem, very much, what are the thoughts that are keeping you awake at night? And just trying to

download them from your mind where they whizz around and round in circles in a very unhelpful way and onto the page. And simply downloading them or sharing them with other people is often very helpful because we sort of process them as we write, but also then looking at what you've written and kind of asking yourself, okay, if I was my best friend, what would I say to this thought? And just looking at those thoughts with a bit of kindness and compassion. And very often you can put a line through some of them because they're just exaggerated, catastrophic thoughts, which are totally unhelpful. And potentially that act of putting a line through them allows you, when you next recognize that thought, to just put it to one side. There'll be other things you're worrying

about, which are entirely natural and reasonable. And then you can kind of set yourself a bit of an action point, okay, what am I going to do about that to help resolve that worry? So it's just being really logical and reasonable rather than letting them run wild in your brain. At what point would you suggest someone struggling with this seeks professional help? I think at the point where you're feeling overwhelmed that it's interfering with your normal function. You know, we always have a few ups and downs. I call them waves, you know, there's good days, there's bad days, but if you're really struggling to do the normal things that you need to do, such as your work, such as family responsibilities, When these symptoms get in the way of those things, please go and ask for professional help.

So by way of summary, do you have a sort of top of the pops set of list for anyone listening that might be suffering from this? Okay. So for everybody, whether you're suffering from a milder form of the winter blues or something more severe and clinical, I would say at any time of year, honestly, number one sleep tip is actually to move your body. Physical activity we know is just this potent antidepressant. It has so many benefits, both for your mind and your body. It's certainly great for sleep. If you're not sure where to start, just get out for a walk. And the great thing about a walk is that you're probably going to go out and get some natural light as well. But even if it's in the dark, you're still going to experience some benefits. If you can do that walk at the same time of day in the morning, that's going to have an even stronger benefit because exercise is also a zeitgen. that helps to regulate your clock and it sends a wake-up sort of signal to the brain. So a morning

walk for 20, 30 minutes, particularly in daylight, would be a sort of triple whammy when it comes to sleep. You're regulating your circadian rhythms. You're building up what we call sleep pressure. So the more exercise you do, the more you build up a drive to sleep. So that's a positive. And it also helps to regulate your stress system. It kind of helps to ease that and can be really good for anxiety. So that's my number one, even though it's kind of got multiple arms and benefits. Move the body. Second one, I would say, is consistency. Whether or not you feel like it, always waking up at the same time of day. Again, it's just awesome for circadian rhythms. You're nodding, looking at me like, that's not going to happen, Sophie. Consistency, okay,

is, honestly, it's the most powerful, I think, way to improve your sleep quality. There's some research out this year that actually suggests that sleep consistency is actually more important for long-term health outcomes than the number of hours of sleep that you get. And I think that's quite powerful for people who struggle to sleep for a long time. At least if you can get that sleep at the same time, that's a positive. It's also going to be horribly depressive for the people who do shift work and can't help it. So if you're in that bucket and you can't get out of bed at the same time every day, Don't worry, you can still use these zeitgebers of light and food and movement to help to reduce the stress on your circadian rhythms, your biological clock. So, for example, before you want to go to

sleep, you're always dimming the lights, no matter what kind of time of day it is. Try and maintain your eating during daylight hours, because that will put less stress on the body if you're a shift worker and squeeze that physical activity in whenever you can if you're working shifts. But For those of us who have it within our control consistency would be my second tip. And then the third one, this is kind of an easy one. We've talked a lot about light, but probably not enough about darkness. We've got to create a contrast between the light of the day and darkness at night. So just something as simple as wearing an eye mask to shield the eye from light

and actually help get you into the deeper phases of sleep and stay asleep for longer. sleep is better quality during the night, then hopefully you'll wake up with more energy. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought to you from the team behind BBC Science Focus. That was Dr Sophie Bostock. If you liked what you just heard, then please do consider subscribing to Instant Genius on your preferred podcast platform. The current issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is out now. Pick up a copy wherever you buy your favourite magazines or download us on your app store of choice. You can also find us online at Science Focus. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal.

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