Sunny and Toasty

Multiple Causes For Seasonal Blues

One woman said that she did not become sad in winter, but, increasingly, she'd dread the fall of the year, and hadn't a clue as to why. When it was suggested, among other possibilities, that her sadness might be affected by something that happened in the fall in her past she then remembered her unhappy school experiences and realized that the approach of the school term after summer vacation was the cause of her darkening mood at that time of year.

Some people are not unhappy in winter, but are mysteriously so at some other season of the year. Not only can events from the past be a sole cause of seasonal blues, but they can be contributing causes, stacked with other influencing situations, environments, and experiences to create the feeling that winter is not a pleasant or desired time of year.

Anniversary Angst

The person above who dreaded the start of the school year had a recurring event to reinforce and strengthen the unhappy feeling that returned annually, even after school was not a problem anymore because she was grown up and no longer went to school.

Some experiences are so strong that a one time experience at a particular time of year or date brings on sad feelings every year thereafter. For example, when I was thirteen years old a tragedy in my extended family on Thanksgiving caused me to re-experience sadness on Thanksgivings many years later. It surfaced when I had a young family of my own, and puzzled me for years as to why I'd feel the way I did, until, one day I realized what the cause must have been.

If you look back into your past experiences you may find that things have happened in the winter that were unpleasant, sad, or traumatic. These experiences may be contributing causes to your present dislike for winter.

Physical Discomfort

Winter has unpleasant weather, cold, windy, and dry, or wet and rainy, One's skin can become dry and scratchy. Clothing can be restrictive and a bother to pile on, take off, clean the mud or snow off, dry out.

Danger

In some parts of the country/world there is danger from freezing, danger from avalanche, danger from being stuck in the mud, danger from frostbite, windburn, and falling on slippery surfaces, danger from falling through thin ice, danger from storms.

Reduced Opportunity For Physical Activity

The weather and inconveniences of winter make people stay indoors more, and exercise less. Unless one enjoys winter sports, one can easily just let physical activity slide into basically getting from one place to another. The mood elevating endorphins created by exercise are then missing.

Less Outdoor Experience

Less time outdoors means less fresh air, less to see and do, less people to interact with, less opportunity to do things one enjoys in warmer months, less pleasure.

Isolation

Winter has an isolating effect for many people. They may work in an office, or at home, and have little interaction with others during the winter months. Stay at home and work at home mothers and others experience "cabin fever," if they are isolated long enough in the winter.

Less Opportunity For Preferred Activity

Gardeners have to wait for spring, even if they have a few houseplants, or maybe even a lot, it's not like the great outdoors. Many sports require either an expensive indoor sports facility or must wait for spring, summer, and fall for participation. Walking is much easier from one's front door than driving to a mall or other indoor location to find a suitable place to walk in the winter. No garage sales, no picnics, no outdoor concerts, no visits to the beach.

Less Light

Ah, yes, the biggie, the light. It's the light all right, but maybe not only the light. It can be some of the lack of light, and some of any or all of the above that stack to make winter a not fun time, a dreary time, long and lingering, nasty and brutal, or just make one want to sit in a warm chair and hibernate with a good book, any book at all.

So What's The Cure?

Many causes, many cures. Actually, I'd rather not think of them as cures, but as counterweights. The causative elements need to be balanced by actions you can take, for each one, to swing the balance back to the side of feeling good and being happy.

More about that in the next post.

Waiting For Winter To Be Over

People in need of a winter makeover dread winter, and when it comes, they sometimes find themselves in hibernation or "waiting" mode, like the mythical Persephone, who had to spend half the year in Hell with her husband, and was freed back into the above ground world in Spring.

My objective with the Winter Makeover Project is to turn Winter into a delightful experience, fully equivalent to the joys and pleasures of Spring. I'm not planning on changing the climate, or the weather, but on changing your and my experiences in Winter.

I want us to load Winter with so much that is good and satisfying, delightful and pleasant, that we would not think of hibernating and missing all that goodness.

