When the Dark Comes Earlier
For the weeks when it is dark before you finish work and the evenings stretch out. It helps you get light early, keep something in the calendar each week, and notice the slide before it has taken the whole season.
Seasons · Self-Care · Movement · 8 items · once a week
The checklist
- Get outside within an hour of waking — morning light does more than a lamp at night.
- Eat lunch by a window or outdoors — the middle of the day is the brightest light you get.
- Put one thing in the calendar for each week — dark evenings empty out if nothing is booked.
- Turn on lamps before it gets dark, not after — the room matters more once the window is black.
- Keep the walk you had in summer, shorter — a habit survives better than it restarts.
- Hold your wake-up time steady on weekends — the clock drifts fastest in the dark months.
- Write down how you felt in January last year — a pattern you can see is easier to plan around.
- Tell your doctor if this happens every year — a seasonal pattern is worth a conversation.
Use this checklist Free account: tick items off and keep each day's record.
How to use it
Run through it once a week, honestly and without scoring yourself. A checklist is a way of noticing, not a test: an item you cannot tick is information about the day, not a verdict on you. Over a few weeks the pattern of what gets ticked and what does not says more than any single pass.
With a free Theraglee account the checklist remembers each pass, so you can look back. Without one, you can still read it here and keep your own copy.