Hey, does everyone listeners. Today I'm going to answer patron email, so let's get into it.

This first is from patron Lady Ada. She writes,

I want to ask you if possibly you could talk about in general or share specific tips on how to survive during the winter

season with the gray weather, very short days, pressure of the holidays, etc.

I know that you have people listening to your podcasts from all over the

planet and possibly the subject will be irrelevant to some, but for us living in the

Northwest and possibly other people living in other regions of the world, it would be good

to hear what you can share with us.

End of email.

Yeah, it's a broad topic, hard to talk about in a way that addresses everyone's individual issues.

You know, people tend to associate this with seasonal effective disorder. You'll hear people kind of throw that around.

A seasonal effective disorder is, you know, a full-blown disorder. It's like major depression, bipolar, it's no joke.

And a lot of people with seasonal effective disorder

actually have their mood fluctuation

where it takes a downturn in the summer.

So seasonal effective disorder just means that you have an effective disorder, a mood disorder, that

fluctuates with the seasons. It doesn't have to necessarily fluctuate with winter.

Often it does, but it doesn't have to. And this has been, it's a small part of the mood disorder spectrum. There are most people who have depression, It doesn't it doesn't fluctuate

significantly with the seasons or in a consistent way. So it's a pretty rare thing

and so I want to differentiate that from what I think you're talking

about Lady Ada, which is this downturn in your mood or your sort of enjoyment of life during the winter, which isn't

seasonal effective disorder, it's just dissatisfaction with life or a little bit of distress or something that doesn't rise to the clinical level of seasonal effective or depression.

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