Getting Through the Dark of Winter

Personal Perspective: Responding to the encroaching darkness of the cold season.

Updated November 8, 2025 | Reviewed by Margaret Foley

I have always hated November. As soon as daylight saving time is withdrawn, darkness at 5 p.m. drains me. I start counting down to the winter solstice immediately. With the approach of December 21 prominent in my mind, I look forward to the celestial juncture when light will last a bit longer each day. This awareness gives me a quiet spark, a portion of zest that starts replenishing me. It’s no fun feeling bleak.

Every year, my reaction embarrasses me. To be so dependent on light! Knowing there’s a name for this sensitivity— seasonal affective disorder— is at once a relief and an insult. OK, others have this same tendency in their neurobiology that has earned a place in psychiatry ’s diagnostic manual. But is it really a disorder to be so deeply affected by the insufficiency of winter light? Perhaps it is part of a heightened attunement to the natural world, an inability to be indifferent to the encroaching darkness that is winter.

Early in my learning how to abide Seattle’s winters, I happened to be walking downtown after a particularly long, dreary stretch. Out of nowhere, a dramatic sunbreak occurred. The low-hanging clouds parted and revealed a blue sky we hadn’t seen in a protracted series of desolate weeks. The whole city gleamed. Minutes later, I watched office workers burst out of their towers. This went on up and down the street where I stood. I figured their supervisors must be running outside along with the workers, or they would have been restrained. This was really something, a collective admission of dire need. This spectacle and the sunlight itself made me feel as if I could bear the rest of the winter.

A few years later, in late November, I found myself in the airport parking lot in Anchorage, Alaska, having just flown in from Seattle. The sunlight was amplified by the snow underfoot and atop the cars. It was a spectacular and surprising display of midwinter brilliance. I had just located my rental car, but instead of readying the car I stood beside it. I closed my eyes and put my face into the splendor of the light. It seemed my spirit was becoming renewed right then and there. I kept thinking of the pineal gland, otherwise known as the Third Eye, somehow revving up and becoming activated in the deep central reaches of my brain.

I came out of my reverie and noticed a woman several cars away doing the same thing I had been doing. “Are you from Seattle?” I called out. “Yes!” she yelled back, and we quickly fell into an animated exchange, half laughing and half crying about our hatred of the darkness and almost demeaning need for this bright light. We knew each other’s travail all too well as we reveled together in the relief of our being released from it.

Surely there is nothing in the human condition that doesn’t benefit from fellow feeling. To all who crave sunlight in the winter, who suffer palpably when the gray prevails, I hereby assure you that the sunlight is hastening back to us. Remember that the propensity to be crushed by its absence comes with the capacity to be dazzled by the return of the light.

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Wendy Lustbader, MSW , is an affiliate associate professor at the University of Washington School of Social Work.

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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.