Thank you for joining us for episode 543 of Live Happy Now.

As the seasons change and the days get shorter, some people are filled with excitement,

while others have a sense of dread.

But today's guest says it doesn't have to be that way.

I'm your host, Paula Phelps, and this week I'm joined by Dr. Hanna Nierney, a clinical psychiatrist

and medical director at Flow Neuroscience in the UK.

Hannah is here to talk about what happens in our brains during seasonal changes that can

cause depression, what factors can influence the severity of it, and then she shares some

of the ways we can prepare for it

and protect our mental health as the days get shorter. Let's have a listen. Dr. Hannah, thank you for

joining me on Live Happy Now. Oh, thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here. This is a great topic

to talk about. We're getting ready to set our clocks back as daylight saving times ends and then we know

the days are getting shorter so it is a great time to talk about how we can prepare and kind of

protect our mental health so I wanted to start by getting kind of a picture of how big a problem

this is how common is it for people to be affected by the earlier sunsets and shorter days?

Well it's a really good question and it kind of depends on where you live in the world.

So if we think about the change in daylight hours, it really varies a lot depending on how far you are from the equator.

And so people who are in the northern hemisphere countries, say like Northern America, Canada, much of Europe, etc, have a big variation from, like with the seasonal change.

Like you were just saying, they have to change the clocks.

And there's a big change over that fall into winter compared to the summer in terms of the daylight length. So actually what

we find is that people who have seasonal episodes of depression is much more common the further

from the equator you are in the northern hemisphere. So it can vary anything from like one to 10

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