5 Tips to Manage Seasonal Depression

Winter is upon us, and for those that live far north of the equator, it can be a time of year we brace ourselves for. It is the season that bridges the end of year to the new, and a time to truly rest and reset. Along with that, there are naturally fewer sunnier days, shorter days, and less movement. These changes can impact our circadian rhythm, as well as our serotonin and melatonin levels. For some this causes symptoms of Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD).

What are the signs that you may be experiencing SAD? The following are symptoms to look out for: feelings of sadness, drops in energy levels, increase in sleep, change in appetite, difficulty concentrating, fatigue, lack of interest in socialization, and irritability. During this time of year, make sure you are checking in with yourself to see if you are noticing subtle shifts. Below are some tips to put in your back pocket, and help you manage your symptoms.

Tip #1- The first tip is a small, but easy one. Consult with your doctor to get your vitamin levels checked, and consider a vitamin D supplement. Less sun exposure means less vitamin D which can have a huge impact on your mood.

Tip #2- Let there be light! On the days that there is sunshine, bundle up and take a quick walk around the block. Natural sun exposure and movement are a win-win. For days where there isn't as much sunlight, consider purchasing a SAD Lamp like this one. Light therapy usage can help simulate sunlight, and trigger a release of serotonin. 

Tip #3- Plan ahead, and create rituals to look forward to. Before your week begins, see what subtle shifts you can make to break up your day. Consider waking up 5 minutes earlier to open your shades, do a quick stretch, and journal. Take a walk with a friend on your lunch break, have a doodle pad by your desk, or a puzzle you can tend to during breaks. These little rituals can help fight fatigue!

Tip #4- Pull out your social calendar. Lack of interest in socialization is a symptom of SAD and admitting that is okay. Some nights allow yourself to lie back on the couch and stream your favorite show. On days where you are feeling a bit more inspired, plan for events to schedule to connect with loved ones. It may feel like pulling boots out of the mud on the day of, but you likely won’t regret it afterward.

Tip #5- Remember that you are not alone. SAD can feel like more than just the “winter blues”, and it impacts thousands of people each year. It is okay to not be okay, and it is okay to ask for help. There are many skilled therapists, including those at Empowered Connections Counseling, that are here to support you. Interventions like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) can help address negative thinking. Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) can help with emotional regulation, or even discussing seasonal medication with a therapist are just a few options.

How to cope during the holidays

Family drama, financial strain, lack of routine, increases in substance use, and memories that can trigger grief and trauma - the holidays are rife with opportunities for emotional distress. Establishing a coping plan is essential to navigating the stress of the holiday season with your sanity intact. Consider the strategies below: 

1. Boundary setting is the number one skill I recommend for clients navigating the holiday season - especially those with interpersonal conflict. We have a finite amount of time and emotional resources on a given day. Consider how you can set and maintain effective boundaries this year to make the most of your time while minimizing stress. Here are some examples:

   *Instead of traveling to 4 different events over two days, consider saying “no” to 1 or 2 to allow more time to reset and rest between events. 

   *If you are visiting family that tends to be emotionally tiring, consider staying at an Airbnb this year instead of with family. Staying elsewhere provides space for alone time and rejuvenation for the next day. 

   *Conversely, if you have family staying with you strive to maintain parts of your routine - this may require setting boundaries and expectations with others. Routine and space allow you to fill your emotional reservoirs - i.e. continuing your morning walk, meditation, date night, etc. 

2. Budget - according to a Dec. 8th CNBC article, the average American is planning to spend $1000 this holiday season on gifts. No doubt this spending adds additional stress for the weeks and months ahead. Set a budget for gift-giving in advance and think about how you plan to manage the increased financial stressors pragmatically and emotionally.

3. Substance use - substance use tends to increase around the holiday season. The reasons for this are clear: increased stress, more parties and extravagance, less routine and minimal work obligations, and emotional triggers surrounding the holidays from grief, trauma, and depression. If you struggle with substance use around the holidays create a plan, seek out support from loved ones, and maintain vigilance in a difficult season. 

4. Grief & Trauma - alongside warm traditions and holiday memories exist a dark, painful underbelly for many during the holidays - painful memories of lost loved ones, trauma, and familial abuse. For loss, consider how you can honor your loved one by maintaining or establishing rituals that allow you to feel connected to those you have lost. For trauma, practice skills that help you navigate triggering events or memories - journaling, mindfulness, distraction, and anxiety management skills can all come in handy here. Do not wait for triggers to appear before applying coping skills - prevention is key.

What coping skills have worked for you during the holiday season?

