Student Depression: Preparing for the Winter Blues

Winter is Coming

"Luckily, he won't be around to experience it"

Winter is coming. (Thanks to elenagance for the awesome intro idea!)

And shuffling along with it, dragging their undying limbs, are Seasonal Affect Disorder (SAD) and general winter blues, creeping up on unsuspecting college students nationwide. How do you fight these nefarious stalkers? Read on, fellow depression fighters, read on…

First, let’s dig into why some students may feel depressed during wintertime.

Less sun, shorter days, the inability to spend time in the sunlight due to the cold; all these factors somehow contribute to seasonal depression, whether it’s a disorder like SAD, or vanilla melancholy that just happens to spike during the dead season.

Here’s a quick and handy list of things you can do to triumphantly chop those blues to bits.

Sleep: Sleep is like a mini vacation you take every night. Do it. It helps scurry the stressors that plague seasonal depression and gets you feeling fresh. If you can’t take a real vacation somewhere closer to the equator, at least get well rested in your claustrophobic dorm room. This also means less alcohol and coffee.

Sleep is Good

"Sleeping on books helps you absorb knowledge"

Outdoor Exercise: Bundle up and go for a jog, or do indoor exercises near a sunny window. Just get that sweet, precious sunlight to penetrate your shriveled pores.

Light Therapy Box:  “Sounds a tad pricy,” you say; “looks like it’s just a regular ol’ lamp,” you say. Popsugar Fitness suggests this reasonably-priced light box, and if you can throw down $60 for a game, you can likely afford a decent light box. When nature offers nothing but clouds, gloom and doom, the machine that can shine brightly in your face is your friend.

Force Yourself Outside: Cooped up in your room, you begin to feel miserable, trapped, and despondent. You plunge into a downward spiral of self-pity and self-loathing, and the very idea of seeing someone while in this state or facing the unsheltered world makes you wary and weak, and so you remain in your pocket of darkness. Your original excuse of having too much work inverts itself and now you really can’t do any work because you’re moping in bed, practically paralyzed from grief. The moral of this diatribe? Get your ass outdoors before it falls into darkness.

Friends: While they can sometimes be the biggest instigators of unproductivity, positive friends are great propagators of a sense of well-being. Friends serve as a great distraction when you’re feeling on the verge of depression, and can quickly get you out of your sulk-status. You have them, why not use them?

Best Friends

"They may be happy now, but wait until the one on the right has to go home"

Prose Therapy: Write down what plagues you. Similar to the way I reified SAD and general depression as White Walkers, you can reify your own internal monsters as evil beasts or pestering insects or Tea Party activists or whatever you wish. Characterizing concepts makes it more fun to deal with them and makes them out to be less serious and more surmountable.

Imagination

The list is just shy of a lucky seven points: the final suggestion, which encompasses not only seasonal blues but general depression, will be taking up next week’s entire post. Get your lap napkins and sporks ready, because we’ll be tackling diets!

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Aleksandr Smechov, Baruch College.

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