So here’s the deal. We all know that college life can seem a bit mundane at times, especially if you spend most of your day indoors watching TV, playing Xbox, going to class, whatever.
While this may be your way of coping with growing stress, it could also be your deathbed here at DU during the winter. Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), aka winter depression, is a mood disorder that is believed to be caused by lack of sunlight.
Yeah, living in the Mile-High City gives us the benefit of about 280 sunny days a year, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t susceptible to SAD.
Being college students, it’s easy for us to get used to the comfort of our dorm rooms, the pillows on our beds, the movies from Blockbuster, and even the convenience of the co-ed living next door. These are a few tips to prevent the onset of winter depression so that you can make the start to 2008 in Denver the best it can be.
First off, start with your breathing. It is estimated that only about 30 percent of waste from our bodies is released through Thomas Crapper’s mighty invention. The other 70 percent is supposed to be released through our lungs, however most of us have developed “interesting” breathing habits that prevent us from ridding the leftover waste of our Halls breakfast meat.
Qigong (pronounced chee gong) is part of traditional Chinese medicine and is used primarily as a form of health maintenance and therapy. The basic idea behind qigong is to use breathing as a way to release any stress, anxiety, depression, etc. Taking deep, long breaths that completely fill and empty your lungs, imagine the stress (or what-have-you) that fills your entire body. With each breath push that stress down through your body and eventually out through your toes and the bottom of your feet. This could take two minutes, or it could take upwards of 15 minutes. This is a perfect way to relax your mind and body and help reduce the effects a gloomy day may have on your persona.
More sure-fire and proven techniques to cure SAD involve light therapy, ionic air purifiers, and medications. If your SAD is so bad that you need medication, I imagine you already know about most everything I could say here, so we’ll sort of skip the medication part of it (the first two sessions of counseling at Health Services are free, just incase your depression has gotten bad).
Light therapy involves using artificial sun lights aka “happy lights” to counter the gloominess of a cold winter day. Reading under these lights for only 30 minutes a day has been proven to be about 57% effective.
Most people have heard of the Ionic-Breeze purifier. Well, scientists have found that the negatively charged air (produced using an ionic-breeze) is roughly 47 percent effective in treating SAD. These two treatments combined are pretty much your tickets to the good-life come the cold, dark days of February.
For those of you who aren’t really interested in those treatments, get up to the mountains instead and spend more time outside weather permitting.
