I’ve suffered with Seasonal Affective Disorder for years… living in North Yorkshire doesn’t help, as in the autumn and winter we have very short days, so I would begin to encounter problems with migraine and low mood pretty much at the start of October. A special lamp and a sunrise alarm clock both did a lot to mitigate the darkest days last year, but as September ticked by, I still found myself dreading the next few months until spring, and I knew I wasn’t alone in this.
I was talking to a colleague about it, and she said she used to have exactly the same problem… Used to? My antennae were up immediately! She said she had found it profoundly useful to think about the Celtic Calendar – the old way of celebrating the circle of the year (in this part of the world, at least) and the passage of the seasons, with a festival every 6 weeks or so. It’s a lot less overwhelming to break the dark days down into blocks of 6 weeks, rather than thinking of the whole 6 months! Immediately, I could see what she meant – paying attention to the natural world, not just in terms of searching for signs of spring, which I had been doing, but really celebrating these small points in the seasonal cycle… So I celebrated Mabon in September, then Samhain, which begins today; then we have Yule (the start of the Celtic year), and Imbolc – that takes us into February – then there’s Ostara in March before Beltane, Litha and Lughnasadh before we are back to harvest time and Mabon again.
It feels right to bring myself back into alignment with the seasons, and speaking to another colleague about this, she explained that we have different natural energy levels at different times of the year, too, which it’s useful to be aware of… and this set me thinking about Circadian Rhythms too – where we have different energy levels at different time of the day – everything is interconnected, after all, so we have cycles within cycles – rather like that model of human development by Urie Bronfenbrenner that I use a lot in my trainings…
If we think of the Macrosystem as being the wheel of the year; the Exosystem (the next level in, as it were) how we are affected by each individual season; the Mesosystem (the next level down) as our daily rhythm; then we have Microsystems within the Mesosystem – what are we doing within the day? These are when we eat, when we sleep, when we create things, when we exercise, when we relax and so on…. What if one of these is out of balance? Then the whole system doesn’t work properly and we don’t feel good.
So I’ve been studying how to reset my own balance – I’ve been listening to Podcasts (like this one, which is a good place to start) and I’ve been reading an excellent book – The Circadian Code – by Dr Satchin Panda, which I can highly recommend. And it turns out that my Seasonal Affective Disorder is a disorder of being disconnected from my natural rhythms, and from nature, and daylight, so I am paying attention to that and doing something about it. It’s early days, but so far I am feeling good… the big test will be how I feel when we hit what my Mother-in-Law used to call ‘The Dark Days Before Christmas’ – so I’ll let you know whether or not I’m in for a Cool Yule!
