Seasonal affective disorder – SAD – was something I used to think people made up as an excuse to be grumpy.

Seriously, how could a lack of sunlight make you depressed?

And then I returned to the UK after living in America for four years.

One of the things I loved most about America – even more than free coffee refills – was the crisp, sunny winters. Even between December and February, you can average five hours of sunshine per day.

In London, we get one hour in December, and two in January and February.

My first winter in the UK for four years hit me with an almighty wallop. On the outside everything was going well – our first child was even sleeping through the night – so why did I want to crawl under the duvet and stay there until June?

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A friend suggested I might suffer from SAD, but I pooh-poohed her suggestion. I soldiered on, sinking deeper and deeper into my black mood as the winter progressed, refusing – very Britishly – to give in.

The next winter was even worse. We had two children by then, so sleep deprivation was added into the mix.

The leaden skies made for a grim succession of depressive symptoms. I didn’t want to do anything. I didn’t want to see anyone. I couldn’t be bothered to cook, so I loaded up on toast, crisps and pizza.

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My work suffered, too. My creative output totalled one unfinished short story – about a man who refused to get out of bed.

Still, I obstinately refused to listen to my friend, who gently advised I might want to try some bright light therapy. As a SAD sufferer herself, she swore by the mood-changing power of her lightbox.

On a sunny day, she explained, the strength of light outside is approximately 50,000 to 100,000 ‘lux’ (a lux is simply a unit for measuring light intensity), whereas indoors on an overcast winter’s day it is as little as 100 to 200.

An effective ‘bright light therapy session’, she explained, would require me to be exposed to a light source of at least 2,500 lux for about an hour a day, two or three times a week. This should be enough to ward off the blues.

In October last year, when the clocks went back, I was still insisting that bright light therapy was an overreaction to a spot of the winter blues.

My wife disagreed. Without my knowledge, she ordered me a circular 10,000 lux lamp costing £140 made by a Finnish company called Innosol. (Gloomy Finland has the highest rate of SAD in the world, with 9.5 per cent of the population formally diagnosed as sufferers.)

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December 28, 2009

The Best of Tom Sykes

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