{"id":286580,"date":"2025-11-16T10:40:15","date_gmt":"2025-11-16T10:40:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/286580\/"},"modified":"2025-11-16T10:40:15","modified_gmt":"2025-11-16T10:40:15","slug":"luke-oneill-why-winter-can-increase-levels-of-depression","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/286580\/","title":{"rendered":"Luke O\u2019Neill: Why winter can increase levels of depression"},"content":{"rendered":"

In this week\u2019s podcast, professor Luke O\u2019Neill delves into Seasonal Affective Disorder, or SAD, a form of depression that appears in winter and lifts again when the light returns.<\/p>\n

First identified about fifty years ago in northern Europe, SAD affects around one in every hundred people severely, and up to one-in-five to a milder degree.<\/p>\n

Geography plays a big part too: roughly 1% of people in Florida report symptoms, compared to 10% in Alaska.<\/p>\n

Around 7% of people here in Ireland can be badly affected each winter.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll the evidence suggests \u2013 and it makes sense \u2013 that it would be the dimmer light that is the problem,\u201d Prof O\u2019Neill said.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd the further north you go, if you get to Troms\u00f8 in Norway, where I was in the depths of winter, the sun doesn\u2019t come up at all for a few weeks.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat\u2019s going on is the sunlight is very important for our circadian rhythms.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur bodies have these clocks built into them.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey have a roughly 24-hour cycle that we run through during the day.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"child Wake up in the morning with alarm clock, person sleeping in the bed<\/p>\n

Prof O\u2019Neill explained that in low light, this rhythm can drift off course, affecting hormones like melatonin (which regulates sleep) and serotonin (which affects mood).<\/p>\n

The good news though is that light therapy has proven to be an effective treatment.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn particular, there was between a 60% and 90% response; that\u2019s people reporting relief is they used light therapy daily,\u201d Prof O\u2019Neill said.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo, more than 80% of people with SAD who had light therapy said that they felt their symptoms were relieved by it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Woman, Woman, light therapy. Image: Alamy.<\/p>\n

One study concluded that 30 minutes a day in front of a light source of 10,000 lux can help reset your body clock and ease symptoms.<\/p>\n

For comparison, moonlight gives off just 1 lux, normal indoor lighting about 300, while a bright winter\u2019s day can reach 20,000.<\/p>\n

Prof O\u2019Neill recommended anyone that is suffering with any form of depression to discuss their symptoms first with their GP.<\/p>\n

Main image: A woman looks out of a window, Alamy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In this week\u2019s podcast, professor Luke O\u2019Neill delves into Seasonal Affective Disorder, or SAD, a form of depression…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":286581,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[49,48,84,393,394],"class_list":{"0":"post-286580","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mental-health","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-health","11":"tag-mental-health","12":"tag-mentalhealth"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286580","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=286580"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286580\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/286581"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=286580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=286580"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=286580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}