Seasonal Affective Hypochondria
Do you have trouble getting up in the mornings? Do the winter months make you want to eat more, sleep more, and go out less? Does cold air turn you into a sort of lizard-thing that lies under blankets and does nothing?
Well relax. It’s not fer-chrissake “Seasonal Affective Disorder.” You’re a normal goddamn human being. Who likes getting out of bed when it’s cold out? (Maybe the Swedes; they do that whole sauna-to-snow jumping thing.) But regular as clockwork, my over-educated, internet-dredging peers are starting to whine about feeling sluggish and needing heat lamps, vitamin D pills; god knows what all else. And there isn’t even snow on the ground yet.
I don’t want to sound unsympathetic to the weather’s effect on people’s moods and productivity. I’m a cave-dweller by nature; I work best in dark, cool rooms, and start to get cranky when there’s too much light or I start to sweat. But I have solved these problems by turning some damn lights off. And growling at O Best Beloved, who is used to it.
As the weather turns, I encourage everyone to recognize their reactions as natural and probably even healthy (presumably our evolution-driven bodies made the decision a while ago that we ought to stay in our caves and make babies when the snow was up to our furry nipples). Disregard the advice of psychological experts, even those sages who post on Wikipedia, and keep your self-diagnosis personalized and perhaps even ridiculous: do you miss the blooming green of summer? Maybe you need a broccoli camel.
And so on. Indulge in whatever it takes to make your workplace a happy, energizing space. Set up fans to cool off, or space heaters to warm up, or crystals to energize the flow of your chi if you feel like your life is lacking in chi. Or energy. Or, uh, crystals. You get the point. Don’t let Wikipedia-browsing paranoia drive you crazy, don’t believe your idiot friends either; buy a goddamn sun lamp if it really makes you feel better. But have the self-awareness to realize that you just like sunny rooms. Nothing wrong with that. As long as it isn’t my room.
I’m going back to gnawing on sticks.
I’ve always found mornings to be distasteful independent of the season. I thought my condition would be improved if I adopted a “responsible adult” bedtime. Now I know the truth- I need a broccoli camel
(and possibly a cauliflower poodle).
Oh, the myth of adult bedtimes! I wind up wallowing even more when I’ve had a full eight-plus hours of sleep, turning it into more like ten-plus. Five or six is much more productive (if overall unhealthy).
I used to think this as well. I mean, a hypochondriac’s dream if ever there was one, right?
Yea, then I moved to England, where it really didn’t get THAT much colder in the winter than I was used to, just damper and for longer periods. The difference was the sun. Or rather there wasn’t any sun. You may laugh, but during the shortest days we only had sunlight for approximately 4 hours, and it is so bloody easy to sleep through those four hours and miss the sun altogether! For days!
Trust me. Extreme lack of sunlight does things to you, even if you don’t normally like being in the sun.
Incidentally, that broccoli camel is one of the weirder things I’ve ever seen on the internet. Where on earth did you find that? And if you googled it….WHY would you google broccoli camel?!
We sell them, actually. At my day job. Along with various other animals made out of various other fruits and vegetables, cast in colored resin.
I can’t explain the appeal as decorations qua decorations, but we brought the broccoli camel home because O Best Beloved had been bugging me to feed her broccoli (one of her favorites) all week, and she also sometimes decides she is a camel. Humph!
It’s from a story.