The snow is gone, but is it too early to celebrate?

This weekend was GORGEOUS and the week is shaping up to be much of the same. On Saturday the temperature reached a snow melting ten degrees, plus ten! Most of the snow around the city and all the snow in my backyard is gone, really gone, and it’s only mid March. As you can imagine, I’m really happy about this. So happy in fact that getting into a fight with my boyfriend and having difficulties with the ENG cameras were only minor inconveniences. This lead me to wonder, are people happier when it’s nice outside? Of course they seem like they are, but are they?

I mean I’m happy in the winter when we set our clocks back an hour and not when I lose an hour when the clocks move ahead. But, this doesn’t last long because there is less daylight, and when it gets dark outside I’m less motivated to do, well, anything. I’m much happier, however, when it’s warmer and a lot less likely to let anything get me down.

Like the other day I was talking to my grandma and we were talking like we always do about the weather. She said to me, “I won’t be surprised if we get a snow storm before it gets too nice.” “Really, grandma,” I said. “Even with all this El Nino stuff?” Oh course, she went on to say. This made me feel a small tinge of apprehension. Yuck, I didn’t want winter to come again after it just went down the drain I just started to feel a lot better about, well, everything.

I wanted to find out just how much the weather affects emotional health, so with the help of Google Scholar, I found an academic paper on the winter blues called Winter Blues: A SAD Stock Market Cycle. And you’ll never guess what the first few lines of the paper say. It says “Depression has been linked to seasonal affective disorder, (that’s what SAD stands for) a condition that affects many people during the seasons of relatively fewer hours of daylight.” Wow, this is actually a disorder. Then I started to wonder, what can be done about this? Move somewhere warm 12 months a year; that’s not going to happen anytime soon. So then what? What can we do to help alleviate seasonal affective disorder?