Let us know in the comments below!

Knowing our needs

We all have needs, and to prioritize our needs is a way to a fulfilling life. Acknowledging that we have them is the first step towards figuring out what they are and how to have them met. You are not needy for requesting them to be met, nor are you selfish for placing your needs before others’. Let us explore knowing about our needs, being resourceful in meeting our needs and then, not being afraid to make mistakes.

Knowing not Preferring

When we notice a thing, we can begin to master it. Needs are something we often don’t spend time thinking or talking about. Recently I had a conversation with a friend about needs in which they expressed they “never really know what I need. I do know what I prefer.” 

Preferring something is not the same as knowing. This becomes clear when what we prefer clashes with what we need. I prefer to be with friends, but often I diminish my need for sleep. Do you know your needs? This is a broad question, so let me ask it again in two ways that I have been asking myself as of late to help inspire you to answer this question for yourself more often. What do I need emotionally to feel content? What do I need physically to feel at ease?

Resourceful, not Needy nor Selfish

When we make requests about our needs in relationships, there are two words often thrown at partners as a deflection or accusation, and those are needy and selfish. Asking for one’s needs is an important and vulnerable aspect of relationships. You are not needy for asking your partner for help in achieving a need, nor are you selfish for doing something for yourself; you are resourceful. 

I have to balance this in my own life quite often. My partner works third shift, and this comes with a few stipulations. I often need to be quiet in the afternoon after I am done working when I would rather play my guitar or watch a movie. As well, I often pack their meal for work. It is not selfish for my partner to ask me to be quiet, so that they can get the sleep they need. It is also true that my partner is not needy for asking me to make them a meal; nor is it selfish for me to make the meal I want to make. Are you being resourceful?

Needs and Mistakes

Knowing and being resourceful with needs is not easy. We often do put preferences over needs, or don’t realize that we are asking a lot of our partners and not addressing their needs. Life is learning, and to learn you must make mistakes. Some needs must be met by you and some must be met with the help of others. It is okay to make mistakes, because it means you are learning. What lessons have you learned about needs from your mistakes?

I will often make mistakes due to being too self-centered. I have asked my partner to come with me to explore fascinating intellectual topics and dragged them to listen or read things so we could talk about them. Though it is a need for me to be intellectually stimulated, it isn’t a need of my partner in the same way, and though a need, I misplaced it as a romantic-relationship need instead of a need that can be filled by a platonic-friendship.  Mistakes are made in attempts to get needs met and are a positive sign of change. 

When we know what our needs are and are resourceful in meeting our needs, we can live a more fulfilling life. In that pursuit we will make mistakes and that is a part of the journey of knowing and finding ways to be resourceful about our needs. 

For further inquiries into some of the surrounding topics in this article here are some resources for you on your journey:

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is a wonderful place to start in finding not only personal needs, but needs in relationships. We have physical and emotional needs,  and both must be addressed.

MindBodyGreen breaks down Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs into easier to explore parts and how we can actualize these needs in our lives.

Melissa Orlov, writing for Psychology Today, examines nine ways to recover from mistakes in a relationship. Setting aside time for your relationship is rewarding and validating, and focusing on how you communicate can make mistakes easier to recover from (rules 3 and 5 in the article, respectively).

For those in a rut in their relationship, sometimes it isn’t that you don’t know your needs, rather it is that they have changed with time. Mark Travers, writing for Psychology Today, gives four solid ways to address this issue of needs in our relationships, while overcoming mistakes we may have made.

GIVE to Yourself

Dialectical Behavior Therapy’s (DBT) GIVE is a powerful therapeutic tool I find myself returning to over and over again in my work with clients, particularly in strengthening interpersonal communication skills. Recently, when preparing for a session, I was thinking of new ways to treat negative self-talk; realizing there is great potential in applying GIVE not only to communication with others, but also toward one’s self!  Today I would like to introduce you to Marsha Linehan’s GIVE and how it can be used for positive self-talk.

What GIVEs?

GIVE stand for Gentle, Interested, Validate, Easy Manner. Gentle can mean many things, I often tend towards tender or non-judging in my approach. Interested means to be listening, if you are listening you can summarize what the speaker said and they would agree with it. Validate means to acknowledge what is being said, this does not mean agreeance. Easy Manner means light-hearted, at ease or humorous.

How can I GIVE to myself?

