When the Evenings Start Getting Dark

You leave work and it is already dark. You get home, the curtains are shut by five, and the evening has a heaviness to it that was not there in August. Getting up is harder. The plans you made in the summer feel absurd. Nothing is wrong, exactly, and everything takes more out of you.

Plenty of people feel this and assume it is just a mood to be endured until spring. Some of it is, and a surprising amount of it responds to a handful of unglamorous changes.

Why the dark does this

Your body sets its rhythms partly by light. Light in the morning tells it when the day starts, which sets when you get sleepy, when your appetite comes, and how alert you feel in the afternoon.

In the dark months, many people go to work and come home without seeing real daylight at all. Indoor light is far dimmer than outdoors, even on a gray day, so the signal your body relies on mostly goes missing. The result is predictable: wanting more sleep and getting worse sleep, craving heavier food, lower energy, and a flatness that is easy to read as a personal failing.

Get outside in the morning, even briefly

This is the single highest-value thing, and the one people most resist because the mornings are cold.

Ten or twenty minutes outdoors in the first couple of hours after waking does more for your rhythm than an hour outside at lunchtime. A gray, overcast morning still gives you far more light than any room.

Make it something you were doing anyway. Walk the first part of the commute. Take the coffee outside. Walk the dog before breakfast rather than after work. Stand at the bus stop one stop further along. If mornings are impossible, lunchtime still helps, so take what you can get.

Move while it is still light, if you can choose

Exercise after dark is better than none, but moving in daylight does two jobs at once, and most people find they will actually do it. In the dark months, the walk you take at three in the afternoon is the one that happens. The gym trip you planned for seven in the evening is the one you talk yourself out of.

Keep the bar low enough for a cold, wet week: fifteen minutes, around the block, in a coat. It is not about fitness at this point, it is about light and rhythm.

Light the house for the time of day

Bright, cool light in the morning and warmer, dimmer light in the evening helps your body keep track. A bright lamp where you eat breakfast. Lamps rather than overhead lights after dinner. Curtains open the moment you get up.

Some people find a daylight lamp made for this purpose helps a great deal, used in the morning for a set time. It is worth asking a doctor about rather than guessing, especially if you have eye problems or take medication that makes you sensitive to light.

Expect to sleep differently and defend the schedule

The pull in dark months is to go to bed later and get up later, which leaves you both short of sleep and short of morning light. Keeping a roughly steady wake-up time, even at the weekend, is more useful than it sounds, because the wake-up time is what anchors everything else.

Plan things, because the drift is the problem

The flatness is not only chemical. The dark evenings quietly cancel your social life: nobody suggests anything, the park is out, and you stay in. Four months of that is a lonely stretch, and loneliness deepens the flatness.

So put things in the calendar on purpose, indoor things, cheap things, regular things. A standing coffee on Saturdays. A class on a weeknight. A monthly dinner at someone's house. Something to look forward to in January, booked in November.

Eat and drink with the season in mind

Wanting heavier food in the cold is normal and not worth fighting. What is worth watching is the drift into drinking more in the evenings, which worsens the sleep that is already poor, and skipping meals during the day and then eating everything after dark.

Keep breakfast, keep something green in the week, and if you are in a northern place with long winters, ask your doctor whether a vitamin D supplement makes sense for you.

Know the difference between the dark months and depression

A seasonal dip usually leaves you functioning: tireder, less keen, still getting on with things.

Take it more seriously if you cannot work or care for people who depend on you, if you are sleeping enormously and still exhausted, if nothing is enjoyable at all, if it happens severely every year, or if you are having thoughts of not wanting to be here.

When to get help

Please talk to your doctor if this is more than a dip, if it comes back hard every year, or if it is affecting your work, your relationships or your ability to look after yourself. There are treatments specifically for seasonal low mood, including light treatment, talking therapy and medication, and a doctor can also check simple physical causes like low iron or a thyroid problem that look very similar. Getting through four dark months is easier with a plan and a professional in your corner than on willpower alone.