I have seasonal depression

What this looks like

The light goes and so do you. Some years you see it coming and brace for it. Other years it sneaks up on you and you don’t realize what’s happening until October is half over. You sleep more. You eat more. You stop wanting to leave the house. You drop activities. You stop responding to messages. The version of you that comes back in March is someone you barely recognize.

You write off the winter months as something to survive. Then survival mode becomes who you are from October to April.

What you’ve already tried

• A 10,000 lux light therapy box at 6am
• Vitamin D supplements through winter
• Fish oil
• Booking a winter trip somewhere sunny
• Forcing yourself outside for a daily walk in the gray
• Antidepressants you start in October and stop in spring
• Telling yourself it’s only temporary

The light box helped a little. The trip helped while you were on it. The pills made it slightly less severe. None of it gave you back the months.

Why this keeps happening every winter

You very likely came up in a household or a climate where the dark months were treated as something to endure rather than live through. You may have grown up watching the adults around you check out from October on, and you absorbed the lesson that winter is when life pauses. You may have built an adult life in a place whose climate doesn’t match what your biology needs, and you’ve never made peace with that mismatch. You may have used past winters to retreat from things you didn’t want to face, and the retreat became its own habit.

Seasonal depression has a biological component. The shorter days affect your circadian rhythm and your serotonin. Light therapy and Vitamin D address part of the biology. What they don’t address is what you do during the months you’re depressed. You stop the things that connect you to people. You stop the things that move you forward in your life. By the time spring arrives, you have months of accumulated absence to dig out of. The next winter you start from a lower point. Each winter cycle leaves you a little further behind.

The biology starts the depression. The withdrawal pattern is what makes each winter worse than the last.

How we work with it

Strategic therapy treats the biology as one layer and the winter behavior as a separate one we can actually change. Light therapy and Vitamin D do what they do. Alongside them, we work on the specific withdrawals you make from October on, the relationships and projects and routines you’ve been letting go dormant. The next winter starts from a higher floor because you didn’t spend the last one disappearing.

The light still leaves in October. Your life doesn’t have to leave with it.