"Falling Back": SAD, The Return to Standard Time, and How I Survived It

On Sunday, the clocks officially got turned back by an hour.  On the plus side, an extra hour of sleep.  On the minus side, the sun sets an hour earlier.  And on the double-plus minus side (ha! see what I did there?), at this time last year is when I really began to lose it.

I was at home in Minnesota for a family wedding a year ago.  My visit had been great.  We'd had a lovely, late Indian Summer*.  The days were balmy -- I didn't even need a coat most of the time -- but the nights were cold enough that frost was forming on the ponds.  Since we've all grown up, the younger family members and friends have scattered all over the country, and all over the world.  Most of us (not me) have demanding careers.  We hadn't all been in one place since my brother graduated from high school ten years before.

After the wedding reception we set our clocks back (which, I'm just now realizing, means the happy couple added an hour to their wedding night ... clever!).  The next day we had a nice post-wedding brunch at one of the bride's parents homes.  And when we started home at around 4:30, and it was already dusk, I thought, bleahhh ...".

The short version of that story is that I started having paranoid thoughts, my mood began to slip, and then bottom out between 4 pm and 7 or 8 pm every day, and within a month I was covering things in foil.  If you wand the long version, click here.

This year I've done a lot of work to prevent that from happening again.  I'm on lamictal and off SSRI's.  I started using my sun lamp at the equinox, instead of in December like I did last year, after I'd already become psychotic.  So far, no paranoid or delusional thoughts.

While on my trip to the Northeast, I noticed that my sense of looming darkness wasn't as angst-provoking as it has been over the last couple of years.  When I was driving back for Grandma's from a trip into town, I realized why -- because it was fall, and I could tell it was fall.  Some of the trees still had colorful leaves, but many of them had dropped them already.  It looked like late October.  Maybe there's something about living in northern California, where the seasons are so much more subtle.  There are deciduous evergreens here.  Seriously, I'd grown up thinking this was impossible.  Seeing green leaves on the trees at this time of year really messes me up.

Nonetheless, I now live in California.  And I'm scared as hell of the time shift, and what it might do to me.  I went crying to my partner, who said, "what can we do to solve this problem?" (he's an engineer; he can't help it).  I said that I didn't know of anything that could be done.  I was just scared of losing my sh*t again, and adding to the stress on our relationship.  He validated my feelings (it's something we're working on) and we both agreed that preventing a relapse would be the ideal solution.  I had no idea what that would look like.

"Well," said my partner, "You mentioned that your mood was better when you were in the Northeast, and you were spending a bit more time outside where you could observe the seasonal change.  I think we should head out and watch the sunset.  It might do nothing, but it might help you to orient yourself."  I'm always game to wander around outside, and I figured it certainly couldn't hurt.

And so we did.  Sunset was scheduled for 5:05.  At about 4:30 we wandered over to a local park that overlooks the Pacific Ocean and settled in to watch the sunset.  I periodically glanced at the clock on my partner's iPod.  I was losing an hour of daylight, true, but I already felt more oriented.

The sun slowly reached the horizon, the light decreased, the sun set.  We walked back to our car in the darkening twilight.  And I felt like it was 5:30, not like I was in some other time zone.  I didn't feel like I'd lost an hour od precious light.

I've read that humans acclimate to the seasons by the gradual changing of the light.  We break up our periods of light and darkness by our artificial means, which have become just as important, psychologically, as the natural world.  I've been told that the abrupt change in the relationship between the natural rhythms of light and dark -- when we change our clocks, when we "fall back", causes all sorts of problems.  People get into more auto accidents, they get more colds and flu.  They don't get to acclimate gradually like they've evolved to do.

By watching the sunset, I was able to retain some of this gradual change.  It wasn't as bad as looking out my window and thinking, dammit, it's 4:00 and the sun is already behind the trees.  Then looking out the window at 5:30, and thinking dammit, it's already full dark.  It will take a few days to see how much this helped -- but I'm clearly already doing better than I was last year.

If you have SAD, or just have trouble adjusting to the time change, I highly recommending getting outside and watching the sunset.  Or the sunrise, if you're one of this morning persons -- I don't judge.  It may be a way of replacing the gradual change that civilization has replaced with the tyranny of clocks.

*NB: For those of you who don't live in the northeastern and midwestern United States, "Indian Summer" is a term used to describe warm weather that occurs after there's been a hard frost.