When I ask folks how they really are these days, I tend to hear something like this:
“I’m kind of just getting through,” or,
“Honestly, really over the winter.”
Me too, dude. If you live in the northern hemisphere, the days are dark and long and cold and it feels like it’s been forever since we felt joy in the form of warmth.
In shocking news, your nervous system hears you. Pain complaints seem to skyrocket in winter, likely driven by increased muscle tension of your body literally trying its damn best to keep you warm, not to mention the sympathetic nervous system response (a.k.a fight/flight/freeze — literally?) that the body has to cold exposure.
So what is one to do? In my coaching practice, I frequently say that I do not think of success as how little pain a person experiences, or how long they go without a flare. Pain is an innately human experience. Flares happen. Instead, I think of success as the resilience a person is able to demonstrate in response to life unfolding in this chaotic, slightly insane world.
We find resilience in knowing ourselves — our triggers, our bodies, even our mental spirals, and more importantly, in knowing what tools help us in specific situations. And then (here’s the really tricky part) actually using those tools at the appropriate times.
So today, I offer you some tools to get you through the depths of seasonal affective disorder (aka SAD) season in under five minutes: