For every year it's getting harder to cope with long, dark, glum winter days - I've never seen myself as a person depending this much on sunlight as I've grown to do these past few years. For every sunny day I feel lighter and brighter, inspired and more in a pleased mood than on grey days. Alas one can't fuel up as much sunlight as one think for a rainy day.
As this past week has been pretty bad regarding dark, heavy skies and it has felt like it's 5 pm already when it's only 1 pm, I've also felt a bit blue and perhaps not as active and productive as I would have been otherwise. Today we had sun and everything suddenly felt great on a whole other level (that crap and unexpected things happened during the day, well I'm sure I would have felt so much worse about them if they skies had been depressingly grey and heavy).
And it got me thinking about adding certain vitamins to the winter diet probably is a good idea, no matter how good you are at eating a varied diet of fruit and veggies perhaps a sunlight supplement is a good thing.
Possibly visiting places with artificial sunlight regularly can help chasing the Nordic winter blues away too. Though granted, when I found myself in such a place some weeks ago, by chance when we had lunch, it was mostly just annoying with such stark white light. Not the least bit relaxing or uplifting actually. Not at all as exhilarating as real sunshine (mostly) is. Alas.
Fingers crossed for a speedy winter, please, and more regular glimpses of sun. Snuggling up in sofa with tea, candles, a good book or a decent movie can't always help chase the dark winter blues away.
How about you, how do you cope with really dark winter days?
Food supplements, a special diet?
Perhaps visiting artificial sun rooms?
Do you feel it helps in a significant way?
Funnily enough it is my Swedish husband who is more affected by the darkness than I am, although I do feel that these winter months are tough and the longer I spend in Sweden the harder they get. Perhaps it's my age. His theory is that I've charged my batteries with sunlight all of my life in Australia, so I have a reserve to fall back on here, but the reserve isn't being topped up these days.
ReplyDeleteNevertheless, what I've found helpful for both of us is to make sure we're out in the daylight as much as possible (having a dog who likes long walks helps that bit), to eat plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables, take a vitamin D supplement and we use a Phillips Bright Light at home to "extend" the daylight hours. We used to have nymfparakiter and they would stand in front of the light sunning themselves :-)
Here in Toronto I take Vitamin D, eat lots of fruit and any sunny day I try to get out into it as much as possible. Our days are not as short as yours but I still miss the light.
ReplyDeleteWhen I had blood work done a little over a year ago I found out that my Vitamin D3 was real low. So low that the doctor gave me a prescription for a 20,000 IU pill that I had to take once a day. 20,000 IU! He told me that I wouldn't be able to build it up by using an over the counter vitamin. After the prescription was done we checked it again and my D3 count was just above the minimum level. So, yes I agree that you need to add vitamin D3 as well as calcium if you are not already taking that. My doctor told me that woman are prone to be low on both.
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