Feeling unwell in winter: how to overcome constant fatigue and restore the joy of life

Often, mood swings are closely related to weather conditions and seasonality - winter depression occurs in the coldest time of the year, representing an affective disorder with emotional disturbances of a depressive nature and impaired cognitive functions. The illness manifests itself suddenly - in the morning you don’t want to get out of bed, the desire to even go to your favorite job completely disappears, the body wants to rest and eat.

Winter depression occurs regardless of age, but more often the disease falls within the time period of 18-30 years. The danger of this condition, as well as any other depression, lies in possible complications in the absence of treatment - we are talking about suicidal tendencies, social isolation, the formation of drug or alcohol addiction, and problems with work or study.

Quite a lot of people face the phenomenon of winter depression

Take a walk

You have to turn into a real hunter. Do you see the sun peeking out the window? Get ready quickly and go outside. Yes, yes, there is a lot of work, it’s cold and windy outside, and in general I’m too lazy to get up from my seat. These are all excuses. Force yourself to walk during daylight hours. It is enough to be outside just 15 minutes a day to provide yourself with the necessary supply of sunlight.

How to cheer up in bad weather? More details

How does the problem manifest itself?

When a person develops winter depression, the symptoms are quite numerous, which, however, does not mean the presence of absolutely all signs in the clinical picture. The list includes:

1. Feelings of hopelessness and uselessness, guilt and depression, reluctance to do anything, despair, loss of self-esteem, inability to experience joyful emotions.
2. Increased tension, anxiety, irritability.
3. Memory problems, indecision, inability to concentrate on anything, loss of intellectual activity.
4. Problems with sleep - despite its duration, strength cannot be restored, the need for daytime rest appears, awakening causes difficulties.
5. During the day, there is a deterioration in well-being - lethargy and a desire to constantly sleep appear, apathy develops, a constant lack of energy, limbs “fill with lead.”
6. Even light loads cause rapid fatigue, decreased or complete loss of ability to work, and the inability to cope with stress.
7. A person is prone to overeating and strives to include as many sweets and alcoholic beverages in his diet.
8. There are disruptions in digestive processes, joint pain, deterioration of immunity, and decreased libido.
9. When it comes to children and young people, social behavior problems arise.
10. Victims avoid communication, are prone to creating conflict situations, communication with others is difficult, hence subsequent problems with loved ones, work colleagues, and friends.

Worth seeing: Somatized depression

Typically, signs of pathology appear with the arrival of each winter period, starting from the last days of November and ending at the end of March. The symptoms of winter depression go away on their own with the beginning of the spring period, and this can happen gradually or rapidly, in parallel with hyperactivity or hypomania.

In the first case, sudden mood swings, anxiety, and short periods of hyperactivity are observed.

In the second, there are no mood changes. The speed with which symptoms go away depends only on the amount of sunlight entering the body.

A person suffering from depression is not inclined to communicate

In addition, a latent form of the disease may develop, when the main symptoms are fatigue and lethargy, problems with sleep and the digestive system. Despite the fact that the disguised form is not as dangerous as the overt one, it is also not a very pleasant state.

Play some sports

Physical activity will help restore a good mood. It has been proven that half an hour of intense exercise increases the concentration of joy hormones by 5 times!

However, be careful not to overdo it. If you are a beginner athlete, you should not train hard, this will only worsen your physical and emotional condition. Pilates, yoga or walks in the fresh air are suitable for beginners. The main thing is that classes are regular.

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Feeling unwell in winter: how to overcome constant fatigue and restore the joy of life

Short daylight hours, grayness outside the window and everyday routine can significantly affect your well-being, causing worsening mood and apathy. Olga Aleksandrovna Chashchina, head of the neurobioregulation department at the X-Clinic Adaptive Medicine Clinic, spoke about methods of combating apathy during the cold season.

Determine the severity

It should be remembered that winter blues and seasonal depression are not the same thing. For most people, seasonal changes in mood, motivation, appetite, and sleep affect daily activities but do not reach the level of depression. If such changes occur regularly during the fall and winter and meet the severity criteria for a depressive episode of the International Classification of Diseases, they can be classified as symptoms of seasonal depressive disorder. Your doctor can help you differentiate between winter depression (seasonal depressive disorder) and the winter blues.

Main reasons

Any decrease in activity in winter has general patterns of development and causes:

• Lack of light. The duration of daylight in the European part of Russia in winter hardly exceeds 6 hours, and in St. Petersburg it is even less. Add here dense clouds and, of course, the fact that we usually spend daylight hours at work. As a result, we do not see sunlight for 4-5 months a year. Because of this, the body’s circadian, daily rhythms are inconsistent with external conditions. In winter, the secretion of melatonin (a hormone that is produced in the dark) is disrupted and less serotonin is produced (a neurotransmitter that affects our emotions and mood).
• Feeling of constant cold. The body is exhausted by temperature changes during the day - cold and wind outside, stuffiness and elevated temperatures in transport and indoors.
• There is little time in the fresh air - we ventilate rooms at work and at home less often, and on the street we try to cover the distance to work faster so as not to freeze.
• Add here annual reports and other increased stress associated with the end of the year, not always regular and balanced nutrition, excess alcohol during the holidays, lack of physical activity, colds and exacerbation of chronic diseases.