Supplying What's Missing: Greenery

When I ask myself what's missing in winter, one of the first things I think of is leaves on the trees, flowers, and green plants of all sorts.

Now, I'm not very good with house plants. I always feel like a bad mother with them. I forget to water them, or I over water them, or more likely, do both. They sometimes come home with me with little bugs I don't see (probably little unseen eggs for little bugs that then hatch out in wild abandon) which then infest them and their neighbors, and I have to figure out whether to toss them, douse them, rinse them, or try not to think about it.

Add to that that I've told my body I'll avoid molds and mildews so I won't need to respond uncomfortably to them. That leads me to sniffing the dirt around the plants in the store to see if it there is a hint of mold, and probably also leads to my not watering them enough, afraid I'll encourage mold to grow in the dirt.

But, plants do make me feel happier in winter if none of the above has a counter effect big enough to cancel it out. And they also make indoor air cleaner, more free of airborne toxic fumes. So, if you can stand em, get em. Get lots of them.

Spider plants are among the top air cleaning plants, as are rhododendrons. Ferns do their job too. I find them easy to grow and have a nice Boston fern on my front porch, unfortunately, instead of in the house where it would not have been killed by frost. Got to buy another one, will have to go to the store and do some dirt sniffing I guess.

Do you have a sunny room you could use as a semi greenhouse? Or a sunny bay window to fill with plants? Or, can you install a shelf or series of shelves in front of a window? Or, make it bigger, how about adding a little greenhouse to your southern exposure part of your house? 

If you cannot or don't want to go the more plants indoors route, or, in addition, you could add pictures of plants for your walls, even paint or wallpaper a plant and flower mural on one wall.

How about a set of flowery print sheets for your bed? Look around and see where you can add plants, in whatever form. It will bring some Spring and Summer to you whenever you see or touch it.

Color And Space

Modern Scandinavian design is warm and spacious, with clean lines and elegant simplicity.

Clean, uncluttered visual environments create an open and uncrowded atmosphere, countering the feeling of being cooped up inside, restricted and limited.

Look around you at your own home and work environments to see where you can create the illusion of space and distance, and simplify and harmonize what is already there. What could be added or changed to enhance or create a peaceful, yet vibrant and warm atmosphere?

Scandinavians also use color to make their inside
  environments lively and energetic.

Carl Larsson's paintings show his use of the color red as an enlivening element in  clothing and interiors.

Ingmar Bergman's award winning movie Fanny and Alexander is filled with rich

color and open airiness in the home of the happy and lively Ekdahl family, contrasted with the drab dullness of the antagonist's home.

Add color to your winter environment. Buy a red scarf, a red cap, add a glowing red glass bowl to your dining room table, filled with colorful ornaments, flowers, or fruit.

Golden reflective accents add light, faceted crystal light catchers suspended at your window create rainbows on your walls and furniture when the sun hits them.

Add color, bold and lively color, choosing the colors that give you joy--your own personal good response colors.

Subscribe To The Email Discussion List

To provide a medium for participants to interact, share, and converse more quickly and easily, I've created a Yahoo Groups email discussion list specially for the Winter Makeover Project. Subscribing is easy, and you are welcome to lurk on the list and post often or not.

To subscribe send a blank email message to [email protected]

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Pat

About The Winter Makeover Project

This is the place to make winter better for you, and to share with other people so they can do that too. It is born of my own distaste for winter in a cold winter state (I don't like winter in any state, but it's worse in a cold one.) I thought I'd create a project for my own benefit, to make winter better for me, and share with others at the same time I gain good suggestions and advice from them. Win win.

If you live in the Northern Hemisphere, where it's just now starting to be winter, will get first use of the material here, and those in the Southern Hemisphere will have it already in full swing when they need it.

I've named the blog Sunny and Toasty because that's the way we want winter to be. Our job, as I see it, is to make it that way for ourselves.

Pat Gundry