When I talk with strangers or friends I use GIVE as a guideline to monitor if it is a healthy conversation. The same holds true with my self-talk. If I cannot be gentle with myself, I must be hurt. It’s important that I talk to myself gently if I wish to feel heard, much like I require of myself and those I associate with. If my internal dialogue is abrasive and rapid (cutting myself off) - it is time to implement a coping skill to center myself so that I can fully listen to myself. If conflicting parts of me cannot acknowledge that I have differing roles   that can conflict (being a therapist is different than that of a brother, son or partner) then it is no wonder that I am hurting. Even in ambivalence I have to create space to acknowledge  inner conflicting ideas, thoughts, and emotions. I admit that Easy Manner is an odd and deeply personal approach when it comes to self-talk. I am not particularly humorous, but I can be at ease. My role as a therapist should be at ease with my role as a son, even though they conflict from time to time. GIVE is a great way to support healthy internal communication, which can lead to improvements in other aspects of life including emotional well-being, interpersonal communication, and self-esteem.

What do I do when GIVE doesn’t work?

This is where coping skills come in. What can you do that will ground  yourself so that you can practice GIVE? Use your creativity! You know yourself best. For some inspiration here are a few ways I have seen clients successfully ground themselves in this situation: (1) Just breathe. Find an easy rhythm that keeps your attention on your breathing. (2) Music. Let the tone or lyrics speak to you in a positive way to balance the negativity. (3) Reach out to a close friend, or family member, and talk about mutual interests that you enjoy. Once you feel relaxed, centered, and grounded try to focus on one of the principles of GIVE and see how you feel on the second try. 

Self-talk is one of the hardest parts about communication. If you are trying to communicate with others and it is difficult, you can take a break. When it comes to yourself, you can never quite leave yourself. This is where using GIVE can help, because it is about respecting you, and all your parts, when you use it for self-talk.

--

Linehan, M. (1993). Skills Training Manual for Treating Borderline Personality Disorder. The Guilford Press.

The 3-minute exercise to manage anxiety while under quarantine

Anxiety has the capacity to be both incredibly helpful and harmful. In the event of finding yourself face to face with a cougar, down to the wire on a final project, or gearing up for a big race, anxiety gives us the "juice" to dig deep, focus, and function at a high level. There are consequences of course to these bouts with anxiety, including adrenaline and its counterpart cortisol - which, studies have shown, can be very harmful in high doses. Similarly prolonged states of anxiety can lead to fatigue, GI issues, heart problems, and memory problems. For brief periods of time, this anxiety can be functional and help us overcome challenges.

 Unfortunately, anxiety isn't always helpful. Often the evolutionary anxiety that would help us in the event of a battle against a wild animal is constantly "ON" as we fight internal fears surrounding things that haven't actually happened yet. In fact, I often find that when anxiety is over functioning it leads us to look to the future and build dozens of different possible outcomes, then mount problem solving against them all. This is overwhelming, often unhelpful, and multiplies distress by focusing on situations that do not yet exist!

 The beauty of practicing mindfulness as an anxiety management technique is that it helps us to stay focused on the present moment. Much of our psychological distress exists when we ruminate about the past or catastrophize the future - both are out of our control and are not happening in the present moment. You do not have to hold the distress of the past, present, and future simultaneously - it is too much!

 My favorite quick trick to bring anxiety down to a more manageable level is a grounding technique that engages your senses. This helps take you out of your mind and into the physical space around you. Here you can remind yourself of what is actually happening - relieving your mind of the burden of holding so many possible realities at once. This has been increasingly helpful to folks as they are stuck in self-isolation due to the growing impact of COVID-19 on our world (a veritable powder keg for anxiety and catastrophic thought).

 Before starting, I encourage you to take a few deep, full breaths - holding at the top of the inhale briefly and slowly exhaling. Then I invite you to turn to your senses and work through the following list. Repeat at least once (more if needed):

 *Name 5 things that you see

 *Name 4 things that you physically feel

 *Name 3 things that you hear

 *Name 2 things that you smell

 *Name 1 thing that you taste

 *REPEAT*

 Extra notes: it is normal to still feel your mind racing and to experience internal dialogue (even critiquing the exercise). Allow those thoughts to come and go and continue to focus in on the exercise - the anxious voice will start to subside as you draw more and more attention to the world around you. Also, I encourage you to try to slow down with each item you name, trying to avoid rattling things off as quickly as possible "PILLOW - COUCH - LAMP - CHAIR"; instead try to also include one detail or adjective along with the item "the faded chair" or the "patterned rug". 

If you are interested in more mindfulness activities, I highly recommend checking out meditation apps such as Calm, Simple Habit, and more. If you prefer a hands-on resource I encourage you to check out A Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Workbook by Stahl & Goldstein.