The result is loss of strength, decreased performance and efficiency, disturbances in appetite and sleep, and decreased mood. The situation is aggravated by a feeling of guilt towards the body and a feeling of hopelessness of the situation. I am ashamed of my lack of initiative at work, of the lack of time for my family and children. The circle closes. Such maladaptive thoughts themselves support the winter blues and it becomes difficult to cope on your own.

How to identify Winter depression can be suspected if emotional disturbances (low mood, inability to experience positive emotions, apathy, increased irritability, decreased self-esteem) are combined with cognitive impairment (difficulty concentrating, decreased memory, decreased intellectual activity). Fatigue, increased fatigue and drowsiness, an increased need for sleep, which causes a person to have trouble getting enough sleep and difficulty waking up in the morning, are often a concern. Additional manifestations are an increased need for food, cravings for flour and sweets, decreased sexual desire, and decreased resistance to infectious diseases. Women are more susceptible to seasonal mood swings than men.

Treatment

Treatment of seasonal depression must be carried out under the supervision of a doctor. But you can easily use prevention methods yourself. These simple tips will help you reliably protect yourself from winter depression:

1. Fight light starvation. If it is possible to change your work schedule so that you catch at least a little light, change it. If this is not possible, try to move to a window and work at least part of the day in the sun, and not under artificial lamps.
2. Go to bed early. In winter, the need for sleep increases and it is important for the body to ensure normal, healthy sleep. During vigorous activity during the day, it is worth keeping in mind that in winter fatigue may be greater. So try to take short breaks or switch to another activity.
3. Light therapy from 7 to 9 am. In the morning, the body must be allowed to wake up. Turn on lights, open curtains, use alarm clocks or light therapy glasses. This will restore melatonin production, sleep quality and daytime activity.
4. Surround yourself with light, bright colors. On the table you can put a dish with juicy fruits: oranges, tangerines, red and green apples. Let yourself be surrounded by pleasing shades.
5. Add your favorite smells and tastes, turn on your favorite music. Make all your senses and brain work, create new neural networks.
6. Time outdoors is a must. Pull yourself together and go for a walk. A jog or a walk in the park will do. If possible, also take up winter sports, skiing and skating.
7. Moderate physical activity - 3-5 times a week. Combine different types of loads, choose the types of activity that you like.
8. Optimize your diet. Add foods rich in polyunsaturated fatty acids - sea fish (salmon, mackerel, herring), avocado, olive oil, nuts.
9. Drink hot drinks. Various teas, cocoa. The very process of preparing hot drinks for yourself and your loved ones can turn into a daily ritual that brings people together and gives a feeling of comfort and intimacy.
10. Reduce the level of demands on yourself, try to overcome the feeling of guilt. During seasons when performance declines, guilt is not the best help. Take an inventory of your time and effort. Optimize your daily workload - cleaning and cooking, review your work schedule, discuss with your loved ones what can be put off until later, and what really requires a quick decision and your participation.

And, of course, keep in touch with relatives and friends. Try to get out of the house to exhibitions, cinemas or out of town. In difficult moments, the support of loved ones will help you overcome negative emotions.

If you feel that the listed preventive measures are not enough, this is a reason to consult a specialist and select methods for increasing endurance and resistance to stress. Here, modern neurotechnologies and traditional healing methods come to the aid of doctors.

Get more rest

No matter how hard you try, you are unlikely to be able to overcome drowsiness. In the afternoon hours, labor productivity drops. If possible, do not fight sleepiness, but surrender to it. During the day, peak sleepiness occurs between 1 and 5 p.m. At this time, it is advisable to take a nap for 10–15 minutes. This short break is enough to keep you energized for the rest of the day.

Those who spend winter days in the office and are deprived of the opportunity to take a nap should remember to take at least five-minute breaks after every hour of work. Just walk along the corridor, or even better, do a little warm-up: twist your head, arms, legs and be sure to look out the window to give your eyes a rest.

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Main symptoms

As a rule, you can suspect that the cause of a constantly bad mood is precisely an excess of melatonin and a deficiency of serotonin, based on the following signs:

• constant feeling of fatigue;
• desire to sleep throughout the day;
• decreased libido;
• eating disorders - appetite either increases or, conversely, decreases.

