Why Depression is Worse in the Winter (NOT Vitamin D)

Have you been hit by the winter blues, despite adequate vitamin D intake? Uncover the real cause of winter depression beyond your vitamin D levels and fix your winter mood problems naturally and effectively.

You want to know the real reason why people get depressed during the winter? It’s actually not vitamin D. Vitamin D is involved a little bit, but not as much as you might think. And I’ve done a lot of videos on vitamin D, especially for depression. And some people take vitamin D during the winter, and don’t see any change.

Well, this video is for that person. Vitamin D does play a role, but it’s not as much as you might think. When we talk about sadness during the winter time, we’re talking about the biggest difference between summer and winter, and that is, of course, we have more sun. But a lot of people don’t realize that sun doesn’t just give us vitamin D. It’s involved in over 2,000 different genes.

Genes that trigger serotonin, which actually makes you happy. Genes involved with melatonin, which is another hormone. Genetics that involve the thyroid, even affecting your microbiome. and many many other additional effects. When you look at depression, let’s just define depression.

People automatically think it’s a mental problem. But in reality, in the wintertime, a lot of times it’s not sadness. It’s the inability to feel pleasure or a higher state of emotion, the inability to feel happiness from a reward. And so that gives us a very interesting dynamic because there’s so many things that could be done to actually elevate the person’s emotional state that doesn’t involve taking a medication like an SSRI. So at the very root of this issue, we have a problem with our internal clock.

You have a main clock in your brain that activates this circadian rhythm and that clock is controlled by a lot of things, but mainly it’s light. And so in the winter time, obviously it gets darker, right? I mean, in the summertime where I live, it’s light until 9:00 at night. In the winter right now, it gets dark like at 4:30 or 5:00. And so, just the fact that it’s darker pushes us inside.

It exposes us to more artificial light. And this has a huge effect on our hormones, our timing of sleep. We want to go to bed earlier, but of course, we might stay up later. A lot of people don’t go to sleep early, so they just kind of push through it. And of course we have the temperature.

It’s colder. So that also affects our physiology as well. There’s a condition called seasonal effective disorder which is completely affected by this misaligned circadian wave. In this video, we’re not going to be covering too much on that, but one of the most important tools to solve this is morning light. Now, of course, if it’s cold out, you’re not going to be going outside and getting this light.

That early morning light is so powerful to set up the entire circadian wave through the entire day as well as that night. But of course, when it’s freezing outside, we stay inside. So, winter doesn’t just affect your mood, it desynchronizes your biology in a big way. And so, I want you to step back and look at this, not just from vitamin D, but from a whole system that’s involved in this. Let’s first talk about this little piece of the puzzle, melatonin.

Maybe you’ve heard about melatonin affecting your sleep because when melatonin goes up, it helps you go to sleep at night. What stimulates melatonin is darkness. Obviously, in the winter, you’re getting more darkness which is going to give you more melatonin in your pineal gland in your brain. But there’s another melatonin that’s in a different system that’s throughout the cells. And that melatonin does a completely different thing.

It’s in your mitochondria. It’s a very powerful antioxidant. And the way that you mostly get that is through infrared from the sun. We have this imbalance where our brain might have too much melatonin making us tired, but the rest of our body might have too little melatonin. So it throws off the whole balance of melatonin, but these signals are during the day when you don’t want them just with having an imbalance of melatonin.

And then of course we get to vitamin D, which is a piece of the puzzle. Vitamin D is not a vitamin. It’s a hormone that’s involved in literally over 2,000 of your genes. It’s a hormone that activates serotonin, the hormone that is involved in your mood. And people take anti-depressants to fix this.

But of course, they just found out that there’s no proof of that and it actually makes things worse. That’s a whole other video. But the point is vitamin D is necessary to actually make sure you have enough serotonin and also to recycle serotonin correctly. And you also need vitamin D for another really important thing called dopamine, especially in the receptors for dopamine to make sure it’s sensitive enough so it works. When you don’t have enough dopamine or you have a problem with this sensitivity issue, you’re going to feel emotionally flat.

You’re not going to be able to feel higher levels of emotion and that’s where you get into the sadness or even kind of feeling apathetic. So, vitamin D helps dopamine work better within its receptors. You’ll have more motivation to do things. You’ll have more ability to experience pleasure and enough vitamin D helps keep brain inflammation down because there’s a huge connection between brain inflammation and your mood. But vitamin D also protects you against mitochondrial damage.

So many people that feel sad or depressed just are lacking energy. Now, let’s get into artificial light. you have the excess blue light on your cell phone or on your computer late at night or even your TV. Boy, does that mess things up and gives your brain and your circadian waves a massive confusion. So again, we keep coming back to this light issue, right?

Long ago, ancient man didn’t have this artificial light. When this entire system starts breaking down because we’re lacking sun, we don’t get enough serotonin. Obviously, we don’t get enough vitamin D. Our melatonin goes down. you’re going to start feeling kind of like I don’t feel like doing much.

You lose your motivation. You’re kind of tired and you start craving the wrong things as well, especially the refined carbohydrates and sugar, which then sets you up on a blood sugar roller coaster because of the dependency of your brain on glucose and the inability to get it because you develop insulin resistance. And then when you starve the brain of energy and you don’t convert it to ketones, it can become very tired and very depressed. The next thing I want to share with you is the relationship between sun and your thyroid. During the winter months, your thyroid can suffer greatly.

And it’s not just the lack of sun, it’s cold. If you ever notice people that get sick when the seasons change, and I think it’s usually in the fall, all of a sudden they get sick. That’s because the thyroid can’t adapt to that cold fast enough. And it puts a huge stress on the immune system. And think about if the thyroid is not working, your energy goes down, your mood goes down.

A lot of people with thyroid problems have a lowered mood, depression or anxiety. They also get cold intolerance. They get a lot of brain fog. They gain more weight. Now, another interesting thing about this is the microbiome is also affected by the temperature outside and the sun.

Also, the shift in diet during the winter time. So many people, especially during the holidays, go off their plan, right? And then their whole microbiome shifts and our bodies during the winter months, are not meant to consume sweet things, even a lot of fruit. This is why it’s so important to eat seasonally. And fruit is not in season.

So, we’re not supposed to be eating any sweets during the winter months. And so, that affects the microbiome, which can then affect your neurotransmitters. In fact, most of the serotonin mad