Seasonally Affected? Not So Much?

By Steve Carter, Mental Health Promoter, Mental Health Foundation

It’s winter again and it’s me again, talking about my ongoing battle with the devil called Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), or winter depression.  This year, I am lucky enough to be able to present some new insights into my condition.

Lucky enough?  From the outside it might not look like I am so lucky.  After all, we have had more earthquakes and more devastation in Christchurch and, on top of that, my partner has left for an extended overseas trip and one of my closest friends has fled the city with her children, leaving my personal support systems significantly diminished. 

Yet I only ‘hit the wall’ a couple of weeks ago, where normally I struggle with increasingly crippling SAD from any time in mid-April.  Why, amid so much difficulty, am I able to share good news?  What’s the secret?

As many of you will know, the Christchurch office of the Foundation  has been seriously affected by the ongoing quakes.  Our old office is being demolished as we speak and we are ‘camped out’ in a small new space, rebuilding our sense of place and our work.  But the circumstance has produced a peculiar effect for me – I have coped better with winter depression. 

I am working largely from home

While some of the team have taken to the new space, I haven’t.  It is not conducive to work, for me at least.  So I am now working largely from home, with flexibility the key.  Previously, I had to set my alarm clock, rise in the dark and drag my weary body out into the cold to catch a bus that would ensure I got to work in order to ‘clock in’ (as supposedly required) at bang on 9.00am. I had to slog through muddy thinking all the way until 5.30pm only to do the whole cold, dark return journey home to a cold house.......day in, and day out for an eternity of weeks.

It was a shattering routine that, for the three months that run up to my annual winter holiday, left me emotionally drained, physically tired and totally unproductive and uncommitted.

This year’s winter is different.  I wake up when my body tells me it’s time, snooze for a few cosy minutes and then pull myself out of bed.  Most days, this has been 8.30/9.00am.  The computer goes on and I check my emails while eating my breakfast (or even, as colleagues will attest, Skype into a meeting while brandishing a cup of tea and a bowl of porridge!).

I can go out for a quick cycle to get my morning coffee at about 10.30 and be ‘back on the job’ 20 minutes later.  If I need a break, lunchtime might include a walk on the beach; the afternoon might be punctuated with a strum on my guitar; and as the suns starts to dip downwards and the house chills at 4.00ish, I might take 20 minutes to chop some wood and light the logburner.  The house is warm again before I even finish working.

I am more productive, my mind is sharper

And you know what?  I am more productive, my mind is sharper, I am responsive and effective in my work and I am not battling with the annual question about whether I am even capable of remaining in my job or whether I should just jack it all in, surrender and go to bed for three months. 

On the days when I am required to get up by the clock and travel in to work, I do it with a fortitude unknown in previous winters.   These recent testing circumstances have, ironically, resulted in a better me: more able to deal with SAD this year than at any other point in my working career.

Strangely enough, this is not a new insight.  There is growing evidence to back up my assertion.  The Cochrane Systematic Review in the UK included 10 studies, involving a total of 16,603 people, which focused on various different forms of flexible working.

Self scheduling shows positive impacts in health

Self-scheduling of working hours was found to have positive impacts on a number of health outcomes including blood pressure, sleep and mental health. In one study, for instance, police officers who were able to change their starting times at work showed significant improvements in psychological wellbeing compared to police officers who started work at a fixed hour.

"Flexible working seems to be more beneficial for health and wellbeing where the individuals control their own work patterns, rather than where employers are in control," said the review lead, Clare Bambra of the Wolfson Research Institute, Durham University. 

By contrast, fixed-term contracts and other situations where working conditions were determined by the employer, had no benefits for health. One study even showed fixed working hours had a negative effect on mental wellbeing.

Clearly, there are implications for employers, and some sectors (indeed, some employees) will take to this easier than others. But we live in a digitally connected world, where contact and team work do not automatically require a fixed base of operations. 

In a creative industry, an information and knowledge-driven economy such as the one in which I work, might there not be more appropriate ways to structure our teams?  Is the office environment an expensive, unnecessary anachronism?

I don’t presume to answer big questions like these.  What I can say, however, is that force of circumstances, combined with a compassionate and free-thinking manager , has precipitated a revelatory year in my personal ongoing battle with SAD.  It is, perhaps, one my most significant professional developments.

I’m pretty low right now, quite crippled by the various symptoms of winter depression… but I have only had to really struggle for two weeks, not 10, and my Queensland holiday has rolled around so much quicker this year. 

Thanks Mental Health Foundation for being such a sensitive and progressive employer.  I feel as though I might well be repaying your flexibility with an improved approach to my working winter.

Seasonally Affected?  Not so much.