Goodbye, winter blues! These tricks help against the fatigue

Winter means cozy comfort, liters of tea and wool socks. It’s the time when many people put a lot of their energy into creating the perfect ass hole in the sofa. There’s nothing wrong with that. Unless it’s winter fatigue that forces you to go horizontal. It is completely natural that people are less vital in winter. Because when the days become darker and the hours of sunshine become fewer, the body also changes. It produces more of the sleep hormone melatonin. And, as the name suggests, this makes you sleepy.

How strongly the hormone influences your well-being depends on each individual. For some, however, it can trigger an extreme desire to hibernate. And although there is some evidence that our ancestors were able to slow down their metabolism and sleep for months at a time (more on that here), that’s not an option for modern humans. But that doesn’t mean that you have to endure constant sleepiness without doing anything. You can change your hormone balance using simple means.

Daylight is an important lever against winter fatigue. The UV rays stimulate the production of mood-enhancing hormones such as dopamine and norepinephrine, but also serotonin and the important vitamin D. Every minute of daylight is therefore beneficial for the body’s energy balance. We present other easy-to-implement measures that help against the winter blues in the photo series above.

If symptoms such as tiredness, irritability and listlessness are particularly pronounced and persist for weeks, they may also be a sign of seasonal depression, or winter depression for short. “In addition to the classic symptoms of depression, there are atypical symptoms such as cravings instead of loss of appetite and increased sleep instead of difficulty falling asleep and staying asleep,” describes the German Depression Aid. In such cases, a doctor should be consulted.