This article was originally published on Nov. 24, 2021.
The days are getting shorter, it’s harder to get out of bed in the morning and it’s darn near impossible to get outside before the sun goes down at night. For some, the winter months make us want to saddle up on the couch with a bag of potato chips and hibernate until spring. And for those with seasonal affective disorder (SAD), a subset of depression that occurs during the winter, the darkness of the season comes with much more serious mood disturbances.
Plus, with age, the weight gain, sleepiness, and lethargy associated with SAD may seem to get worse, and the heaviness of winter may feel harder to overcome than in years past. Teodor Postolache, a psychiatry professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, says that although the data doesn’t support the condition getting worse with age, other ...