Often winter depression, in its clinical picture, resembles a lack of essential vitamins in the body. However, typical symptoms of winter depression, affecting the behavioral and emotional spheres, help to recognize an affective disorder:

• depressed mood that persists for 2-3 weeks or more;
• exacerbated, excessive irritability;
• the constant presence of a feeling of despair, depression;
• loss of desire for life's pleasures;
• increased fatigue with previously acceptable loads;
• the emergence of a desire for isolation, seclusion;
• deterioration in the ability to concentrate and concentrate;
• difficulty making responsible decisions;
• domination of dark ideas in the mind;
• the appearance of thoughts about one’s own worthlessness, social uselessness.

Such depression can begin in the fall, for example, from the end of October, and continue throughout the winter. In the absence of proper help from a psychiatrist or psychotherapist, a person may even attempt suicide.

How does the biological clock work?

However, the human brain responds to light levels not only through the synthesis of melatonin, but also through a number of other biochemical pathways.

The most important center for controlling circadian rhythms (usually called the biological clock) is located in our hypothalamus. A real molecular pendulum works there: one combination of proteins corresponds to the dark time of the day, another means that morning has come, during the day everything changes again, and in the evening everything returns to its previous state, and the brain understands this in the spirit that night is coming and it’s time to sleep.

This molecular machine runs on a cycle that is approximately equal to a day, and whether the clock tends to rush or lag depends on the individual's genetic makeup (this is what apparently determines owls and larks) - but it also receives nerve impulses from the retina and constantly adjusts its internal clock, bringing it into line with the real solar rhythm. It is now known that some genes involved in the molecular clock are present in different variants in different people - and this allows us to predict whether a given person is predisposed to seasonal depression.

Accordingly, classical antidepressants help against seasonal depression. But the main treatment for seasonal affective disorder is simple exposure to bright light. People come into a medical office and sit there for two hours next to a bright light bulb, specially designed so that its radiation imitates sunlight. The retina of the eye receives a signal that there is a lot of light, nerve impulses are transmitted to the pineal gland, where melatonin is produced, and to the pituitary gland, where the molecular biological clock works, and the brain decides that, judging by the intensity of the light, it is still spring here, and not autumn, so depression can be suspended.

Even gerbils don't want to live

Melatonin is a wonderful substance, so darkness, which ensures its synthesis, is necessary and beneficial. But there is one problem: in most animals (and it seems that humans are no exception), melatonin suppresses the production of sex hormones. Nighttime melatonin synthesis decreases significantly during puberty (and if this does not happen, then the teenager develops more slowly than his peers). People living close to the Arctic Circle are less likely to conceive a child in the winter than in the summer (due to seasonal fluctuations in melatonin levels, which are high in the dark and low in the light). And in the instructions for the drug Melaxen (this is melatonin in tablets) there is a warning that the medicine has a contraceptive effect.

At the everyday level, the dependence of melatonin concentration on changes in illumination takes the form of a general belief that spring is the most suitable time for violent love, but in the fall everything becomes somehow dull.

But are fluctuations in melatonin levels directly related to the development of seasonal affective disorder in late autumn? At least partly yes. For example, Tel Aviv University uses local rodents, Egyptian gerbils, as a model to study seasonal affective disorder. Like humans, they lead a diurnal lifestyle, and, moreover, being a southern species, they have never developed adaptations to the long, dark winter.

If you give animals a shortened daylight hours (five hours of light and nineteen hours of darkness) or directly inject them with melatonin, then within three weeks they begin to clearly demonstrate depressive and anxious behavior. Compared to normal gerbils, victims of melatonin or short daylight hours gain weight more slowly and are less interested in sweet syrup (that is, they lose interest in the joys of life), avoid open spaces in mazes (they do not want to explore the territory), and are not inclined to attack strangers who have invaded their home cage (they do not feel the need to defend their homeland), and when they get into the water they despair much faster - instead of trying to swim out, they soon fold their legs and plunge into the depths, so that experimenters have to urgently rescue them before the victims of seasonal depression have time to completely choke.

Similar experiments have not been carried out on humans, so what is known so far is that those whose internal hormonal rhythms are especially sensitive to changes in lighting, that is, to changes in melatonin levels, are susceptible to seasonal depression.

Causes of winter depression

Autumn-winter depression always has two causes - biological and psychosocial. The first means a weakening of the body, like what leads to endless colds. In the case of depression, we are talking not only about the immune system, but also about the nervous system. The second reason is the lack of pleasure, lack of attention, communication, feeling of loneliness, uselessness, dissatisfaction with oneself, and so on. Everyone always has psychosocial problems to one degree or another, but against the backdrop of a gloomy winter picture, a lack of vitamin D and a decrease in the production of the joy hormone, they, like an untreated cold, can get out of control.

Reasons for weakening the body in winter:

1. Lack of vitamins.
2. Reducing the duration of contact with sunlight.
3. Increased secretion of melatonin, the sleep hormone, by the brain.
4. Changing the length of daylight hours.
5. Other seasonal diseases.