The winter blues; you have probably heard it echoing in your flat over a morning cuppa. Perhaps you have noticed the triple-shot brews now desperately needed to witness some of each day’s nine hours of sunlight. English student Lucy Redfurn says: “You notice it most when you compare it to the 17-18 hours we get in the summertime.”
It hits 4 p.m. and you find yourself torn between finishing your group project or watching the next episode of The Traitors at home on your sofa. Normally, “the time left in the day feels endless,” says student Indie; you could finish work, hit the gym, and return home to cook dinner for your flatmates, before a friend’s birthday drinks. Yet, for her, adjusting to early November, exiting the brutalist jungle of George Square with plans to make after five p.m. makes her wince.
November brings a host of hibernating factors welcomed by impending darkness. Scotland does its best to prepare: Christmas markets, Bonfire night, and GlasGLOW botanical garden illuminations add some magic.
In 2018, VisitScotland popularised ‘Còsagach’ to replicate the Danish “Hygge,” loosely meaning a feeling of being sheltered from the outside world, despite accusations of misinterpretation from the Gaelic community. Mark Wringe of Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, Skye’s Gaelic language college, translates Còsagach literally as “an animal’s mossy hole.” Still, students embrace the snug version and retreat into their familiar dwellings: cozy pubs with roaring peat fires, tartan blankets, and drams of malt whisky in hand.
This romanticised picture is easy to paint. Yet storm Boleo recently claimed a life with gusts up to 85mph – a poignant reminder of Scotland’s ferocious winter reality.
Students now face an increased onset of Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD); social withdrawal, oversleeping, and anhedonia. These could describe a moody teenager, but they also represent the effects of an altered circadian rhythm, reduced sunlight, and diminished melatonin.
Most women I spoke to feel the shifting seasons more strongly, echoing UK Biobank data showing winter peaks in SAD symptoms to manifest differently at the sex-level. Living far from the equator increases the likelihood, which puts Scotland on the front line.
Compounding this, academic pressures mount as darkness sets in. One student described the night after Halloween as “not dissimilar from January 1,” while others call it “a time of overwhelm and general irritability.” Myriad studies track the compounding effects of academic pressure onto SAD, showing sleep to play a central role.
Knowing that tiredness is normal is crucial. Students mentioned that setting unrealistic goals like ‘getting into shape’ every winter is counterproductive. Perhaps this reflects the cultural verdict that slowing down is lazy. A Sunday league player for women’s netball team Nothing but Net pivots this: winter training in sport focuses on “strength and conditioning, mapping our bodies natural seasonality.”
So what can we do? Bright light therapy is established as the treatment of choice for SAD, thought to work by resetting circadian rhythms and boosting serotonin. As part of the UKRI-funded ‘Living with SAD’ project, Professor Hester Parr of the University of Glasgow has delivered Wintering Well boxes, containing a therapeutic lamp and guidebooks through Scottish libraries. The project inspired Radio 4’s Winter Well series, with Professor Hayden Lorimer explaining that “inside the box are all the ingredients for adopting new habits during the dark season.”
‘Brew and blether’ gatherings let people observe the winter sky when things seem, as Lorimer puts it, “drab and dreich.” In 2019, dreich won the vote for most popular Scots word – defined since 1420 as; “protracted, wearisome; damp and wet,” – a shared experience surely predating modern-day mental health metrics.
Nature helps too. Edinburgh GPs recently trialled “nature prescriptions”; 335 were issued, with 69 per cent for mental health conditions showing positive affect. Take the Japanese practice of Shinrin-Yoku (forest-bathing), where the green light spectrum bathes the brain amidst the forest terpenes. Multiple theories have explained why proximity to sunlight enables this effect; attentional restoration that allows brains recovery from overstimulation, stress reduction, and biophilia (humans evolved in natural environments, so thrive in them).
The consensus is that SAD is here to stay and exams aren’t going anywhere. However, between wintering well and getting enough vitamin D, there is plenty of room to let natural hibernation tendencies creep in.
Photo by Matilde Impavido for The Student.
