S.A.D

It’s the end of January. Every year I struggle with seasonal affective disorder. That was the primary reason that I moved to California from the Pacific Northwest in 2002. Then in 2005 when I quit my job to coach full-time, and wanted to live somewhere cheaper than California, I moved to Albuquerque for the sunshine instead of back to the Pacific Northwest.

I seem to really need to be active outside year round, or I get this disorder. My primary issue, other than the obvious (depression) is disruption of my sleep patterns. I don’t usually get outright insomnia where I’m not sleeping at all. But my sleep patterns are quite poor, with nightmares and frequent awakenings. This causes migraines as well as exhaustion.

I do what I can with mindfulness and meditation techniques to calm my thinking. It’s not like I’m just laying there awake and worrying or anything. But unfortunately, calm-but-awake brainwaves are very different from sleep brainwaves. And we really don’t know how to generate sleep brainwaves without medication.

In fact, it’s surprising how little we know about sleep. Given the huge percentage of our life that we spend in the sleep state, I would expect that we would study it more.

I do take vitamin D, which may help slightly. I’ve tried melatonin, but it seemed to make it worse. According to webmd, “melatonin seems to shorten the amount of time it takes to fall asleep, but only by about 12 minutes. Melatonin does not appear to improve “sleep efficiency,” the percentage of time that a person actually spends sleeping during the time set aside for sleeping. Some people say melatonin makes them sleep better, even though tests do not agree.” In general I don’t have any trouble falling asleep; I just have very disrupted sleep throughout the night and very little “deep sleep.”

The only thing I know that clearly seems to help is to spend a lot of time outside everyday. Unfortunately, this is difficult to do with a full-time job and difficult in the northern climates where it’s dark before and after work in the winter, and cold all winter.

It is not helped by having a windowless office. I do have a therapy light in my office, but I don’t think it helps much. If I did not make a strong effort to get outside during my lunch half-hour, I could go 5 days straight without ever seeing the sun. I might as well live in Alaska! Some days I go the entire day in darkness.

I’ve told my team that if they want to have a one-on-one meeting with me, we can always consider a walking meeting. But I don’t want to force my coworkers to walk around in the freezing cold and wind on the hazardous ice unless they want to!

I worked overtime for two weeks in order take last Friday off so we could go on a quick trip to Tucson. Unfortunately I had a cold during our trip, but I still enjoyed getting out.

Also, unfortunately, I got a migraine as soon as we got back. It lasted for 4 days, and I was so sick that I missed 2 days of work. I think it was because of the elevation change getting back into New Mexico. Or it could have just been due to road food. I don’t fully understand why, but this is what happens. I’m really not a good traveler.

But I still want to go back to Tucson again – it was so warm and nice. I’ll post about Tucson soon!