Come Out at Work: With S.A.D.

Do you feel as listless as we’ve been lately? We’re in the throes of S.A.D., or Seasonal Affective Disorder, in part because high noon these days can look like the photo at right, and then there’s the not uncommon 14 degree morning temperatures.

Which add up to gloomy days outside — and on the inside, too.

To manage these earthly doldrums, it can help to come out with it at work. On one hand, you’re not the only one suffering. And on the other, you help those around you to:

  1. Identify S.A.D. in themselves if they’re unaware, and
  2. Understand the accommodations you may need, such as the freedom to walk outside during the middle of the day, or extra time to meet deadlines.

A depressed mood certainly has its advantages in the workplace. For example, you’re able to concentrate on single tasks, not distracted by external stimuli, and your communication style may become more direct.

Thinking about the source of this condition, we’re inclined to see our yearly S.A.D.ness as adaptive somehow. Epochs ago food was scarce during the winter, so having lower energy corresponded with the dearth of available food.

Which is to say, if we accept this condition as natural, we fight it less, and reserve our wherewithal to accomplish what’s important right now.

Ah, we’re already feeling relieved having shared this.

Image via

2 thoughts on “Come Out at Work: With S.A.D.

  • January 11, 2012 at 11:56 am
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    A lengthy portion of my honeymoon in Galapagos took place on a small yacht that entertained fourteen couples from around the world. As one might imagine, this mix made for excellent conversation at every meal and during the after-hours klatches at which we’d be briefed on the following day’s activities. One of the couples was a pair of scientists, doctors both in endocrinology from Sweden.

    The lot of us eventually happened across an odd and older subject, the one-time well-published practice of American doctors encouraging diagnosed depressives to visit or move to overtly sunny places like Florida while simultaneously encouraging persons diagnosed with hyperactivity to seek out the traditionally light-deprived areas of Alaska. I and most of the group went on for bit comparing our uninformed and often laughable opinions on the seemingly magical effect that sunlight has in our lives. We joked which ones of us would probably get shipped off to Juneau. We postulated what it was like to live as a fern. We threw in random, pop culture details as obscure as digital characters in the original Sims franchise remaining “happier” for longer periods of time when you built them virtual houses with larger windows. (My Sims were always fickle.) We referenced practically ancient Tom Hanks movies like ‘Joe Versus The Volcano’ where his character, Joe Banks, quit his job in the midst of a rant that noted, “…under these zombie [fluorescent] lights. I can feel them sucking the juice out of my eyeballs…” and “If these lights don’t give you a headache, then you’re dead,” a phenomenon I later came to understand deals with the human eye’s capacity to register the sixty-times-per-second directional shift in the state of excited electrons that cause a fluorescent light to glow. (Yeah, that’s what was wrong with ‘Joe Versus the Volcano,’ not enough science.) We even managed cursory arguments later mirrored in television shows like ‘Law and Order: Special Victims Unit’ that played with the idea of vitamin deficiencies caused by good sunblock snarking, “So our choices are skin cancer or scurvy?” Finally, we asked the actual doctors.

    While by some counts the suicide rate in Sweden since the 50’s has dropped from sixth place to thirty-fifth place globally, statistics that challenge a commonly held American belief that Swedes as a group somehow consistently exhibit the highest rate, that didn’t stop the notion from making the geo-political stage. Persons as influential as American presidents and Nobel laureates have publically alluded to the Swedish suicide rate as a means to underscore their own agendas. Consequently, Sweden seems to have taken the implication rather seriously and developed exceeding advancements in the treatment of depression. Among these advancements, research and testing that shows reasonable exposure to sunlight a key factor in maintaining specific hormonal balances. While I cannot claim to have understood all the in and outs of their explanation, to my layman’s surprise the doctors detailed how conditions like hyperactivity and depression are largely hormonal in nature and how vitamins absorbed into the system during exposure to the sun play a role in offsetting inadvertent hormonal over/underproduction. High doses of vitamins and, in particularly severe cases, hormone therapies seemed to be years ahead of “You’re depressed? Check out Fort Lauderdale next spring break.” Sure, the sunlight factor was one of the slightest factors among many in what they’d discovered about depression, usually most evident when coupled with predispositions in test subjects toward other conditions, but I was most impressed. In short, it was refreshing to hear professional opinions based on lifelong work that revealed sunlight and its relationship to happiness as a function of biology, rather than a pure function of psychology, psychiatry, sociology, magic, fiction, or religion.

    I expect that on some level, we share S.A.D. because we all share human biology. While most of us aren’t prone to leaping from a bridge after three cloudy days in a row and a graveyard shift at Pinkberry, why wouldn’t a physiological imperative like exposure to sunlight impact everyone to at least a small degree? In ‘Whole Wide Work’s’ continuing tradition of revealing one’s whole self at work, so oft by means of discovering common ground, I presume it might sometimes prove relatively easy to admit an off day that has no other causal reasoning beyond “rain makes me sad.” In fact, were it not for the biological facet that can help force our off day into being, I would almost expect the opposite to be true. Given that most of us dislike a commute in the snow, the cold, the dreary, I’d instead think, if S.A.D. were a mere state of mind, we’d look forward to getting to a warm office, to relate to people we know in place of bulky-shouldered subway strangers we are sandwiched between for thirty-eight local stops, to sit in a place where we can readily accomplish far more than refraining to drip Egg McMuffin on our cheetah print galoshes, or to spend eight hours plus lunch in an ergonomic seat that holds not even the remotest danger of badly navigating black ice and plowing your minivan onto the roof of a chicken farm. With all and much due respect to those more sensitive to the condition than others, I would almost, almost, venture to say that revealing yourself at work as having S.A.D. might not be a reveal at all. In some ways it would be like saying, “Hey, I have feet. How ‘bout you?” Still ever important to be self-aware and to be practiced in fruitful communication, perhaps verbalizing S.A.D. is less of a reveal and more of an acknowledgement of what, unlike feet, is invisible common ground. (I’m suddenly hyper aware of how many people missing feet might read this comment. To you all, I apologize.)

    On the flip side, come summer when there is plenty of sunlight dancing all over one’s biological needs and psychological preferences, both before and after work, a season when many vacation from the workplace anyway, how much more difficult might it be to come out to one’s boss as a person who’d really rather go sit under a tree every day and poetically contemplate the ripples on the water than to hang around a cubicle and collate. True? Yes. A shared and understandable perspective? Of course. Yet, while common to most of us, that is a tricky reveal to revisit on the regular and therefore possibly a “whole self,” workplace taboo that illustrates why so many other people would have such difficulty revealing diverse cultural mores and individual practices that, conversely, would not be shared by everyone. In other words, if you don’t share that you’d rather be on a beach every time you are in your boss’ office because you fear it will threaten your job, even if your boss makes that exact claim on a daily basis, then imagine the persistent fear another might experience while closeting away personal details that same boss is certain not to have in common. Yes. S.A.D. gives me the doldrums. But worrying about how I might have failed to invite a person in, a whole person, how I may have helped to get them stuck in an intolerable place, well that just gives me the willies.

  • January 31, 2012 at 10:30 am
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    @Robert, thank you for adding greatly to this topic. True, sharing common experiences with S.A.D. can help mitigate loneliness in the workplace — for more, see http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/jobs/building-a-bridge-to-a-lonely-colleague-workstation.html. And, in terms of relating the desire to be out in the sun during summertime, I think this can be a fleeting feeling. On one hand, you may want to engage in our work projects, on the other, the physical environment may be comfortably cool, and being around coworkers can feel refreshing. Sometimes.
    I love the story from your honeymoon! -Haig

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