As the nights draw in, it is all too easy to let lack of daylight get the better of us. But there are plenty of ways to stay one step ahead of the darkness
April is allegedly the cruellest month, but October and November could give it a run for its money. In the northern hemisphere, the nights are noticably drawing in, especially now the clocks have gone back and sunset is an hour earlier. Every day, it gets darker two minutes earlier than it did the day before. And, while there are compensations – hello moon! Hello stars! Hello, most of all, Orion the Hunter, back in our northern skies after long months below the horizon – many of us cannot be consoled. As one of his patients told the US psychiatrist Norman Rosenthal: “I didn’t realise how quickly we haemorrhage light”.
“I love that expression ‘the haemorrhaging of light,’” Rosenthal says. “With a haemorrhage, you feel depleted, you feel exhausted. It dramatises something that’s real.” According to Rosenthal, who has spent more than 30 years studying the effects of seasonal changes on mood, about one in five Americans suffer some sort of “winter blues”. He is one of them. When we speak, it is 8.30am in his hometown of Bethesda, Maryland, and he is sitting in front of a light designed to reduce the symptoms.
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