Cillian Brand drinks his Costa Coffee on Broad Street in Aberdeen, disappointed at being reminded that the clocks go back on Sunday.
Winter is on its way.
Then his friend William Jones chips in.
“It’s his 19th birthday on Saturday,” William says, brightly. “He’ll get to stay in bed for an hour longer.”
It might be the coffee, but Cillian perks up. The prospect of winter suddenly doesn’t seem so bad.
Why the north and north-east is prone to SAD
Sunday’s clock change will bring out similar conflicted feelings in many.
Most people like the extra hour in bed, but the prospect of darker nights and increasingly short days makes getting up that little bit harder.
In the north and north-east of Scotland, the winter months can feel especially daunting. We are, after all, on similar latitudes to Alaska and Moscow.
In fact, our northern climes mean our winter blues are more likely to tip over into Seasonally Affective Disorder, the condition known as SAD, or even “winter depression”.
According to the UK-based Seasonal Affective Disorder Association, the further north you live, the more likely you are to suffer from SAD, which is thought to be triggered by lack of sunlight and causes symptoms such as a low mood, cravings for carbs, a lack of energy and even a decreased sex drive.
In the UK, the condition affects an estimated 3% of the population, or around two million people.
As SAD researcher Hayden Lorimer tells the Press and Journal, “the further north you get into Scotland, the numbers increase for obvious reasons”.
‘Wintering Well’: Tips on how to avoid SAD
He should know.
Hayden may be Chair of Human Geography at the University of Edinburgh’s School of GeoSciences, but he lives in Woodside, Aberdeen. He knows just how gloomy it can get in the winter.
Which may be why he has partnered with a fellow researcher from the University of Glasgow to set up online courses that can help people recognise SAD symptoms, and provide a way to do something about them.
Called ‘Wintering Well’, the free workshops launch on October 28 — the day the clocks go back — and include a number of exercises to help people change their relationship with the season.
The key to the exercises, says Hayden, is their creative approach. They were developed alongside Scottish artist Alec Finlay and encourage people to delve deep into their emotions.
A key exercise, for example, asks participants to write a ‘letter to winter’ to vent any frustrations they have at the season.
It may sound odd, but Hayden says the technique has been a success in pilot schemes held last winter.
“The letter writing validated people’s experiences and the first time it also made them feel as though they had a voice,” he explains. “It changes the air pressure a little bit.”
Don’t just ‘grit your teeth’ with SAD
One aim of the workshops is to show people with SAD that the condition is real, and has consequences.
“There’s a sense in which, well, everybody has to go through [being gloomy in winter], right?” Hayden says. “And so the attitude is that you just have to grit your teeth and get on with it.
“But people who’ve experienced SAD are going through it in a far more acute way. And in some people’s cases, it’s really chronic. They’ve experienced it their whole life and it happens on an annual basis.”
But though the winter wellness workshops target those chronic sufferers, Hayden stresses they can work for anyone feeling down about the dark.
“We probably all have our dark days in wintertime,” he explains. “Just finding a little bit of creative inspiration to shift the atmosphere on a dark winter day — if the resources help people do that, then that’s wonderful.”
Why Aberdeen’s granite doesn’t help with SAD
Back on Broad Street, William and Cillian aren’t convinced the winter makes them more depressed.
But William, who’s from Aberdeen, does think the Granite City’s famous colour scheme doesn’t help.
“Everything is so grey here,” William says. “Or just different shades of grey.”
The sentiment is shared by the city’s newest arrivals. Christos, Thomas and Agis are three PAOK football fans just arrived from Greece for the Thessaloniki team’s Thursday night Europa Conference match against Aberdeen.
“Grey sky, grey buildings, grey streets,” says Christos, 32, as he looks around in slight disbelief. “Why?”
The Wintering Well workshops, part of the Living with Sad project co-developed by the universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh, launch on Sunday October 28. The project has released a free online book called Light is a Right: A Guide to Wintering Well, which can be accessed here. The project is also offering resources for people to set up their own local Wintering Well workshops.
