Seasonal Mood Check-In

This check-in looks at seasonal mood shift through four domains that keep showing up in seasonal-mood research: how much your mood and energy actually change once the days get shorter (mood & energy shift), whether your sleep tilts toward sleeping more and struggling to wake, hypersomnia, the atypical pattern most linked to a winter mood dip, rather than the insomnia more common in non-seasonal low moods (sleep changes), how much your appetite and cravings for starchy or sugary carbohydrates increase in the colder months (appetite & carb craving), and, the key differentiator, whether the pattern reliably reverses, worse in fall and winter, better by spring and summer, year after year (seasonal pattern). A general low mood that never lines up with the calendar isn't the same thing as a seasonal pattern, which is why the fourth domain carries as much weight as the first three combined.

Feeling a bit more tired or craving comfort food once winter sets in is common and not the same as a true seasonal pattern. What researchers, following Norman Rosenthal's foundational work at the National Institute of Mental Health in the 1980s, have studied for decades is a more specific pattern: mood, sleep, and appetite shift together with the seasons, and, critically, the shift reliably reverses once the days lengthen again. It becomes worth paying closer attention to when the fall/winter dip repeats year after year, is significant enough to affect work, relationships, or daily functioning, and consistently resolves by spring without you doing anything different.