It's not a Disorder. It's Just a Natural Cycle of Life.

There is only one thing that makes me happy, productive and full of energy in winter. It’s travelling to Thailand or another tropical country. As long as I get enough sunshine every day I’m cheerful, outgoing and driven to make things happen, but the winter cold, dark, and grey makes me want to curl up under a blanket and sleep until early March.

For years I tried to find a way to work around this. I drank crazy amounts of coffee, put a bright sunlight lamp on my desk, went on a long walk every day around noon, and took Vitamin D pills and other miraculous supplements. At best, all these efforts kept me somewhat awake, but far from being effective or bright.

Coincidentally, the last two months of every year were also the time when I had to perform at my max. I used to work helping people set up their online stores, and between the Black Friday craziness and Christmas shopping, this was always the busiest time of the year. Sometimes I wondered if there was something wrong with me because I couldn’t stand the pace, and yearly performance reviews certainly did not help me ease the anxiety.

I’m not unusual in this seasonal weariness

The further North you go, the more people display the same pattern. Women are more likely to get affected than men. If it gets too intense, you can seek an official diagnosis for Seasonal Affective Disorder, and get prescribed medication that will hopefully bring you back to normal. Because getting back to normal is what everyone wants and needs, right? When all projects are planned for the mythical man-month, it doesn’t matter if the month in question is May or January. Everyone is expected to perform consistently no matter the time of the year.

However, that’s not how people lived even a hundred years ago. For traditional farmers, there was hardly anything to do during the cold winter months. Given that food was scarce, and working in the snow would burn a lot of calories, staying in bed might have been an amazing evolutionary strategy. If you can’t do much to increase your chance of survival, and staying active might actually even lower your chance, it makes perfect sense not to feel like doing anything at all.

Few people these days can afford doing nothing

Most of us rely on a steady paycheck, even when all the signals from nature are telling us to go back to sleep. In some professions like my previous one, the demands at this time of year might be even higher than normally.

But even knowing that there’s nothing disordered about feeling melancholic now can go a long way. There’s a huge difference between feeling low on energy and knowing it’s completely normal, and feeling low on energy and thinking there is something wrong with you, wondering if you’re lazy or broken, and getting increasingly anxious and terrified when nothing at all seems to help.

Some people just want to hibernate through the winter, and that’s fine. A hundred years ago it might have even saved their lives. The only disordered thing here is believing that there’s something wrong or dangerous about them feeling this way.